ILLUSTRATION BY CARLIE BURTON
It’s the night of December 28, 1988. If this large copper box is empty, the people on live TV will be embarrassed as hell. If this box instead contains priceless mementos that have disintegrated after 100 years, the people who buried them in 1888 will be embarrassed as hell, possibly in Hell.
The crowd holds its breath as the time capsule, excavated from the cornerstone at Cincinnati City Hall and delivered here to the convention center by armored truck, is pried open. Long drum roll… Yes! Everything inside is in great shape! The event hosts—Mayor Charlie Luken, baseball legend Johnny Bench, and not-yet-legend Jerry Springer—can finally exhale and begin their rummaging. The audience here and watching on TV leans forward in anticipation. Everyone has wondered for months what the time capsule might contain.
Well, not quite everyone. One person at the ceremony knows exactly what’s in there but told no one. Local historian Dan Ransohoff found an 1888 edition of The Cincinnati Times-Star that listed everything inside. He quietly gathered available duplicates of the historical documents and brought them to the ceremony just in case this televised unboxing might reveal a blob of mush. But no; those 19th century engineers had done an admirable job. The business cards are still crisp and sturdy, including my favorite item from the entire box: Milo G. Dodds wrote on the back of his card, “Sorry I can’t be present when this is opened.” As of 1903 (I checked), Milo was definitely not available.
This night was the grand finale of Cincinnati’s bicentennial celebration, 200 years to the day of its official founding. There’s a video of the whole shindig here. What a relentless 18-month barrage of smushed-together events it had been! Fast forward to today, though, and we can see that the event with the biggest impact—the one that’s now embedded itself into the heart of Cincinnati to a depth that will probably outlast us all—was something nobody saw coming.
It wasn’t even a real event. An ordinary press conference was held to present plans for Sawyer Point Park, a riverfront construction project to mark the bicentennial. Halfway through the presentation, the architect unrolled his drawings for the park’s entrance. It’s a small pedestrian bridge, he explained, with four tall smokestacks at the corners, each smokestack topped with a brass-winged pig.
Wait, what? Did he say pig? Are those things pigs? With wings?
Reader, let us pause for a moment and acknowledge that the flying pig has become the most iconic and beloved symbol of Cincinnati in our lifetime. But in the first days after that press conference, those pigs and their architect inspired nothing but thoughts of tar and feathers.
Public reaction was brutal. One citizen snorted, “I have raised hogs, I have castrated hogs, and I have slaughtered hogs, but I do not go around with a flying-pig brooch on my lapel!” Even Mayor Luken remarked, “I think we risk a lot of embarrassment.”
We all know how it turned out. City planners stood their ground, the pigs were installed, and today they stand proudly among such eternal Cincinnati icons as Fountain Square, Music Hall, three-way chili, and clogged sinuses.
In 2088, somebody will open the replacement time capsule that was installed for Cincinnati’s tricentennial, and you can bet that some version of a flying pig will be inside. Or can you? For almost a year, in fact, there was no pig in the new time capsule. Was it because Cincinnati hadn’t yet fallen in love with flying pigs when the new box was installed? Or maybe people objected to something so lighthearted in such a dignified historical vault? No, the problem was that the new time capsule wasn’t installed at all.
Not that they didn’t try like hell to do it. After the original City Hall box was removed, suggestions for a new time capsule and its contents quickly came pouring in. Among the proposals were various concepts of flying pigs, some of them derisive. (Seriously, those first anti-pig weeks were intense.) An early idea was to display the new time capsule at that big bicentennial ceremony on December 28, 1988, pre-loaded and ready to send to City Hall immediately. That didn’t happen.
January came, and the capsule committee said to expect a burial in February. Again, nothing. In mid-March they presented the capsule itself, a “thermo-plastic composite that is stronger than steel” developed by Cincinnati Milacron. They also described some of the suggestions they’d received for what might go inside: a can of Hudepohl “Hu-Dey” beer (the Bengals had just played in the Super Bowl); the secret recipe for Skyline Chili (as if Skyline would hand that over); the names of 100 babies born in 1988 (a few of those geezers will still be around!); and a love poem to Hit King Pete Rose (his big gambling scandal broke three days later).
The committee avoided predicting yet another target date for the capsule’s installation (fool me once, etc.), but they did mention that the finalized list of contents would be announced in May. It wasn’t. Nor in June.
The committee finally displayed everything in July. Our great-great grandchildren in 2088, they said, will open the capsule and find things like a welcome note from Neil Armstrong, a bar of Ivory Soap, a Bengals Super Bowl program booklet, and a lapel pin of a flying pig. Yes! The pigs made it in! And by the way, the capsule is now scheduled for installation in September 1989. Did it happen? I kept trying to find out.
While working on this mystery, I encountered another one, and here’s where things entered the Twilight Zone. There was another official bicentennial time capsule.
Everything about it was almost identical to the City Hall one, but this box was to be buried inside the Cincinnati Museum Center at the newly-rehabbed Union Terminal. There was a contest for students from area schools to create homemade representations of 1988 Cincinnati life, and the winning entries would go in the capsule. But just like the City Hall project, the Museum Center time capsule seemed to evaporate as well.
To review: both time capsules had the same timeline, same clamoring for what would go inside, same future date to reopen, and even the same splashy setup at the same place (downtown convention center) on the same bicentennial party night on December 28, 1988. And then the same nothing.
Tell you what. Let’s celebrate a slam-dunk, definitely-buried bicentennial time capsule. Partridge Meats, a now-consolidated local meatpacker, filled a 55-gallon drum with bicentennial stuff and buried it on the University of Cincinnati campus, following what I must now assume is a requirement for these things: an announcement that the burial would happen in May followed by an announcement that it would happen in late summer, with the thing finally hitting the dirt in October. But this one happened; I have pictures.
Was the City Hall replacement time capsule ever installed? Yes it was, but the hoops I had to jump through to verify it are way above my pay grade. I finally connected with someone who swears he was there at City Hall in late 1989 and saw it installed with his own eyes. No media was invited because the planners decided it was no longer newsworthy after such a delay.
Might that also be the punch line for the other time capsule? Here I must thank those dedicated people at the Cincinnati Museum Center’s History Library and Archives who trudged through their bicentennial catacombs and eventually pulled out Storage Box No. 151. In it they found the winning entries that students from area schools had created, thinking their hard work would be ceremoniously unveiled in a time capsule in 2088. Sorry, kids, but now you’re plenty old enough to know how unreliable adults can be. Now you’re them.
If Cincinnati City Hall is still standing in 2088, the tricentennial box will be dug out and opened. I wish now that I’d had the power to decide what was to go inside. I also wish I could live long enough to watch people open it up so I could see their faces. Just one thing would hop out of the box: a singing frog with a top hat and cane. OK, for Cincinnati it would be a singing pig with wings.
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