According to some Holy Name of Jesus church bulletins from the fall: “No one alive today has any notion of what, if anything, might be inside.”
The announcement was referencing the insides of a small safe tucked within the church’s larger parish safe, which has been in continuous use since at least 1891, five years after the church was built and during the timeframe of its first pastor, Fr. Thomas Tierney. According to several at the church, no one had opened the inner safe in living memory, no one knew what was inside and there’s no one alive to ask who might know.
The bigger safe is used for the storage of documents and assorted deeds, whereas inner safes like the one inside were used in the 19th century for the protection of valuables, said the bulletin.
Because of the intrigue and because the church would like to use the interior safe again, Holy Name decided to get the safe opened, and while at it, have a little fun.
They asked parishioners to make a guess on what would be found inside the interior safe and the person whose prediction was the closest was to win a $100 gift card from the Holy Name School scrip office.
Ron Niswonger, a certified registered locksmith with Felts Lock and Alarm of Evansville, first made a visit in early November and spent all day drilling holes and then finagling the inner mechanisms of the inner safe’s lock. He couldn’t get it open then.
Niswonger returned in early December, again spending the better part of the day on the 100-plus-year-old safe.
Finally, on a third trip on Dec. 18, Niswonger opened the safe, which was made by the MacNeale and Urban Safe Co. out of Cincinnati all those years ago.
The results were….drum roll, please! Two paper clips and a quarter.
Holy Name pastor, Fr. Richard Meredith, who’s been at the church for more than a year, said that no one at the church had any idea what would be inside the safe and he expected it to be nothing. “But you never can tell,” he said.
Meredith said the quarter was dated 1966, which indicates that the last time it had been opened could have been as early as that year.
There were no parishioner guesses for paper clips and a quarter, so Meredith has asked a church employee to find the five closest guesses to that so that a drawing can be held.
“There will be a winner,” the pastor said.
The small inner safe is fixed now and it will be used, he said.
