A group of seventh and eighth graders from Gompers Junior High School in Joliet stood anxiously outside the school office with their teacher as they waited for district carpenters to confirm their suspicions about the location of a time capsule buried in the school 57 years ago.

Several alumni from the late 1960s had called Joliet Public Schools District 86 in the last year since the timeline for the building’s demolition was announced to remind officials about a long-buried time capsule.

However, the exact whereabouts of the sealed copper box were not known.

That’s where Chad Nelson, a special education teacher at Gompers and the sponsor of the monthly student magazine, came in with his staff of student writers.

“We found records of a time capsule in the school archives, but they didn’t say where it was,” Nelson said.

A group of five students, seventh graders Evelyn Carrillo, Jocelyn Lopez, Isabella, Salgado, and Isabella Campos, and eighth grader Alisson Gaitan Lopez, began investigating, hoping to find the time capsule’s location and excavate it before the school gets knocked down by construction crews this summer to make way for the new building’s parking lot and athletic fields.

After three months of research – including finding an old photo of students holding the newly-made time capsule and trying to find them – the team narrowed down the suspected location of the box.

Their deductions led to a brick wall behind the bronze plaque of Samuel Gompers.

“Someone told us they thought it was behind a plaque,” Nelson said. “We looked around and this seemed like the most likely place. All the evidence seems to point to it.”

Nelson and the students were joined in their search by Gompers class of 1969 alum Larry Nielson, the only student from the photo who they were able to contact and who still lives in the Joliet area.

“When I heard they were closing the school I wondered if they were going to find the time capsule,” Nielson said. “Then a little while later I got a call from Chad.”

Nielson said he didn’t remember exactly where the box was hidden, but knew “it was in the south wall, near the band room.”

Although the school was originally built in the 1950s, an addition was put on in the late 1960s, which prompted the students and teachers to bury the time capsule.

“They wanted to put it in in case some day the knocked the wall down, everyone could see what was inside it,” said Nielson. “It’s just amazing that this actually came about. You don’t actually think about seeing the building get knocked down when you bury these things. Being here 57 years later is like coming full circle.”

The big reveal

Nelson, Nielson, and the students watched with anticipation Friday morning as district carpenters Randy Williams and Anthony Brown first removed the plaque of Mr. Gompers, revealing a patch of unbricked, concrete wall, then proceeded to smash into it with a mallet and chisel.

“We didn’t want to look ahead of time to see if it was there, because we wanted the students to see it,” said District 86 Director for Communications and Development Sandy Zalewski.

Finally, the copper box became visible and was pried from the wall, though it took several more minutes and metal snips to get it open.

Inside the box, students found mundane school supplies like chalk, pencils, and a Joliet bus schedule, as well as school memorabilia from the year of the capsule’s burial.

Those items included a 1967-1968 yearbook, a Class of 1969 graduation program, a Gompers Junior High button, a student handbook, and a mimeographed paper of the March 1969 lunch menu.

The box also contained an old reel-to-reel film strip, the subject of which was not immediately clear as it was unlabeled and technology to play it is not readily available, and a miniature recreation of a wooden disciplinary paddle.

The last contents were perhaps the most interesting to the students – a packet of handwritten letters from former seventh and eighth grade students explaining to the future generation what life was like for them.

Topics of the letters included fashion, music, sports, the girl one student had a crush on, “why girls are silly,” and current events, including one letter speculating about how much longer war in Vietnam would last. Included in the box was several clippings of war coverage from The Herald-News.

Nielson recognized the names of several classmates in the packet, and the students marveled at the neat, cursive writing, with some expressing shock that it was clear enough to easily read.

Creating history

“This was an amazing experience to have, it’s fun to see what our school was like in the past,” said Salgado. “We heard rumors about the time capsule, but many people didn’t believe us, so the fact that we didn’t get our confidence low and we found it just shows to be confident in yourself and you can achieve your goals.”

“It’s amazing,” Corrillo added. “We kind of made history here. It’s fun to see what they were doing back then and how different it is and what they thought then. And they have nice handwriting.”

The district plans to collect all the artifacts from the time capsule and place them in a display case in the new Gompers Junior High School library next year.

The journalism students will write their final article in a three-part-series about their investigation for the school magazine.

The group also plans to compile a new time capsule of objects from 2026 to hide in the new building, which will open in August for the 2026-2027 school year.

“I’m so proud of the students that we started something and finished it,” said Nelson. “I’m so glad the students got to experience this first hand because it came about literally because of their hard work.”

A second time capsule from the 1990s is thought to be hidden in a court yard outside the school, though its location is not as precisely known.

Nelson and the students hope to stage a dig for it before the demolition work begins and the courtyard is paved over for a parking lot this summer.