East Aurora Advertiser

Column: The Time Capsule



Siri, my supposedly robotic iPhone concierge, and I were having a rough morning.

It seemed like nothing I could say got through to her. Perhaps I was garbling my words, it being early in the morning. Perhaps I wasn’t making myself clear. For all I knew, she had it in for me from the start. When I thought I said, “What’s the weather?” she answered with a website for TJMaxx, which is apparently having a sweater sale. Sweater? Weather? I guess you can confuse those.

When I asked her if there was gas in my car, she quipped, “Was it something I said?”

I thought I’d try Spanish. “Siri, cómo estás?” I asked. She answered by saying she couldn’t find anyone in my contacts list called “Moustache.” She was clearly messing with me.

I was getting frustrated. “You can’t understand a word I’m saying, can you?” I asked.

She replied, in a tone of voice I swear was sarcastic, ”Oh, rats. Unfortunately, I am, as yet, imperfect.”

“You don’t like me much, do you?” I grumbled.

“As you wish,” she said. Maybe it was my imagination, but she was getting downright snarky with me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I barked. I decided to threaten her. “Well, maybe you’d like to spend 50 years in a time capsule.”

“This is about you, not me,” she replied.

“I’d like it if you’d lose the attitude,” I griped, to which she said with a comedienne’s timing, “Yes, I’ll bet you would.”

“Siri, turn the power off on my phone.”

Without hesitation, she answered—I’m not kidding—“I’m sorry but I can’t do that, Rick.” We were getting dangerously close to that iconic conversation astronauts Dave and Frank have with the Hal 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. You remember that scene when Hal decides he’s had enough of the humans and sets about killing them rather than be turned off? A bit unnerved, I pressed the off button on the iPhone and, thankfully, the phone powered down.

I’m fairly certain I have one contribution for the time capsule that our town historian, Rob Goller, is putting together, and her name is Siri.

Which brings me, fairly early on for a change, to the subject of this latest musing from Right Field: time capsules.

We, at the world’s best hometown newspaper, have been asked to make some contributions to the Town of Aurora’s time capsule, and that got me thinking about the concept of saving history for future generations. In a time capsule, you gather artifacts, memorabilia, newspapers, arcana, and stories written in the argot (RIP Snake) of the time and place and seal them against moisture, critters and other contamination. Then, with great fanfare, they are unearthed fifty years later, so that our descendants can be enlightened by the wit and wisdom of their forebears.

I love the idea of the time capsule, but can I make an observation? Not all time capsules are buried in the ground; some are walking around, just waiting for an invitation to be opened.

I stumbled on a time capsule last week, in the normal course of events around town. My formal Advertiser assignment was to interview Burt Foster, president of a charitable organization named after his son, Matthew Foster, who died of cancer at age 17 in 1999. Burt’s foundation runs several events a year that generate money for families with children suffering from cancer. To date, the Matthew Foster Foundation has raised $1.3 million, which has helped 600 families with medical expenses, transportation, car repairs, mortgages, rent, food,  and sadly, funerals. Burt and I agreed to meet at the Boys and Girls Club of East Aurora last week for a chat. I figured it would take us 20 minutes or so to cover the activities of the foundation.

I knew Burt Foster in that small town way of assuming that we know everybody, even though we hadn’t spent much time together except rubbing shoulders at a Kiwanis chicken barbecue or a beer tent. In fact, I doubt we had spoken to each other, but each of us knew who the other guy was, so a short conversation wouldn’t be taxing for either of us. Well, guess what? An hour and a half later, long after we had covered the information about his son’s foundation, we were still at it, a couple of old townies ripping open a time capsule and reveling in its contents.

Burt grew up at 691 Oakwood Avenue; my family homestead was three blocks west at 472 Oakwood. As a kid, Burt worked at Mileham’s Pharmacy (next to the Show, where Fowler’s stands today) and East Aurora Hardware (site of today’s Sewing Center). I cut grass, pulled weeds, shoveled snow, anything to make a buck. We both remembered taking our hard-earned money to Hill’s News Stand on the northwest corner of Riley and Main, where kindly Dunk Hill (real name Cliff, but nobody called him that) ran an old-fashioned soda fountain and sold everything else under the sun from model airplanes to comic books to cigars and pipe tobacco. I think our first clumsy attempts at dating involved Dutch-treat cherry Cokes there with the girls of our dreams. Dunk could spot a juvenile shoplifter a mile away and dissuaded us from any thoughts of larceny by threatening to call our parents, a worse fate, in my case and Burt’s, than going to jail. We rued the day that they took the building down to widen the intersection so the tractor-trailers could make the turn down Riley on their way to Fisher-Price.

We recalled that Saturday morning tradition of going to the garbage dump—not a transfer station as it’s euphemized now, but a real dump—down by Caz Creek, where the garbage and trash from our Oakwood homes found its final resting place. The long, downhill driveway is still there near the dentist office that used to be Pizza Hut across from Sammy’s Car Wash. We both conjured visions of the old gent who acted as the dump’s gatekeeper, directing our dads like a traffic cop to certain parts of the dump, inspecting our contribution to the growing pile, burning some of it, earmarking other piles for salvage. Burt’s first bicycle came from spare parts his dad scavenged from the dump.

Our time capsule revealed piles of leaves raked to our curbs and burned, in our case with chestnuts filched, a great personal risk, from Mrs. Thomason’s spreading tree, chestnuts that would explode like firecrackers in the heat of the fire. And there were Buffalo Bills like Cookie Gilchrist and Richie Lucas billeted at the Roycroft, bars like the old Globe owned by Vic Bathasar and tended by the ageless Gert and the Barn on Grover, scene of fisticuffs and American muscle cars. There was Wallenwein’s where Huey O’Brien lorded over a men-only barroom in white shirt and apron and let us young scallywags sit in the back dining room only if we had dates, a guarantee that we would act like gentlemen. There were newspaper collections and tin cans flattened for recycling so they could be used in the war effort. And more.

At one point, Burt said, “We’ll be here all day if we keep up like this.”

We would have loved to continue pawing through the time capsule we’d opened, but we each had things to do, me painting at the club and he organizing the Ray of Hope Gala for his son’s foundation. Our time capsule is open, however, and I bet we’ll take a look in it again very soon.

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Columnist Rick Ohler invites readers to visit him at the Advertiser office on Wednesday mornings from 10 to 11 a.m. Find past columns and articles on his website, www.rickohler.com.

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