On a chilly fall Friday, not long before the cloudy sky turned dark, the past met the present at Dawes Middle School.
Present-day David Behrens — like the past version of himself — brought a backhoe to Dawes and started digging 15 paces from the tree in front of the middle school.
Six feet down, his machine hit something and pulled the past to the surface, covered in plastic and dirt, but intact.
Tony Howard was there, married, with two kids and a job at Tenneco. Jamie Anderson came, too. Wade Sykes drove down from Omaha. Toby Schauer flew in from North Carolina, and Breanna Harder requested the night off from her job as manager at Risky’s Sports Bar and Grill.
Katrina McMaster was there, because she'd helped make it happen, along with a host of others who'd read about it on Facebook and decided to show up and peer into their past.
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In the school cafeteria, Mike Hart used a crowbar to pry open the metal cover of the big, plastic box decorated in chunky, handwritten letters: Dawes Team 71 Time Capsule.
The adults surrounding him were seventh-graders in 1999, finding their way through middle school on the cusp of the millennium, led by Mr. Hart, a boisterous teacher who decided a time capsule was a fine way to note the turn of the century.
The students each filled a manila envelope with mementos of life as a tween, and their teacher promised them they’d dig it up 10 years into the new century.
But in 2010, Dawes was in flux. Having narrowly escaped being closed by the school board a few years earlier, it had become the temporary home of Goodrich Middle School while that building was renovated.
Hart decided it was best to wait.
Then, about a year ago, some of his students — many of whom had reconnected on Facebook — started talking about that time capsule and someone posted a picture of its concrete marker.
“The whole thing blew up from there,†said McMaster, who graduated from Lincoln High and started a photography business. She called Hart, now director of human resources at Norfolk Public Schools, and told him they wanted to dig up the time capsule.
After several meetings with Dawes Principal Angie Plugge, they settled on Friday.
Creating the time capsule was a way to note the turn of the century, Hart said, but also a way to show his students they were important and valued, no matter the struggles they faced. When those former students called, he was on board.
“I made a commitment,†he said. “I’m not letting (them) down.â€
Hart grew up in northeast Lincoln and attended Dawes, at 5130 Colfax Ave., in the 1970s before coming back years later to teach. And he knew that Dawes was an underdog that struggled to let the world know what a good place existed inside those walls.
“This place is near and dear to my heart,†he said. “I want people to know what good qualities these kids have — they’re still connected, they’re still part of something here."
McMaster said she was motivated for much the same reason.
“Dawes gets a bad rap and I wanted to show how awesome Dawes can be,†she said.
Hart and a group of alums talked to present-day students during a Friday afternoon assembly and later, they gathered in the cafeteria while Hart opened the time capsule.
First thing out: a plastic skull with words written in magic marker on its forehead that showed some things never change: “Detention sucks!â€
There was a Lincoln Journal Star from Dec. 21, 1999, a box of “Millenios†Cheerios, a National Geographic magazine, a yearbook, a plastic chicken and lots of manila envelopes.
Carmela Sheppard, the school’s beloved principal who died of cancer in 2005, filled her envelope with “nuisance items, confiscated by principalâ€Â — a Pokemon card, a wallet on a chain, a yo-yo, a pager.
Harder’s envelope had mascara and her favorite Stephen King book. Hart had a picture of his then 2-year-old son — now 20 and at Dawes on Friday taking pictures. Many students had papers they’d written, or letters to themselves. Someone tucked a pile of Polaroid photos into an envelope.
Howard realized his "most embarrassing moment" hasn't changed since he wrote about it in 1999 — lighting a firecracker in cow dung and not managing to get out of the way fast enough.
Schauer, who flew in from North Carolina, couldn’t find his envelope, but he didn’t care, because the point was the people, especially those he’d known since he was 4.
Which is exactly the point Hart was hoping to make.
“This is what I envisioned,†he said.