The grand marshal of the Tucker Day parade didn't smile or wave at the crowd. How could it?

It was a time capsule from 1958.

Actually, the capsule was a tarnished copper box that looked like it belonged in a bank vault.

"I thought it was going to look like a rocket or something," said Honey Van De Krete of the Main Street Tucker Alliance, the civic group that stages the annual festival in the unincorporated town in DeKalb County.

"I expected it to look like a big Tylenol," said Harry Powell of the Tucker Historical Society.

Undeterred by the capsule's homely appearance, festival planners declared it grand marshal anyway. The old box was paraded down Main Street on Saturday on a float created by students at nearby Westwood College. The float had crepe paper tail fins meant to suggest a late '50s Chevy; in a sign of the times, it was pulled by a late-model Toyota 4Runner.

"There goes the time capsule," onlookers called repeatedly as the procession went by. "I thought it'd be bigger."

The time capsule was placed behind a brass plaque in a wall at a county health center built half a century ago in Tucker. Instructions called for it to be opened in 50 years.

When the center closed a decade ago, the relic was entrusted to the DeKalb History Center in Decatur.

A few days ago, archivist Paul Graham partially opened the box, which had been soldered shut, to speed the public unveiling and to ensure the contents were in decent shape.

"I knew someone who opened a time capsule once that was all mush," he said. "You don't want that to happen in front of a crowd."

The capsule was the brainchild of Conrad Allgood, the longtime principal of Tucker Elementary School.

He died last summer, but his oldest daughter, Deborah Allgood, came out Saturday with a passel of relatives eager to behold this piece of the past.

"I was a third-grader in 1958," she said. "My father made the time capsule a school project. He asked students to contribute things that would tell people in the future about our lives."

She couldn't remember what she put inside. "I guess we'll see," she said. "I know it had to be small."

At noon, the box was taken onto the main stage. Graham slipped on white gloves and started to remove the contents as Allgood and a circle of dignitaries gathered close to take a look.

One by one, the discoveries were announced to the audience: family histories, yellowed newspapers, a register of local residents, a photo of Miss Tucker 1958.

Many of the items had to do with an old Tucker Day custom. Fifty years ago, it seems, men had to grow beards like the pioneer citizens of the 1800s or they would be "arrested" and fined for charity.

"I remember my father getting arrested," Allgood said.

When all the contents had been removed and laid out on a table, it was clear that they had been chosen by adults. Allgood was clearly disappointed.

"None of our stuff is there," she said. "I wonder what happened to it?"