Sunday, March 23, 2008

Safe-cracking by email


We drove to Tyronza, Ark., yesterday to visit the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum for a quilt exhibition and a dose of local history.
The museum's exhibits include a safe from the Burdette Plantation, a cotton plantation in the area. It was donated to the museum but, since the combination had been lost and there were still presumably plantation records and who knows what else inside the safe, the Burdette heirs retained ownership of the contents.
There have been several heavy handed attempts over the years to force the safe open, resulting in the loss of the latch handle and deformation of the combination wheel.
I took a particular interest in it because I noticed it was made by the Schwab Safe Co. of Lafayette, Ind. I grew up in Delphi, 18 miles from Lafayette, and my late father had a Schwab safe in his insurance agency.
Realizing that Schwab is still in business, I fired off an email this morning to their tech support people asking if they could help the museum folks open the safe. I figured there's an outside chance they still have the combination somewhere in their records, or at least might have some suggestions. For all I know, this has already been tried, but as an expatriate Hoosier, I felt compelled to help.
I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

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