October 1958, Mercer County, Kentucky. The courthouse square in Herodsburg on a Saturday morning. A fire warped safe from the Bumont Hotel goes up for auction at 9:00. Dale Coburn calls it a boat anchor and the crowd laughs. Earl Vance pays $90 for it. He has run the only locksmith shop in the county for 33 years. His rent is 3 months behind.
His landlord wants the space by November. In the back of the crowd, a man in a tan Stson watches Earl load the safe onto his truck. Nobody recognizes him yet. Here is the story. Vance Locksmith and Key sits on the east side of Harland Street, two doors north of the hardware store.
The shop is 16 ft wide and 22 feet deep. A glass case along the front wall holds the display work. Pad locks, deadbolts, a dozen mortise locks in varying states of disassembly. Each one tagged in Earl’s handwriting with the make, the year, and what was wrong with it. Behind the counter, the workbench runs the full width of the back wall.
Drill bits sorted by size in a strip of drilled oak. Three sets of picks in leather rolls. A magnifying glass on a swing arm. A small vise bolted to the left corner of the bench that Earl’s teacher Otto Karn bolted there in 1924 and that has not moved since. The sign above the door reads Vance locksmith and key established 1925.
Earl painted it the year Otto died because the old sign said Karna and Vance and Earl did not think it was right to keep a dead man’s name on a door without his permission. Earl Vance was born in Herodsburg in 1913. His father, Raymond, worked the Louisville and Nashville Railroad as a section hand for 27 years until the depression let him go.
Raymond had no trade but the railroad and no skill but the willingness to work in weather that turned other men back. He kept the family fed through the worst years by sheer accumulation of hours. Earl was 12 years old in 1925 when Raymond brought him to Otto Karn’s shop. Otto was 61, Germanorn, had been a locksmith in Herodsburg since 1898.
He said the boy could start Thursday at 35 cents a day to sweep and watch. Earl would not touch a lock for 3 months. He would only watch. In December of 1925, Earl asked Otto why the second pin in a Yale lock always stuck before the third. Otto looked up. He said that was the right question.
He spent an hour explaining not the specific pin but the logic of the mechanism. A lock is not a wall. Otto said a lock is a conversation. The key is one side of that conversation. The locksmith is the other. Earl picked his first lock in the spring of 1926. By 1930, he could disassemble and reassemble a standard pin tumbler in the dark.
Through the depression, when the hardware store and shoe repair around the square were closing or cutting hours, Karna and Vance stayed open 6 days a week because locks did not stop needing service because the economy had gone bad. The courthouse called Otto every time administration changed. The bank called him for vault maintenance.
The jail called him. These were not customers who went away in bad years. In 1943, Earl went to the draft board. He was 30 years old. The examining doctor found a defect in his left eye, present since childhood, that Earl had accommodated so naturally he had ceased to think of it.
The board classified him for F. He told Otto. Otto said there was work here. The county had defense manufacturing contracts in Lexington that needed lock systems installed. Earl took the contracts and drove to Lexington twice a week for 14 months. Otto Karna died in February of 1947. He was 83. He left the business, the tools, and the lease to Earl with one condition, that the shop remain a locksmith shop as long as Earl operated it. Earl changed the sign.
He kept the old one. Karna and Vance leaned behind the drill press. From 1947 to 1958, Earl ran the shop alone. His gross in 1950 was $4,100. In 1954, it was $4,200. The numbers moved slowly, but they did not shrink. And he had no debt, but the monthly rent, which was $60 until 1957. In 1955, a Thurman’s Hardware opened three blocks away with a key cutting machine and a sign, “Keys made while you wait, 15 cents.
” Earl had been charging 20 cents and doing the work by hand. By 1956, his key revenue had dropped from $40 a month to 12. In 1957, the building changed hands. A property company out of Lexington raised the rent from $60 to $80 effective June 1st. Earl paid 80 in June and July. In August, the Ford’s transmission failed and cost $95, and he did not pay the rent.
He sent 60 in September with a letter. October came and the shop brought in $62 against 70 in expenses, and he sent 40 with another letter. By the first week of October 1958, he owed $240. A notice dated October 3rd said, “Pay in full by November 1st or vacate.” Earl read it on a Thursday. He folded it into the drawer under the register.
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He had $22 in the cash drawer. The Bumont Hotel had stood on the corner of Maine and Washington since 1922. The only three-story building in Herodsburg. On the morning of November 14th, 1938, a fire started in the kitchen at 4 in the morning and took the ground floor before the fire department arrived.
Robert Bowmont was found in the lobby at the front desk. He was 67 years old. The inspector’s report said he had been trying to recover items from behind the counter. The hotel was demolished in 1941. The safe went to a county storage annex and stayed there for 17 years because it weighed 260 lb and nobody wanted to pay for hauling.
The Saturday auction drew 60 or 70 people to the courthouse square. Farm equipment went first, then furniture, then tools. Item 14 came up at 10 9. Two county workers wheeled the safe out on a dolly. Its outer surface was scored and blistered from the 1938 fire. The combination dial was intact.
The key lock on the outer door was fused solid. Dale Coburn was standing near the front. He was 38, heavy set, in a gray suit too warm for an October morning, driven up from Lexington in a white Lincoln Continental parked on Main Street that several people had looked at on the way in. He walked around the safe once.
He looked at the warped door and the fused lock. He said to nobody in particular that it was a nice boat anchor if anybody needed one. The people near him laughed. The auctioneer opened at $200. Nobody bid. He dropped to 150. Nobody. He dropped to 100. One man at the back raised his hand and put it down when Coburn looked at him.
The auctioneer dropped to 90. Earl Vance had come for three locksmith tool sets listed in the auction contents. He had already looked at them and decided they were not worth buying. He was leaving when the safe came out. He did not look at the warped door or the blistered surface. He looked at the key lock, a Corbin double-acting lever tumbler manufactured before 1925.
He had worked on exactly four of them in 33 years, and he knew what they sounded like when the levers found their gates. Earl raised his hand at $90. The auctioneer asked for another bid. Coburn looked at the safe and then at Earl and then at the safe again and shook his head. Sold at $90.
The crowd laughed again, a few of them. Earl and a county worker loaded the safe into the truck bed using the dolly. It took 20 minutes. Earl tied it down with two lengths of rope and drove back to the shop. In the back of the crowd, a tall man in a tan Stetson and a canvas work jacket had watched Earl raise his hand.
He watched Coburn shake his head. He watched the two men load the safe. He watched Earl tie it down and drive away. He did not move until the truck turned the corner. Then he walked back toward the center of Herodsburg with his hands in his jacket pockets. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments.
I want to see how far this story reaches. Rio Bravo was 46 days from the end of principal photography. Howard Hawks was shooting at Old Tucson in Arizona. The man in the tan Stson had driven east for a publicity stop in Louisville and was heading back south. He had taken a different road to avoid construction and had stopped in Harodsburg the night before.
He saw the auction notice on the hardware store board and walked through it in the morning. That afternoon he had his hair cut in a barber shop off the square. A farmer in the next chair named Bowman, who had been at the auction, told the barber about the safe and about Earl buying it and what Coburn had said. Bowman thought it was funny.
He said the old locksmith always bought things others threw away. But this time he had spent $90 on a problem because the safe hadn’t been opened in 20 years and the door was warped shut and the combination was unknown. The barber said that was too bad. Bowman said the man was behind on his rent too and the property company was going to put him out.
So buying a 260-lb boat anchor was not going to help. The man in the tan Stson did not ask any questions. He paid for the haircut and left. He sat in his truck for a few minutes with the engine off. Then he drove to the drugstore before it closed and bought an envelope. Harland Street was dark by 9:00. A single lamp burned inside Vance Locksmith and Key.
Earl was on a stool in front of the safe with a flashlight and a pick, working the key lock on the outer door. He had his back to the window. He could have driven south that afternoon and been back in Arizona by morning. He could have listened to Bowman’s story and finished his coffee and let it go. He could have told himself it was none of his business, a man he did not know, a town he was passing through, a rusted safe that was probably empty.
Instead, he had counted out $240 from the money in his jacket pocket and written six words on a page from his glove box notebook and sealed them in the envelope. He walked down Harland Street. He stopped in front of the shop. The lamp was on. Earl’s hands were moving over the lock mechanism with the deliberateness of someone who knows what they are doing.
Wayne bent and pushed the envelope through the mail slot. He stood up. He walked back to his truck and drove south. Earl found the envelope on the floor at 7:30 the next morning. His name was on the front. He opened it. He counted $240 on the counter. He unfolded the paper. Six words. Open it. And two initials. JW.
He did not know a JW in Herodsburg. He did not know a JW in Mercer County. He put the envelope in the drawer and drove to the property company’s office and pushed the cash through the mail slot with a note. Payment in full. October Aars’s events. Earl worked on the safe for 3 days. The key lock yielded on the afternoon of the first day after 4 hours of conversation.
The combination mechanism was intact but had no record anywhere. Earl wrote to Mosler’s records department in Ohio. He called the county savings bank. On the third evening at 20 11, he was on his stool with all his tools laid out when the fourth wheel found its position and the mechanism released and the inner door swung open.
He sat back and looked into the safe without reaching in. A cloth bag, dark canvas tied with a leather cord, a bundle of paper certificates, a manila folder, a plain white envelope with two words on the front, for whoever. He took out the cloth bag first, 22 coins, gold, St. Godens’s double eagles, each slightly smaller than a half dollar. He lined them on the workbench.
He opened the certificates. United States war bonds series E issued 1942 to 1944 13 of them. He opened the folder. A fire insurance policy Midwestern Indemnity Company of Cincinnati 1935 covering the Bowont Hotel for $40,000. The named beneficiary was not Robert Bowmont.
It was the town of Herodsburg, Mercer County, Kentucky for the purpose of public improvements as determined by the town council. The claim period was 25 years from the date of loss. The fire was November 14th, 1938. Earl did the arithmetic. He had until November 14th, 1963. It was October 1958. He opened the white envelope last. The letter was two paragraphs in a careful slanted hand on Bowmont Hotel letter head dated November 1st, 1938, 2 weeks before the fire.
The first paragraph said Bowmont had known for 6 months the hotel would not recover. He had sold his personal assets and put everything he could into the safe because the insurance paid to the town and he wanted enough behind it to make the claim worth pursuing. The second paragraph said, “A man’s worth is not the noise he makes leaving.
It is what he troubled to leave behind where the right hands would find it.” Earl read the letter twice. He turned off the lamp. He sat in the dark shop for a while. Then he turned the lamp back on and read it a third time. He was in the county attorney’s office at 8 the next morning when Reirdan arrived.
He set the cloth bag and the folder and the letter on the desk and stood back. Rearen looked at everything for a long time without speaking. He picked up the insurance policy. He looked at the beneficiary line. He looked at the claim period. He set it down. He said, “Earl, I need to make some phone calls.” The Midwestern Indemnity Company was still in business.
The policy was valid. The claim process took 4 months. The 22 coins appraised at $62 each. The war bonds had matured at $940. The insurance settled for $38,000. The town received $40,34. The Herodsburg Town Council voted in March of 1959 to put the funds toward a medical clinic. The county’s last general practitioner had retired in 1956 with no replacement.
The Bumont Community Clinic opened at the corner of Maine and Depot in the spring of 1960 with two examination rooms and a physician from Lexington who drove down 3 days a week. Dale Coburn’s business closed in 1960. The White Lincoln was repossessed that spring. He was not in Herodsburg when any of this became known.
Earl ran the shop on Harland Street until 1971 when the arthritis in his right hand made the fine work impossible. 46 years. He locked the door for the last time on a Friday afternoon in October, the same month, he noted in his account book as the auction. He took Otto’s vice off the bench with a wrench and carried it home under his arm.
He never found out who JW was. He asked around in the weeks after finding the envelope, and nobody could place the initials. They stayed in the drawer until he cleared the shop in 1971 and went into a canvas tote on his workbench shelf at home. Earl Vance died in February of 1978. He was 65.
His cousin Margaret found the tote, read the six-word note, looked at the two initials, and did not know what to make of them. She donated the contents to the Mercer County Historical Society in 1979, along with Otto Karn’s original sign, Karna and Vance, which had leaned against the back wall for 32 years. John Wayne died in June of 1979.
He was 72. He did not mention Hardsburg, Kentucky in any interview or letter or conversation that was ever recorded. The Mosler safe from the Bowmont Hotel is on display at the Mercer County Museum on Chill Street in Herodsburg. It has been there since 1962. It stands in a glass case in the main gallery, its outer door open at a right angle, the way Earl left it the night he opened it.
The inner surface of the outer door is clean, untouched by the 1938 fire. And across the top, someone scratched four words into the paint at some point after the safe arrived at the museum. The words are in uneven capital letters. They read, “Find the right hands.” The placard beside the case reads, “Mosler floor safe, manufactured 1919.
Opened by Earl P. Vance Locksmith October 1958. Contents led to the founding of the Bowmont Community Clinic 1960. Donated in memory of Earl P. Vance 1913 to 1978 and Otto Kern 1863 to 1947. The museum’s east window faces Chile Street. In the morning, the light comes in low and reaches the safe’s case at a quarter 9.
For about 20 minutes, it moves across the open door and lights the inner surface and the four words. Then it moves on. If this story reached you, do me a favor. Pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. They don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
