Playing it safe

It turns out, the buried treasure in the walls of my home amounted to 5 pennies and a soggy Jolly Rancher.

Two years ago, we had put in an offer on this house, and the old owners had accepted, and we were all super excited about making the move.  One of the questions I'd asked the owners was, "there's a wall safe in the dining room; what's the combination?"   

The sellers, they didn't know.   One of them told us that her sister-in-law had figured it out once, by listening carefully while spinning the dial.  They found a penny from 1973 inside; they wrote the combination on a scrap of paper, which they subsequently lost.  

Man, I can't imagine tossing the combination to a wall safe in the dining room.  It's such a cool conversation piece!

At any rate, we moved into the home, added a gazillion family photos to the wall around the safe, and then got busy with the school year.  Figuring out the combination has been on my to-do list for two years now, but of course it took a back seat to about 85 million other things that became more urgent once the pandemic struck.  My own efforts to play safe cracker never got me far; I guess I'm just not destined for a life of crime.  (Or I need to scavenge a good stethoscope?)

With vaccinations spreading in my social circles, a few friends of mine eventually took a crack at cracking the combination, but no luck.  So last week, I splurged and called a locksmith.  Because, really, what fun is an antique wall safe if you can't open it up?

The safe dial, hinged out, on its [patented!] three-arm hinge.

Fun facts: my safe was made a hundred years ago, based on a design that (the hinge proudly proclaims) was patented in 1909.   Because the company has been sold during the intervening years, we couldn't just look up the combination in company records, but the locksmith managed to unlock the mysteries of the Dining Room Wall Safe, using sensitive fingers and a bit of luck.  

The back of the [patented!] three-arm hinge had come off the safe, so the locksmith reattached it for me while regaling me with tales of army service in years gone by.  

A hole in the wall,
before we reattached the hinge to the safe.

We checked together that I could reopen the safe on my own (it's a funky sequence of numbers, truly), and I made sure I noted the combination in a few different places.   I paid the locksmith $100.70, although because of the sticky set of five pennies we recovered from inside the safe, the whole process came in at a bargain $100.65.  

Surprisingly enough, there were no pennies from 1973; the most recent one was 2017.  The soggy Jolly Rancher was undated (not to mention, very melty).   (Ew).  

Another image of the hole. 
It looks better with the door back in place.