By 2089, These Items Should Be Antiques

What will a 100-year-old Barbie doll and a post-adolescent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle look like?

Orange County residents in the year 2089 will probably find out. Those two symbols of youthful amusement in 1989 are on the list of items recommended for a 100-year stay in a time capsule to be buried Aug. 1 as part of the Orange County centennial festivities.

The centennial organizers’ time capsule committee approved a list of 110 items Wednesday. The next stop for the list is before the Orange County Centennial Inc. board of directors.

The list also nominates a week’s worth of junk mail, utility bills, 100 proposals for solving the county’s traffic problems, newspaper food sections, a 1988 tax form, a jar of Knott’s Berry Farm jam, a Disney Dollar (one of the two currencies recognized within Disneyland), a vial of seawater and an Orange County Transit District bus schedule.

The items selected will “represent life in Orange County as it is today,” said centennial spokeswoman Mary Ann Waters.

Many organizations, businesses and individuals offered items for the capsule. The Automobile Club of Southern California commissioned a special commemorative map of Orange County in which the historical sites are marked. The map will be presented to Orange County Centennial Inc. and the county Historical Commission at 11 a.m. today on the steps of the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana. (Copies of the map are available to the public; call 859-4000 for information. A $4 donation, to benefit the centennial scholarship fund and other community programs, is requested.)

Waters said many of the suggestions for the time capsule came from children who competed in an essay contest sponsored by The Times Orange County Edition. The Irvine Co. is offering an aerial map of the development the Irvine area, and the Lusk Co., a photograph of the interior of a typical Orange County home.