The mystery has been solved for anyone wondering whatever happened to the missing 1976 Bicentennial Time Capsule. And like any good mystery, the answer has been right under our noses the whole time – sort of.
As local lore goes, residents gathered in 1976 on the City Green to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States. To mark the occasion, members of the Historical Society organized the filling of a time capsule with notable contents and materials from the time. Leaders dropped off the unsealed time capsule at one of the city’s largest employers at the time, Spectro Equipment, to be welded shut. What happened next is another mystery unto itself.
Phil Heim, formerly of Spectro Equipment and now a resident of Florida, said the sealed time capsule sat in his office and was never picked up. To Heim’s understanding, the time capsule was planned to be displayed at the library, but “there was some kind of mix-up, and the city didn’t want it,” so there it sat at Spectro until 1992 when Heim sold the company. Heim then went into insurance, taking the time capsule with him to his new office at Nationwide Insurance. It sat again in a corner of his office until his retirement in 2017. He held on to it yet again and recently dropped it off at the North Royalton Chamber of Commerce after cleaning out his home office, finally ridding himself of the 45-year-old relic.
“Honestly, I don’t have a good answer for why I never did anything with it. I guess over the years it just became kind of an out-of-sight, out-of-mind type of thing,” Heim said in a telephone interview from his home in West Palm Beach, Fla.
There’s also no good answer for why members of the Historical Society never returned to Spectro Equipment in 1976 to pick up the welded-shut time capsule and give it a proper home. Current members of the local civic organization are baffled.
“Normally, a time capsule is buried someplace significant,” said Don Harris, a member and former president of the North Royalton Historical Society.
The City doesn’t have the greatest luck when it comes to time capsules – a time capsule from 1918 that marked the centennial of North Royalton has never been recovered, despite historical documentation of an official dedication ceremony taking place. Officials scoured the community’s most significant sites in 2018 when North Royalton celebrated its 200th birthday. The hunt came up empty. On Oct. 27, 2018, city leaders gathered outside the North Royalton Historical Society to dedicate and bury a time capsule marking the community’s bicentennial. The time capsule, to be unearthed in 2068, is buried in a marked and documented site – officials made sure of that. The recent recovery of the 1976 time capsule – however bizarre the back story – gives leaders renewed hope in recovering history and preserving the past.
“Well that solves a mystery that no one in the Historical Society has ever been able to figure out,” said newly named President Michael McDonald of the 1976 relic. “We always knew there was a time capsule from 1976 that was supposed to have gotten buried but had gotten misplaced.”
And with just five years to go before it can be opened in 2026, there’s no chance it will get tossed aside and forgotten again.
Members of the Historical Society will discuss the 1976 time capsule at their next meeting set for tonight at 7 p.m. at the Historical Society House and Museum.
The Chamber of Commerce will now turn over the time capsule to the Historical Society, where it will remain in safe-keeping until it is opened in 2026.

By SARA MACHO HILL
Contributing Writer