Q-I have an old safe made by the Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co. It was removed from a warehouse on Chicago`s South Side, where I`m told illegal whiskey was stored during Prohibition. How can I find out its value, and where can I sell it?
- Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers 04335
- Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers List Printable Chart
- Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers Today
A-The Herring-Hall-Marvin Co. of Cincinnati and Chicago manufactured fine and fancy safes and was located in Chicago at 225 W. Lake St. Some safes made to order by the company were beautifully decorated with hand-painted pictures and designs. One covered with sailing ships was made more than 100 years ago for bakery mogul Henry Piper; it can be seen at That Steak Joynt restaurant, 1610 N. Wells St., which was once the Piper Bakery building. For more information on the safe, phone the restaurant`s owner, Billy Siegle, at 943-5091. Siegle says he`ll give you a free bottle of wine with your dinner if you bring in any piece of Piper Bakery memorabilia.
Bob McCown buys old safes and vaults, as well as time clock combination locks for safes and vaults. You can reach him at Fink Safe & Lock Co., 2307 N. Western Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60647 (phone 486-2030). Keith Mulford collects cutaway locks (salesmen`s samples with a section cut away to show how the internal mechanism worked), unique padlocks and old safes measuring less than 30 inches high. He can be contacted at 1017 N. Gibbons, Arlington Heights, Ill. 60004 (phone 870-7372). To have an old safe appraised in the south suburbs, write to Harvey Sass, Elmer & Son Locksmiths, 3001 Chicago Rd., Steger, Ill. 60475 (phone 755-5273), enclosing a photo of the safe along with its height, width, depth, inside and outside measurements and any wording it has. Or write to the National Antique Safe Association, Box 110099, 16507 E. 13th Ave., Aurora, Colo. 80011, requesting a safe appraiser`s name and address near you.
The value of an old safe depends on its type and rarity. Some years back, a reader of this column, Felix Gremmo, took my advice and contacted the Smithsonian Institution in Washington about a 5-foot-high and 4-foot-wide black 'cannonball' safe he bought at a warehouse in 1974 for $45 and for which, nine years later, the Smithsonian paid him $2,500. The four-ton round safe, made by the Corliss Mfg. Co., sits on a short steel pedestal and is painted black with fancy ornamentation and the date 1872 in ornate gold lettering. The safe (which is most rare and unusual) is a steel ball made to rotate on an axis inside a larger steel shell and is fitted with three drawers (in which valuables were placed), a timer lock that must be cranked to set the time and two combination locks and two key locks. Warning: If you find an old safe, do not attempt to force it open. It may be booby-trapped, as many were, to discourage thieves.
Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Co., 1550 Grand Boulevard, was welcomed to Hamilton with a 100-gun salute during groundbreaking ceremonies Sept. The firm was a consolidation of Hall's Safe & Lock Co., Cincinnati; Marvin Safe Co. Where the name Kumahira, Security, Diebold, Mosler, LeFebure, Yale, Herring Hall Marvin, Bates, York, Miles, ect. Appears, we merely list those names to indicate the type of lock or part number used to represent that brand for cross reference purposes to match an original or aftermarket replacement products. There's still a lot of mystery. What does p with bar over it mean? Is the last number 60 or 69? How do I actually use these numbers with the safe's controls to open it? Spinning the Dial. I was able to solve the last question thanks to the digitized Duke University Archive and this original instruction sheet for a Hall's safe. We have a safe built by Herring Hall and Marvin Safe Co. The model is 1722 and the serial number is 72370. Currently the safe is open but we don't. To list your antique safe for sale gather together the required information and email it to: theantiquesafecollector@yahoo. Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co. Safe is on wheels and does work. Combination will be provided at pickup. The safe is 61' x 28' x 28. Questions and Answers Q: Is this an open safe or is it like the other one and have file drawers? Can you post an inside pic?
Q-Where can I find a record by Cary Grant entitled 'Did I Remember'
that he recorded around 1935?
A-The World`s Biggest and Best Annual Antique Music Fair attracts collectors from all over the U.S. and features 78 rpm records, cylinder records, phonographs, sheet music, vintage radios, jukeboxes and everything else relating to music memorabilia. It will be held from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and next Sunday at Seven Acres Antique Village & Museum, 8512 S. Union Rd., Union (phone 815-923-2214). Admission is $4; children under 5 admitted free. For information or a search service to obtain the recording you want, write to Randy Donley at the museum.
Q-Where can I get glass replacement parts, pieces and lids for my old set of Guardian Service Waterless Cookware?
A-Ivan Bernstein deals in new and used pieces of Guardian cookware and is looking to buy Guardian Ware cookbooks. Contact him at 6304 Green Meadow Pkwy., Baltimore, Md. 21209 (phone 301-358-2444). Various shapes and sizes of glass lids for Guardian cookware to fit dome cookers, casseroles, fryers, kettles and roasters in oval, triangular and round shapes can be ordered from the Painted Lady Antiques Catalogue, available for $2.75 postpaid from the Painted Lady Antiques Inc., 4712 W. Diversey Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60639. The catalogue also offers a multitude of hard-to-find parts, pieces, hardware, display domes, lighting fixtures and a variety of cleaning products and polishes, including the delightfully scented and fast-working Conrad`s Wood Youth Food Oil, which cleans, enhances, feeds and preserves all wood and iron items. A 16-ounce size is $14.70 postpaid, 32-ounce size is $23.45 postpaid, and 128-ounce size is $84.75 postpaid. For more information, phone Paul Peshkin at the Painted Lady Antiques at 282-5116.
Q-My grandfather, Herbert R. Smiley, manufactured druggists scales in Chicago from 1890 to 1895. Some had the name 'Smiley' imprinted on them, while others were manufactured under the name of 'Druggists Scale Works.' So far I`ve had no luck in trying to locate any of the scales he manufactured. Is there a source?
A-Write to the International Society of Antique Scale Collectors, Bob Stein, 111 N. Canal St., Suite 380, Chicago, Ill. 60606.
Q-Are old wrenches worth anything? I have several types that belonged to my grandfather.
A-Send for a copy of 'Antique Wrenches,' by Larry Finch, available for $9.95 postpaid from L-W Books, Box 69, Gas City, Ind. 46933 (phone
317-674-6450). For a dramatic rustic effect, try an arrangement of different wrenches on a stark white or bright red wall to perk up a dull den or ordinary office.
Because of the volume of responses, when writing sources listed in this column, you must enclose an addressed, stamped envelope for replies. Anita Gold can be reached by writing Anita Gold, The Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. However, the mail volume precludes a personal response.
One of the most interesting places I've lived with my family is a late 19thcentury farmhouse in Ann Arbor. The house is huge, maybe 4000 sq. ft, and welived in an apartment occupying the entire first floor. The most notable,permanent fixture in the apartment is this massive safe:
Our landlord mentioned that it was so big and heavy, the safe was wheeled inwhile the house was still under construction and the building was completedaround it. The safe was locked, and she didn't have the combination.
While we lived there, we occasionally joked about ways to crack the safe. Thetwo leading ideas were:
- Use an Arduino and a few stepper motors to iterate over every possiblecombination automatically, and just let it run while we lived there.
- Host the equivalent of a rent party and have guests pitch in to hire someoneto drill into the safe.
The mechanics of the automatic safe cracker eluded me, being more softwareand 'light duty' hardware inclined, and some online research led me to believethat drilling would be very destructive and might not work. We let the ideas go,and just lived with the massive block of metal in our peripheral vision. Thecats stared at it while in the litter box.
Giving Up
Two weeks from the end of our lease, I found myself sitting in front of thesafe, feeling terrible about leaving such a challenge behind.
I read up on the basic safecrackingand learned there are more intelligent, statistical methods to find thecombination than brute force. This seemed like it might be a good activity whennot packing moving boxes.
The only marking on the safe were the company that manufactured or distributedit - Hall's Safe & Lock Company. I found a post in an antiquesforum describingthe possible types of locks and how they might be unlocked. I hadn't eventhought of how it might be challenging to figure out the unlocking process evenif I had the code.
Sticky Notes
Again, I felt like giving up, but I thought of how this might related tocracking a computer password in the 21st century. The most efficient way isoften social engineering, especially if you can find the password on a stickynote near the computer in question. Whomever last opened this safe surely wrotethe combination down somewhere. Suddenly, this caught my eye, in the doorjam ofan adjacent utility closet:
Why is there a small piece of masking tape in the door jam? I looked closer andnoticed it had very faint markings. I carefully removed it from the wall and wasable to read it under the right lighting conditions, mostly.
Transcribed:
There's still a lot of mystery. What does p with bar over it mean? Isthe last number 60 or 69? How do I actually use these numbers with the safe'scontrols to open it?
Spinning the Dial
Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers 04335
I was able to solve the last question thanks to the digitized Duke UniversityArchive and this originalinstruction sheet for a Hall'ssafe.
Xp sp1 full download. By seeing the description of how to unlock the safe with some sample numbers, Icould decode the notation on the masking tape:
The p with a bar over it turned out to be from the Latin 'post', meaning after.The last person to unlock the safe may have been a doctor, because I found thisis a common abbreviation in medicine (or maybe a physicist, as a leared p-baralso stands for antiprotons).
The final procedure to unlock the safe was:
- Spin 3 times left to 67.
- Spin 2 times right to 79.
- Spin 1 time left to 115.
- Turn directly to 60 without spinning around.
It took only a few attempts once I found this formula, and finally the handleturned:
Riches
Immediately, I realized that trying to drill into the door would have beenfutile due to the depth:
Even worse, a brute force physical approach would have wrecked the decoration onthe interior door:
The suspense was high. The whole point of cracking a safe is to get what'sinside:
Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers List Printable Chart
Alas, it was empty except for a 20-year old thermostat and an old German stamp:
Herring Hall Marvin Safe Co Serial Numbers Today
The stamp is from approximately 1922, German Deutsches Reich 100000 Mark PostageStamp. It's available for a few dollars online, so while this exercise didn'tend in financial riches, I'm really glad to say I didn't leave the house withthe safe un-cracked.
