Donning a hard hat, Temple University Health System president and chief executive Larry Kaiser watched Friday as demolition workers pried out the 84-year-old cornerstone box - a time capsule of sorts - from behind the cornerstone of the Old Medical School Building.

The handsome but obsolete edifice at Broad and Ontario Streets, dedicated in 1930, is cordoned off and vacant, and will soon be razed.

No one knew what was in the tin container, a bit bigger than a toolbox.

"This could be like Al Capone's vault," Kaiser quipped, referring to Geraldo Rivera's much-hyped, live-on-TV opening of one of the gangster's secret vaults. That one contained a pile of dirt.

Two things were obvious as Kaiser gingerly began removing the box's contents.

First, protective plastic bags did not exist in 1930. The papers - there was nothing but - were damp, discolored, deteriorating.

Second, in an era way before TV and the Internet, magazines and newspapers were vital. The historic cache included dozens of Temple Medical College Bulletins dating to 1908, a copy of the Temple University News, an issue of the Philadelphia Medical Journal, and four daily newspapers - the Evening Bulletin, the Philadelphia Record, the Evening Public Ledger, and The Inquirer.

Although the medical school building was christened on Oct. 15, 1930, the newspapers were from four months earlier. The big news, besides a win by the Phillies, was President Herbert Hoover's signing of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which historians say helped transform a bad recession into the global Great Depression.

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Demolition unleashes a blast from Temple's past