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Former La Patera Students Get Blast from the Past with Opening of 1965 Time Capsule
It was a long trip down memory lane Friday morning at La Patera School in Goleta as former alumni of the elementary school returned, reminisced and got a firsthand look at what they put in a time capsule nearly 50 years ago.
No one seemed to remember what went into the shoebox-sized copper box in 1965, just after the current school was built. Some remembered signing their names on papers of some sort; others just shrugged.
“This is overwhelming,” said former student Jim Logan, who with friends and former classmates Linda Thomas Anderson and Dorothy Henderson led the search for the time capsule.
The pursuit started on Facebook when Anderson asked what had happened to the box. Then came some research, which ended with a hole knocked out of a wall at La Patera, and the retrieval of what has been jokingly called the Holy Grail.
Along the way, word spread to other former La Patera students. By this time, some had growing families of their own. Some had moved far away, others stayed close.
People who could came to the reunion Friday, including Goleta Councilmen Roger Aceves and Michael Bennett, and they all leaned over when Logan opened one side of the box with tin snips.
The contents? May 19, 1965, newspapers, including an advertisement for new Mercury Comets at $2,000. Then came the sheaf of papers with scores of names, scrawled in the handwriting of young children. Also included, though no one knew quite why, were rosters for local Masonic chapters.
There was no shortage of memories among the attendees, who talked of the days when they brought out the record player during lunch and danced to “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies. Robin Hill Cederlof recalled the day she got in trouble with the principal because she rode her horse to school and tied him up outside, creating an “attractive nuisance.”
Then there was the time everyone lost their marbles — over marbles. Ben Allway explained that La Patera’s style of marbles had a more carnival atmosphere, with kids pitching their shooters at lines of marbles and pyramids of marbles. The targets grew to include other small objects, including transistor radios and toys.
Shirley Giacomotti Silva came to represent her father, Emilio Giacomotti, who went to the first-ever La Patera School — built in 1881 not too far from the current school. Back then, La Patera was one of three one-room schoolhouses in the Goleta Valley that served ranchers and their kids, as well as children of the workers. The original building was taken down in the 1920s, after a consolidation of school districts that sent everyone to Goleta Union School, in Old Town.
In 1964, in response to a booming post-World War II population in the Goleta Valley, La Patera was rebuilt. Silva’s children went to the new school, and now her granddaughter is in fifth grade at La Patera.
“It really is a good school,” she said. “People don’t appreciate it enough.”
— Noozhawk contributing writer Sonia Fernandez can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.
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