In 1967, former Mayor W.G. Enloe asked me to write a piece describing life in Raleigh for its residents of 2017. The document was placed in a time capsule at North Hills' Cardinal Theatre, then under construction.

I came across a clipping of the document recently. Since it's quite possible that neither I nor many of you will be around in 2017, when the capsule is to be opened, I thought you might find "the way we were" four decades ago fascinating.

Keep in mind that Raleigh was then a town of 110,000. Downtown Boulevard, now Capital, was the busiest thoroughfare in the state. The 12-story Branch Banking & Trust building was our tallest "skyscraper."

Today we are a city of 374,000. BB&T still lays claim to the tallest building at 29 floors. According to DOT's Bill Rosser, Capital Boulevard's traffic volume today is far less than the 100,000 cars a day on an I-40 stretch near Winston-Salem.

Remember the miniskirt? "It's one of the more pleasant controversies of our time -- short-short skirts that often result in frozen thighs, but enable adults to distinguish girls from long-haired boys," I reported.

"What war are you now fighting?" I asked. "Ours is the Vietnam War -- fighting it at home and abroad. We have peace vigils and draft card burnings as expressions of a 'beatnik' age in which some of us think we should be involved and some think we should not. And we have heroes and heroes' wives, who think we should."

"Is Cassius Clay in your 2017 history book? And have you read 'Death of a President?'"

"Whatever has happened to the Ku Klux Klan, whose bed sheets have turned to helmets? Are they still the followers of the cross? We live in a time of Kludds, Klaverns, Grand Dragons and civil rights legislation."

"We think we are a city, but we have small-town ways," I wrote. "Within two blocks of the Capitol, one can still hear a rooster crowing. We jaywalk. We girl-watch on Fayetteville Street in front of the old courthouse now being torn down. We protest the killing of a tree, and we plant bulbs in bits of earth between office buildings on Fayetteville Street and call the colorful little plots 'malls.'"

In the time capsule, I noted the debate over "brown bagging," the illegal practice of lugging our own liquor to local restaurants before the 1967 General Assembly legalized the custom in counties that had voted in liquor stores. Liquor by the drink came much later.

In a lighter mood, I bequeathed to the people of 2017, such irritating problems as "how to get rid of the pigeons around the Capitol, how to get the legislature to go home before the end of June, and how to discourage secretaries from asking callers, 'Who's calling, please?'"

Forty years ago, I asked 2017 readers, "Is it East Carolina College or University, or is the place still in existence?"

The most divisive debate in the General Assembly of 1967 was whether to allow "Eecie-Teecie" to break free of the consolidated university and become a university of its own. East Carolina College President Leo Jenkins and Eastern North Carolina lawmakers prevailed against the efforts of the consolidated university officials and generally widespread public opposition to the change.

In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Raleigh still had not emerged from the dark shadows of racism and widespread discrimination.

"We're now a part of the Union, although county, city and state employees still observe Confederate Memorial Day as an official holiday," I wrote. "And last year, a near-riot occurred on the N.C. State campus when the campus newspaper editor advocated doing away with playing 'Dixie' at campus concerts."

In the time capsule piece, I waxed proudly over Raleigh's advances, such as the "Friend of the College" "7 for $7" concert series that year after year drew capacity crowds to Reynolds Coliseum. For only a buck each, we enjoyed some of the world's foremost performers -- Van Cliburn, Burl Ives, top-notch symphonies and artists from the Met and Carnegie Hall. We were being breast-fed culture, and it caught on.

The Cardinal Theatre is long gone. North Hills has been almost entirely rebuilt. I doubted that the time capsule still existed until developer John Kane assured me that it does, in what is now the Bonefish Grill restaurant.

I drove over to the Bonefish and asked a young man named Sean working in the bar if he knew the whereabouts of the time capsule buried well before his birth.

He did not. "But if there is a 1967 copy of Playboy in it, I bet I can find it," he chuckled, and later pointed it out in the sidewalk.

As I looked down at the forgotten marker, walked on unnoticed by hundreds of shoppers every day, I marveled at the swift passage of time and the contrast in Raleigh then and Raleigh now.

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