DAN'S PAPERS, May 23, 2008 Page 43 www.danshamptons.com
Buried 1986 Contents That Were in a Time Capsule Stolen in Southampton By Dan Rattiner 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
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.
It seems like a particularly complicated business for someone who just got drunk and wanted to do a little vandalism.
Dan Rattiner is the founder of Dan’s Papers. His memoir, In the Hamptons: Fifty Years With Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires and Celebrities will be published by Harmony Books this May.
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
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