A few days ago I did a post about time capsules, so my ears perked up when I was listening to All Things Considered today and heard a report about a century-old time capsule that was forgotten about, rediscovered (inside the head of a lion statue, as you can see ablove), and just opened in Boston. Here's the audio of that segment:

It's straightforward enough, but I hate how the reporter, Audie Cornish, concludes the report by saying, "Stay tuned, history nerds." For starters, that's really condescending. More importantly, I've always thought that the whole point of time capsules is that they make history accessible and appealing to everyone, not just "nerds." Lazy, kneejerk remark by Cornish.

Anyway. Here's some video of that capsule being removed from the lion's head:

Meanwhile, I expect to publish an interview with time capsule expert Nick Yablon shortly — stay tuned.

Photo by Stephanie Strasburg, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Chris Togneri, a writer for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, was recently doing some work on his 1890 house. While tearing out an old attic, he found a bunch of items, including the framed display of old century-old baseball cards you see above.

The cards are from the T206 series, which was produced from 1909 to 1911 — the same series that included the famous Honus Wagner card that's generally considered the most valuable baseball card of all time. Unfortunately for Togneri, the cards he found in the attic didn't include a Wagner, although they did feature several other Hall of Fame players. You can read more and see additional photos here.

My favorite part of that article is this passage:

[B]ecause of [the house's] age, it provides countless little treasures. ... While tearing water-stained walls out of the attic, I found old Pittsburgh Press clippings. While digging around in the backyard, I found a tombstone. (It did not come with a body, thankfully. After contacting the family, we were told that Barbara Tremel [the name on the tombstone] was buried in Reserve Township. They could not explain the duplicate tombstone, but were glad to take it off our hands.)

Wow! The baseball cards are cool, but a duplicate tombstone — that's much more PermaRec-ish! Indeed, what is a tombstone if not, literally, a permanent record? I wish Togneri had written more about that instead of relegating it to a parenthetical mention. (Update: For more on the tombstone, scroll down to Taha Jamil's comment below.)

(My thanks to Brian Justman for bringing this one to my attention.)

I've recently come across a bunch of PermaRec-ish stories from the past 15 months or so, all of which I missed when they originally moved across the news wires. Here's the rundown:

1. A South Carolina woman whose pocketbook had been stolen back in 1990 was surprised when she received a call from the local police, who had found the bag with most of its contents (shown above) still intact. The bag had been found in the ceiling tiles of a bathroom a few miles from where it had been stolen — presumably stowed there by the thief, who took the cash but left everything else.

2. This is pretty good: A Michigan man named Joshua McKinney was removing some old insulation in his attic when he discovered a bunch of old love letters and other ephemera from the 1940s. He was able to return it to its family of origin but nobody could explain how the letters ended up in McKinney's attic, because the family that had originally owned the letters had never lived in McKinney's house, or even in his town. After some further investigation, it turned out that the family had lived in the house after all — but in another city! The entire house, complete with the letters tucked away in the attic, had been moved to McKinney's town after the family moved away. McKinney later bought the house and found the letters. You can get the full story here.

3. Last May I wrote about a hatbox full of old letters from the 1940s, which had been purchased for $1 at an estate sale. When I blogged about this story last year, the woman who bought the hatbox had enlisted the aid of a researcher, who was trying to find the family connected to the letters. It turns out that the researcher's efforts were successful.

4. Last month I wrote about the issue of class rings that are lost and later found. Here's another story in that same vein, about a class ring that was found at the bottom of a lake by a diver in the early 1960s and then returned to its owner nearly 50 years later.

5. And speaking of rings, an Indiana woman was remodeling her bathroom and was surprised to find a wedding band wedged behind the vanity. The ring was engraved with initials that matched those of the house's original owner, making it relatively easy to return the ring to the woman who had lost it 40 years earlier.

The tattered envelope and letter shown above date back to February of 1963. They were recently found under the seat of a rusted-out, rodent-infested 1959 Chevrolet Bel-Air that was purchased at auction by an Indiana man named Dean Sparks.

Sparks was intrigued by the letter, which had been written by a young woman to her sweetheart. The last line, underlined, said, "Let's get married."

After a bit of internet research, Sparks was able to connect with a Kansas man named Wade Waterbury — the son of the woman who'd written the letter. She and her beau had indeed gotten married, just a few months after the letter had been written. In fact, they eloped in that ’59 Bel-Air that Parks eventually purchased. Unfortunately, both of them are now deceased, but Parks sent the letter to Waterbury, who was excited and somewhat emotional to receive this unexpected family keepsake.

It's a great story. You can read more about it here, and there's some additional info in these two video reports (there's some footage that's used in both of them, but they both have a few unique bits that are worth seeing):

(Big thanks to reader James Poisso for letting me know about this one.)

Photo by Angela Peterson, JSOnline; click to enlarge

The documents you see above were part of a large stash of old papers, photos, and other ephemera that a Milwaukee woman named Lisa Crum found in the garage rafters of a home that she purchased more than a decade ago. Crum wanted to return the materials to their family of origin, but many of the documents were in German, which complicated her efforts. But she was never gave up. Her family moved to new homes twice after the found the documents, and each time she brought the papers with her.

Now her efforts have finally borne fruit. With the help of a local museum, Crum recently made contact with Lori and Steve Zeitlin, who are descendants of the now-deceased couple that had saved the photos and papers. The connection has extra resonance because, as it turns out, many of the documents track the family's efforts escape the Nazis during World War II.

You can get the full story in this excellent article, which is accompanied by this slideshow. It mentions that Crum always felt that the documents were her "responsibility," and that she and the Zeitlins "call each other family now."

So much of this feels familiar to me. It took me more than a decade before I made contact with anyone connected with the Manhattan Trade School report cards. During that time, I moved to a new apartment but took the cards with me, knowing that they were my responsibility. When I eventually began contacting some of the students' descendants, it forged a series of intense bonds, some of which still remain. It's great to see other people experiencing this same kind of connection via found objects.

(My thanks to Nicole Haase for letting me know about this one.)

The photo at top is an old hatbox filled with about 250 letters from the 1940s. Below that is a photo of one of the letters and a snapshot that was tucked inside of it.

The hatbox was purchased in 1998 at an estate sale by an Oklahoma woman named Pamela Gilliland, who paid $1 for it. She didn't realize the letters were inside until a few days later. They were all from a pair of brothers who served in World War II and were writing home to their parents. After one perfunctory attempt to locate the family went nowhere, Gilliland put the hatbox and the letters in a closet, where they've sat for the past 15 years.

Gilliland recently learned about a Tulsa-based amateur historian named Doug Eaton, who's had some experience connecting military artifacts with their original owners. She contacted him, and he's now agreed to help her. Here's a shot of him with some of the letters (click to enlarge):

This seems like a good basis for a book, no? Read more about it in this article from the Tulsa World.

(My thanks to reader James Poisso for bringing this one to my attention.)

As you may have heard, there's been a remarkable PermaRec-ish story emerging out of England, where a gent named David Martin was renovating his chimney and found the remains of a long-dead carrier pigeon with a little red canister attached to its leg bone. Inside the canister was an encrypted World War II-era message. It's believed that the pigeon was sent from Nazi-occupied France during the war.

This story has received lots of media coverage, but I particularly like the treatment from Mallory Ortberg at Gawker, who approaches the story with a very endearing sense of Harriet the Spy-ish adventure. She begins by saying, "[S]ometimes life is every bit as exciting and riddled with mysteries as you had hoped it would be as a cunning, hopeful child" (a nice distillation of the PermaRec ethos, no?). Then she describes the particulars of the situation and observes:

Of course there was a small red cylinder! Of course it was rolled like cigarette paper, exactly as a secret code ought to be. We live in days of wonder.

I really like that.

As for the message, we may never know its contents, because British encryption authorities say its code is unbreakable, at least so far, and they may not have the resources to crack it. Further details here.

I have to admit, until now I thought finding a bunch of old report cards in a discarded file cabinet was about the coolest thing ever. But a finding an encrypted WWII message strapped to the decomposing leg bone of a deceased homing pigeon definitely trumps that. I know when I'm licked.

Click to enlarge

On the left is Rose Baggini, age 15, as shown on her Manhattan Trade School report card in 1932; on the right, Rose Baggini Vrana, age 95, in her Florida home on March 3, 2012.

Rose is the first -- and so far only -- living connection to Permanent Record. I interviewed her by phone a few weeks ago but didn't know what she looked like because she doesn’t own a camera or a computer. Fortunately, I was able to arrange for one of Rose's friends, Linda Cadovius, to take a photo of her and e-mail it to me. Linda, whose parents were close with Rose, lives nearby and looks in on her from time to time. Big thanks to her for serving as Permanent Record's first remote photographer.

My article about Rose will be appearing on Slate shortly -- stay tuned.

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Update: Remember all that stuff that I found in the pocket of an old jacket? I contacted the vintage shop where I bought the jacket and told them the whole story. "We receive a lot of merchandise, so we usually just pat down the items instead of checking each pocket," the owner told me. "I'm sure we've sold back hundreds of stray dollars and coins over the years." So much for my theory that they put random ephemera in random pockets, just for fun.

Meanwhile, my thanks to everyone who weighed in on the question of whether I should contact Ann Marie Kroznuski (the widow of the man whose stuff was in the pocket). For the record, my whole "Should I get in touch with her?" thing was meant to be rhetorical -- I don't plan to contact her.

Why not? Mainly because I think doing so would be selfish. When I track down a report card family, I gain information from them but I also provide lots of information for them regarding their ancestors, so it feels like a fair exchange. That's one of my favorite things about Permanent Record -- I'm giving as well as taking. But if I were to contact Ann Marie Kroznuski, it would probably be interesting for me (I'd get to ask her questions about the jacket, about her late husband, etc.), but what would she get out of it? A reminder of a check that she bounced years ago? Feels like a pretty one-sided interaction, which wouldn't be fair to her. So I don't think I'll be going there.

Click on photos for larger versions

On Tuesday I bought a new pair of gloves. When I got them home, I decided I didn't like the color, so the next day I brought them back and exchanged them for a different pair. On my way back from the glove exchange, I decided on a whim to stop at a vintage shop in my neighborhood, where I came across this old jacket. I liked the cut and the fit, but I don't usually wear pale colors, so I wasn't sure about it. As I was trying it on, I felt something in one of the front pockets, so I reached in and pulled out a small wad of papers, all folded up. I didn't unfold them, but I could see that several of them had handwritten notes and appeared to be yellowed with age.

That was enough for me. I put everything back in the pocket and bought the jacket.

When I got home, I examined this new stash of ephemera, beginning with the check that's shown at the top of this entry. As you can see, it was written to pay a phone bill, but it bounced. It's not a report card, obviously, but it nonetheless feels very Permanent Record -- an old document of someone's personal details. How does this stuff keep finding me?

Naturally, I began searching for Ronald and Ann Marie Kroznuski. It turns out Ronald passed away just a few months ago in South Carolina, but Ann Marie is still alive. It feels odd to know that she bounced a check 36 years ago -- a small record of shame to which I'm privy (and now you are, too).

So what else was in the jacket pocket? For starters, a time card from Ronald's job:

No indication of what the job was, which is semi-maddening. Would it have killed Ronald's company to put its name on the time card?

There were also two short grocery shopping lists. One of them was on the back of a small (2.5" square) Woolco sales slip:

The other shopping list was on written on the flap of an envelope (hey, just like the Gettysburg Address, right?):

Next up, a receipt for a gallon of paint at Sherwin-Williams -- "Tivoli Green Accent 4492":

That paint color corresponds to one of the hues on this swatch strip, which has some basic arithmetic on the back:

Green, incidentally, has been my favorite color ever since I was a little boy -- another sign, if you choose to believe in such things, that this stuff was meant for me.

One final item -- a pocket calculator user's manual:

Hmmm -- if the Kroznuskis had a calculator, why did they have to do math on the back of the swatch strip? Maybe the latter inspired the purchase of the former.

That's it.

Did the jacket once belong to the Kroznuskis? If so, had these cards and papers been sitting in the pocket for 36 years until I found them a few days ago? And what about the staff of the shop where I bought the jacket -- don't they go through the pockets of a garment before putting it out on the racks? Maybe they found this stuff in the pocket but decided to leave it there, thinking it might make a nice bonus prize for the jacket's new owner? Or maybe they randomly seed their vintage clothing with assorted detritus, just because it's fun?

Meanwhile, should I contact Ann Marie Kroznuski? Should I just pack all of this stuff into an envelope and send it to her, with a note explaining how I found it? Should I send the material back anonymously, with no note? Or should I just leave her alone and enjoy these latest artifacts to find their way into my orbit?

Finally, consider this: What if I had bought the right color of gloves from the start?