Chuck Klosterman on Tulsa's Time Capsule

The August 28, 2007 issue of Esquire ran a piece by Chuck Klosterman on the Tulsa time capsule we examined a few weeks back. An excerpt appears below and you can read the entire story here.

In June of 1957, the community of Tulsa buried a Plymouth Belvedere in a downtown concrete bunker beneath the Oklahoma topsoil. The car would act as the public vortex for a time capsule that would be unearthed five decades later. It would also be the grand prize in a stridently futuristic contest: During the summer of its entombment, various local citizens were given the opportunity to guess what the population of Tulsa would be in 2007. Whoever was closest (and was, presumably, still alive) would win the (now classic) car, along with several gallons of gasoline and oil. It appears that people in 1957 weren't positive that gas and oil would still be in use half a century later. This is how optimistic Americans used to be: We used to imagine that cars of the future would probably run on uranium, potato peels, and distilled water.

See also:
Tulsa Time Capsule (1957)