Sarah Brown
Public Works Crew Lead Sean Hegge thought it was going to be just another normal day as he headed into the Sweet Home Public Library to perform a quick fix on the book drop, but his day took an upward turn as he discovered a veritable time capsule.
Library Director Megan Dazey called the city for help to retrieve books that had fallen down a slot in the book drop, where she couldn’t reach them. She could hear them moving around in the bottom of the box where she couldn’t reach them.
The book drop at the circulation desk was designed in 1969 as essentially a large wooden box with the top lid situated on a spring that lowers from the weight of returned books. The flaw in the design is that papers and magazines (and apparently books, too) can land on the top and fall through a thin slit on the side from which they land in the bottom of the box.
Hegge removed the trim around the box so he could pull out the top lid and reclaim the stray book, but was met with a pile of other items that surprised him.
“It was pretty cool,” Hegge said. “We were pulling one piece out at a time, looking at the dates and stuff.”
He pulled out papers, bills and magazines covered in dust bunnies, items that dated as far back as 1971.
“I was expecting maybe a few pieces of paper,” Dazey said. “It was interesting to see what was in there, and it did become like a little time capsule.”
Among the items were scribbled notes, checkout slips, and a library card for patron Joan A. Moore that expired in 2006.
“It was interesting to see the design of the old card,” Dazey said.
There was a bill from book vendor Baker & Taylor, as well as an invoice asking why the library hadn’t paid its 1971 bill.
“We don’t use them as a vendor anymore, but they responded to our Instagram post about this and said that they’d be by to collect soon,” Dazey said.
An envelope from book vendor J.B. Lippincott Company was filled with index card-sized slips of paper with brief descriptions of books for sale.
“One of our vendors used to send little postcards about each of the books that they were preparing to send out because, obviously, you couldn’t look it up online,” Dazey said.
“There’d be just a little brief thing about the book. Whichever ones you wanted you would send back to the vendor. That was kind of how you bought them.”
Also found were some magazines, some from the early 2000s, as well as a 1976 copy of The Young Crusader (published by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which started an international Loyal Temperance Legion club for kids), Issue No. 4 of Cascade: Journal of the Northwest, and the Dec. 24, 1979 issue of U.S. News with a cover shot of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Dazey said she is working in collaboration with City Manager Kelcey Young on an idea to create a display of the found items along with another recent discovery.
“When they tore down the old railroad depot, they found some old comics from the 1930s,” she said.