Kathy (Miers) Hartmann remembers helping her mother stem beans on a hot summer day in 1975 before being sent to deliver Della Miers’s letters to her children to The World’s Largest Time Capsule.
She was 16 and spending time with the 19-year-old boy she had been dating since March or April. They met at a New Year’s Eve party.
Steve Hartmann went with her on the errand, and she remembers on the way they decided to take a break from the heat and sit in the lower level of St. John’s Lutheran Church. Kathy decided to add her own letter to Steve for Harold “Budd” Davisson’s time capsule.
Now as the two approach their 48th wedding anniversary on July 31, Kathy laughs that she misspelled both his first and middle name – Steven Reinhard – in that now-historic letter.
On July 4 this year, when the capsule contents began to be displayed, her brother, David Miers, waited in the line to go in and spotted the family letters. He took a photo and sent it to Kathy.
“I recognized my mom’s handwriting immediately,” she said.
A few days after July 4, Kathy and Steve again sought cooler air at St. John’s a few blocks away from the line in which Kathy waited to claim the letters. This time, they sat in the air-conditioned car – Steve opening the letter Kathy wrote at St. John’s, and Kathy feeling a flood of love as she opened the letter from her mother.
“In the letter to Steve, I talked about what we had done that day on the 4th of July and I mentioned the time capsule and wondered where we would be in 50 years,” she said.
She recalls how Steve helped out with the many July 4th preparations her mother took on, from baking apple pies for the bandshell contests to organizing parade entries on index cards.
Kathy remembers riding with Steve on his motorcycle up and down the streets to check on parade entries.
Della Miers passed away in 2017; her husband of 60 years, Dick, died in 2023.
In her letter on then-popular Precious Moments stationery, Della Miers told Kathy that she, her dad and her brothers, David and Bob, who were then just 13 and 5, all liked Steve and shared her feeling that the two might marry.
“It shocked me how she knew that,” Kathy said in a recent interview.
Hartmann was also able to pick up her mother’s letters to sons Bob, who lives in Seward, and David, who lives in Lincoln. David was getting ready to start school in 1975, so his mother’s wishes were more general in terms of a happy life, but specific in saying if his parents had died before 2025, she knew they would see each other in heaven someday.
Bob, Kathy said, had not yet shared the contents of his letter with the family.
Kathy wonders how others are reacting to the letters she saw them carrying away from the old Davisson store on Hillcrest Avenue.
The feeling that welled up when she spotted her mother’s handwriting on the letters as she and her son, Ben, walked through the store on July 4th is strong.
“I am going to cry now even thinking about it,” she said.
Hartmann is hoping the letters she wrote and submitted to the capsule in the 1980s or 1990s will survive for delivery to her own three children – Tim, who now lives in Germany, Ben, here in Seward, and Khristina, who lives in Lincoln.
The additional opportunities to add letters involved a tube into the time capsule, and she said Trish Johnson and her crew are still working to open and get through more letters and items submitted that way.
She knows the letters may not have made it, but she remains hopeful and praises the commitment of the family and others who are carefully sorting through and organizing the capsule’s contents.
“I think of all the work (Trish Johnson) and her family have put into this,” Kathy said. “I wonder if Harold knew the impact this would have on all of us 50 years later. Thanks to his family for keeping watch the past years and for all of the work they are doing now to reunite all of us with our precious letters and packages.”
Kathy is also looking at the letters from the perspective of her 17-year-old granddaughter, after seeing her reaction to the time capsule and its messages from the past.
Will she be writing a letter to her grandchildren with or without a time capsule?
Hartmann laughs again.
“I keep journals. I have had pen pals since third grade,” she said. She has boxes full of diaries.
In fact, she looked up the day she and Steve dropped the letters off at the time capsule in one of the diaries. She wrote about the family’s July 4th barbecue that year, and how they went to the parade as a family.
So it will all be there for her children and grandchildren, too. though in a different kind of time capsule.
