Mystery safe uncovered inside Guerneville’s River Theater

It’s hard to know how seriously to take four guys dusted in concrete powder when they giddily speculate about the contents of a rust-encrusted steel safe uncovered during some remodeling work at the River Theater in Guerneville this week.

Gold coins? Rolled bills? Precious gems? Pieces of eight?

There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to get the darn thing open — though the prospects of doing so seem kind of slim.

Apart from the fact that the passage of time appears to have had fairly corrosive effects on the 50-plus-year-old safe, it has both a combination dial and an inner key lock requiring two keys — both missing — in order to be opened.

But theater owner Jerry Knight doesn’t seem particularly worried about such details.

He’s too excited about the puzzle it presents and what he hopes might be an opportunity to engage the public in some way. Perhaps he can tug on the same sense of curiosity that inspired an estimated 30 million TV viewers to watch tabloid personality Geraldo Rivera break into a hidden vault once owned by Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.

“It’s a real mystery,” said Knight, his eyes glistening and a broad smile playing across his face — ever the showman.

The safe, made by what was the Hermann Safe Co. of San Francisco, founded around 1889, showed itself Wednesday. Volunteer workers from KGGV 95.1 FM community radio, “The Bridge,” were working in the old box office area of the River Theater, in an area being transformed into a DJ booth with a broad window overlooking Main Street. KGGV will soon be broadcasting live from the theater with an eye on the town.

A man named John “Pirate” Fisherman said he had just removed a countertop so he could lower the supporting structure to a level more suitable for people who use wheelchairs. Then he saw the rusted, hatch-like door of what San Francisco safe-cracker Ken Dunckel calls a cannon-breech safe because, when opened, it might look like the place one would load a cannon ball or missile.

It was completely encased in concrete and, as Fisherman and others discovered while drilling and pounding away at the material over the next two days, had rebar and pieces of wood wrapped around it, too.

A metal plate still visible on top describes an inner door that requires two keys to open, including one intended to be kept off the premises — “bad news if you’re the only here and there’s a gun to your head,” Knight said.

“That amount of degree of security, there’s going to be something in it,” he said.

But no one knows. It could be just a big bunch of nothing, like Capone’s vault in the basement of Chicago’s old Lexington Hotel, once Rivera’s work crews got it open in 1986.

Knight, owner of the 1947 theater for nearly 10 years, has his own theory.

“We definitely think it might be full of $20 gold pieces, because it was the ’40s,” he said, with that smile again.

But that assumes, among other things, the safe was installed by an early owner, and there have been several.

Eric Nuss, the heir to Hermann Safe, said his family’s company made many of the money chests like the one he saw in photographs from the River Theater, but the company stopped making safes and vault doors when it was sold in 1970. He now deals in safes and vaults through a company started then called Hermann Associates.

“I’m pretty positive that Hermann never kept a key to a customer safe, and if they did, those records are long gone, or those keys are long gone,” Nuss said.

It’s fairly common for folks to find an old safe in a building or house that they want to get into, and if anyone can, it’s Dunckel, Nuss said.

“You can get into Fort Knox, if you have time and money to spend,” he said.

Dunckel said there are plenty of strategies for someone with expertise to use to get into a safe, though with travel and the potential damage to the safe, the Guerneville specimen could cost a couple thousand dollars.

It’s also feasible that just letting people have a go at the combination, to start with — an idea Knight and KGGV DJ Brian Ohm are considering — is also plausible, if concrete dust and rust haven’t gummed up the works too much.

“Eventually somebody will get it,” Dunckel said. “There’s only a million possibilities.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.