Just keeping the world a bit stranger.
Alumni get nasty surprise as UW opens time capsule
As they cracked the capsule Thursday afternoon, University of Washington research team members expected to find a prim and proper package from the nifty 1950s.
What they got was a faceful of pornography, circa 1978, and dirty underwear.
The older, tamer items -- snapshots of men with crew cuts, reel-to-reel recordings of School of Communications alumni cracking wise -- still lay in the steel box, as they had since the capsule was sealed into the wall of the then-new Communications Building in 1957.
But they had company. Erotic, irreverent company.
Sometime in the early 1980s, the pranksters -- unknown as yet -- laid a pornographic centerfold atop the pile, and added other odd and obscene mementos to the mix. That was the image that greeted researchers, when they opened the capsule in preparation for a dinner Thursday evening with alumni who packed the original.