Dan's Papers - May 23, 2008

Dan's Papers is approaching its 50th anniversary. I founded it in 1960 as a college student. It will be 50 years old in 2010.

Over the years, there have been big anniversaries of one sort or another when a time capsule filled with things has been put together and buried in a public place, to be dug up in a hundred years or so.

As a young publisher, I never kept track of when these things occurred, and when they did, felt sort of left out because nobody contacted me about possibly saving a copy of Dan's Papers. But then I thought, well, the paper is new and not well established. Of course, they'd want to put in one of the 100-year-old mainstream weekly newspapers along with the other items.

One year, I did learn about the burying of a time capsule in the Hamptons, and so I called the appropriate authorities only to receive the ultimate rejection - don't call us, we'll call you. And then, of course, no call back.

It was, therefore, a great and wonderful feeling when, in 1990, I got a call from the Mayor of Southampton Village at the time, Roy Wines Jr., who told me that to celebrate the occasion of the village's 350th anniversary, they were burying a time capsule alongside the pond down by the ocean off Old Town Road, not to be opened until the 400th anniversary, and could I give them a copy of this newspaper. I considered it a sort of coming of age back then. We had made it. No matter what happened, far, far into the future, 50 years down the road from that time, it would be dug up and people would marvel at some of the things that got put in there, one of which would be Dan's Papers.

Well, I recently learned that the contents of this time capsule were stolen not long ago. One night some person or some group of people had come down to where this capsule was buried under a big boulder, moved the boulder and dug it up. They took out what was inside the capsule, then threw the metal capsule itself - a six-foot long six-inch diameter plastic pipe - into the bushes, and went off.

At the time, and this was more than a year ago, the crime was reported by Thomas Rewinski, an employee of the Parks Department, who got a call from a resident near by who said he had gone out that morning and saw this big pile of dirt, the boulder moved, and the hole in the ground. Rewinski went down there, reported it to the police, then got a crew and sealed up the hole - it went down about six feet - and then had the boulder hauled off to a building at the public works yard on Willow Street along with the empty time capsule.

Last week, he learned the police had never found out who did it and that they had closed the investigation. He called The Southampton Press - I don't know if they were asked to put anything in there but perhaps they were - and they printed this account of it in their paper where I read it, and now am writing this account of it.

First of all, I would like to say that I didn't do this. It would not be in my interest to do this. Secondly, I would like to say I find it hard to imagine who would do such a thing. It seems like a particularly complicated business for someone who just got drunk and wanted to do a little vandalism. But then I thought maybe it was someone who had something down in there he later regretted having put there - when dug up might embarrass him or his family or his memory. Or else it was just somebody curious about what was going on in Southampton 18 years ago. Maybe a historian. Maybe two people who had some sort of bet.

Well, it was pretty dumb, it seems to me, that on this boulder they put a bronze plaque announcing that beneath it lay a time capsule of stuff from Southampton in 1990 not to be opened until 2040. Now wasn't that a tempting thing to be saying to everyone passing by.

In any case, I would like to report what stories ran in the copy of Dan's Papers buried in this time capsule on New Year's Eve of 1990. We keep back copies of the paper. We have copies of the paper going back all the way to 1960. And so does the Library at Stony Brook University on Long Island where my personal papers are being collected.

One story was by Ellen Keiser, one of our reporters back then, who went to the off-limits Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center by pretending to be an employee there to celebrate the fourth annual Family Day party. There was an article about the sharp downturn in real estate prices. A three-bedroom house on the ocean, on the market at $3 million had been sold for $850,000. The Shinnecock Tribe was fighting to get some Indian remains in a Southold museum returned to them for a proper burial. There was an article with the headline SECRET PARADISE: The North Fork is Beautiful, Peaceful and Still Undiscovered. Some of the advertisers included the New Moon Café in East Quogue, Bobby Van's in Bridgehampton (with Bobby at the piano), the Coach Factory Store in Amagansett, the Morris Studio in Southampton and Reed's Photoshop and Studio on Newtown Lane in East Hampton.

Perhaps the most interesting article, however, was the lead story, which I wrote. It was called HELLO 2040. And here is what it said in its entirety.

At this point, I know most of you don't think of yourself as kids. But as I write these words in December of 1990, a good many of you are running around the sofa, peeing in your diapers, chasing one another with sticks and playing Nintendo. You are listening to the Chipmunks on your cassette players, you are watching cartoons on Nickelodeon, you are looking to see where we adults have hid the presents. If that ain't kids, I don't know what is.

Well, that's some of you. As for the rest of you, and if we are five billion people, you are probably ten billion, you aren't even a gleam in your parent's eye. You are future kids.

One reason I bring this up, you should know, is that we've been worrying about you. This is a new experience for us. Until now, nobody has really thought much about what things were going to be like for you people way down the road. We worried about tomorrow. Literally. We worried about the day after tomorrow. We did our best, and very largely succeeded, in making life a better place for ourselves and our families than it had been a few days before. We called it progress.

I imagine this is old hat to you by now. If we've just begun to be concerned here in 1990, you must be all over the lot trying to set everything straight. Still, I think it is worth mentioning. For the whole history of mankind, until about 1800, people got along fine without progress. Then came the invention of the machine gun (now people could REALLY take things away from other people), the invention of the telephone, the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane and every other damn thing. And for a long, long time, people were all excited by the wonder of it, figuring that everything would just get better and better and what would they think of next? Nobody ever thought we'd have to pay the piper.

Well, in 1990, here it is. If what we have found out in the last twenty years is true, you are now spending much of your time devising strategies to deal with the depletion of the ozone layer, the difficulties of obtaining food for so many people, and the devastating loss of jungles and forests. I presume you have solved the problem of what kind of fuel to burn. (We have just had a very bad go around with nuclear power.) I figure you've done something to ease the national debt. And I presume you have got a pretty good system together to take care of garbage disposal. (It's something we are wrestling with rather hilariously here at the moment.)

On the other hand, perhaps I'm a pessimist. Perhaps with all the creativity people are putting into solving these problems for you folks of the future, it has gotten licked. We had an "almost" about a year ago. Two scientists in Utah announced they had discovered "cold fusion." They were wrong. They hadn't. But it was a near thing. Now maybe something has come up between we here in 1990 and you there in 2040 that has eased the way. Sure hope so.

One thing that snuck in here in 1990 in time for this time capsule is the collapse of Communism. Happened a year ago. Capitalism won. Turns out these freedoms are pretty good after all. We all feel wonderful about it. It was something that had been on our minds for most of these last fifty years. Since 1945 anyway. Battling the idea that the masses were more important than the individual.

On the other hand, just in the last few months, things have suddenly turned very sour. The economy has taken a downturn after ten years of prosperity. We may be going to war with Iraq because the Iraqis invaded Kuwait.

I suppose this is one of the advantages of being off there in the future. You know how these things turned out. They would be in your history books. Right now, however, we don't know if the economy will go through maybe a half a year of recession and then right itself. Or if it will come tumbling down in a great big crash and everybody will be selling apples on the street. And we don't know if Saddam Hussein - he is (was) the dictator of Iraq - has backed down and withdrawn his troops from Kuwait or we've had to go through a dreadful and bloody war to get him out. At this juncture, it sure doesn't look like we are going to just give up and bring our troops home and let him stay in this little country his troops invaded.

Well, don't be too smug about knowing what happened with us. You'll have the same situation with the kids who follow you.

I was in Sag Harbor this morning bright and early. Drove over from East Hampton to bring my kids, age six and eight, to the St. Andrews Catholic School there, then went down to the 7-Eleven by Long Wharf, got some coffee, then went to Joe Visone's Tailor Shop where I got a couple of buttons that had popped off sewn back on my winter coat. Joe wouldn't take any money for this. Just took him a minute. I think this man is a gentleman. Thought I'd honor him by having you people read about him fifty years from now.

It was a magnificent morning. Blue sky, bright sunshine, brisk wind. In my newly repaired coat, I strode smartly up Main Street to the Emporium Hardware Store to get some light bulbs. Breathed deeply and took big steps. It was such a nice morning to be alive.

What struck me about Main Street this morning was this steady hum I heard as I strode along. It was nothing out of the ordinary, really, just the usual sound of hundreds of automobiles moving this way and that, taking all these people to wherever they had to go. The sound, this hum, is absolutely unique to this century. It is the sound of some liquid that's been sucked out of the ground - gasoline - being burned up in a hundred combustion engines.

That's really the heart of the problem I hope you've straightened out. We're ready to have hundreds of thousands of people killed because we don't want some crazy madman in charge of where this stuff gets sucked out of the ground. And then we burn it up so we can get where we want to go and it pollutes the air and depletes the ozone layer.

Every year there are more cars on the road than the year before. Clearly this trend cannot continue indefinitely.

I hate to say it, but it also doesn't seem possible that we can have more and more people on this planet year after year and that this can just go on indefinitely.

Unless I'm wrong. Maybe I'm writing and you people in 2040 reading it are wall to wall from Montauk to Westhampton Beach all sitting in your automobiles. Maybe with all these people and automobiles you've gotten into layers. Like ten layers of cars and people deep.

Anyway, come visit me. I'm a hundred and one years old here in the year 2040. I've very likely forgotten that I've written this little letter and no doubt, as I'm escorted by my beautiful young wife down the ramp of my private jet to the runway there at the Suffolk County Airport in Westhampton, having just returned from the International Conference I chaired in Paris, I would no doubt be genuinely amused to read what I had to say back in 1990.