by Garrick A Moritz, Gazette
Last week, Bruce Brown, representing the Garretson Area Historical Society and Museum came to the Gazette office with something he thought was newsworthy.
The Museum is in its off season and open by appointment only, but he was there working on an exhibit when Mike Meinders, certified locksmith and owner of Mike’s Lock and Key’s (formerly Pinman Lock & Key), stopped by to say hello.
Brown was giving Meinders an unofficial museum tour, and showed him, among other things, the bank vault where the newspaper archives and bound volumes were kept.
“I noticed something about the bank vault doors,” said Meinders. “I’d just been reading a book about this very thing, that many of these old
bank vault doors were booby trapped with tear gas, so that if someone was trying to drill into the door, they’d go off.”
“He said to me, ‘Were you aware that you’ ve got tear gas traps on these doors, and that they’ re live?’ I was shocked, I figured anything like that would have been removed when the Historical Society acquired the building. Mike showed them to me, and sure enough they were there and they were ready for business.”
“Now these were pretty safe,” said Meinders. “They’re only designed to go off is something shady is going on, though they could go off if anything strikes the door with a great deal of force. It’s a metal frame, with a glass tube containing the concentrated tear gas in a vacuum sealed glass tube wrapped in cotton. It was designed and placed in the door so if anyone tried to use a drill to force their way into bypassing the lock, they would shatter and deploy the gas.”
“Obviously I wanted to remove the traps as soon as possible,” said Brown. “I asked Mike if he could use his talents to do it, and he told me it would be a simple enough job, if not an easy one.”
So, they invited the Gazette to come over and photograph the disarming procedure as it happened on Wednesday, Nov. 10.
Working nimbly and calmly together they first removed the metal frame of the trap from each door, one at a time and then disassembled and disarmed each of the tear gas tubes. Without a mechanism to shatter the glass on impact, they are safe, as long as they are not dropped on the floor.
“Pretty neat job,” said Meinders, as the second and last of the two traps was disarmed and placed safely back in its casing. Some light jokes and banter while they were working on the units occurred, saying that it was every man for himself if one of these went off by accident.
“Can you imagine drilling through one of these doors and hitting one of these suckers,” said Brown. “That’d be a nasty surprise wouldn’t it.”
“The robbery would just be over,” said Meinders. “Anybody on that drill would catch a whiff and just run... if they could run.”
Holding aloft the freed tear glass cylinder, Meinders exclaimed, “Just look at how they made this, you can see here that this end was sealed up, note the little scorch mark from the glass maker. They must have done this by hand, and very carefully. Just a drop of this stuff on your face could send you to the ER.”
“And it’s vacuum sealed so it will last forever unless the cylinder is broken,” said Brown. So now that the traps were out and disarmed, the question was, what was to be done with them? Should they ask the county police to take them in hand?
“Honestly, after talking with the rest of the folks at the Museum, I think we’ re going to consider them museum property and put them into an air tight display case,” said Brown. “They’ll be another nice historical artifact for the collection, and a piece of local history.”
This also might not be the last collaboration that the Museum has with Mike’s Lock and Key’s, as Brown then showed him to a safe that no one has had the combination to in some time.
“I think I could get it open,” Meinders said. “It’s just a matter of starting from zero and doing the math. Finding the right formula for the combination. It can be done.”
“This might be something we sell raffle tickets and have a celebration for at the museum,” said Brown.
Best of luck with that fellas! Good job and may Lady Luck stay with you!
