The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Eureka: Like archaeological discoveries, coins and papers from a safe rescued from the Guadalupe River cover a table at Willow Glen High School. Student Rodney LaBarr gets a closer look.

WG High students liberate muddy treasure from river

Teachers help them solve the mystery of the rusty safe

By Rebecca Wallace

They were reluctant treasure-hunters at best--a couple of high-school guys with nothing to do on a slow Sunday afternoon.

But just as in Titanic, these two 18-year-old Willow Glen High School seniors liberated a mysterious safe from a mass of water and mud. And then their teachers helped them find the safe's rightful owner.

Instead of diving to the bottom of the Atlantic, Michael Hale and Brett Hitchcock, bored with listening to Doors CDs, went down to the Guadalupe River near Almaden Expressway on March 21 to push rocks in the water.

"It was moist. We could smell sewage in the air," Hale said dramatically from a couch in his classroom last week as the long-haired Hitchcock dug junk food out of a plastic bag.

On the other side of the room, looking as though he were part of an archaeological dig, another student peered through a magnifying glass at some of the debris from the safe that was spread out all over a table: jewelry, papers, tarnished coins. Outside, the rusty safe warmed in the sun.

"I saw a safe in the water and Brett said, 'Let's open it up,' " Hale said. The two tried to pry the safe open with a metal bar from a shopping cart; when that failed, they beat it with a big rock until the door came open. It looked as though someone had already tried to open the safe, Hale said, but it was still full--of waterlogged papers, rings, earrings, an Elks Club pin.

Looking a mite sheepish, the two admitted that they had hoped to find valuables to pawn. ("We're starving musicians," said Hale, who plays guitar to Hitchcock's bass in a band called Beyond Idiosyncratic.) But they ended up telling their teachers, Barry Shulman and Janette Supp, from the Willow Glen Plus program, which offers students a relaxing, less conventional learning environment.

"You can't hold something back like that," Hale said. "I don't know how, but they talked us into doing the right thing and trying to give it back to the owner."

"You'll get rich in another way," said Supp mock-consolingly.

It was a mystery that Supp and Shulman couldn't resist. Clad in brown leather boots which soon got coated with mud, Supp went down to the river with Shulman and their students to liberate the safe and its contents. They brought everything back to school and set about trying to piece together the puzzle and find the safe's owner.

"We knew the police wouldn't even try to deal with it," Supp said. "We figured, if we can't find the owner, we'll turn it over to them."

The puzzle pieces were tantalizing. A locket with photos of a baby and two people--the baby's parents? A 1978 gold Kruggerand coin from South Africa. A high school pin from 1927, a long stickpin with a blue jewel and a cufflink with the letter M. And a torn wedding announcement for Robert and Gwendolyn.

That piece of paper turned out to be the solution to the enigma. The wedding was listed as having taken place sometime in the 1980s at St. Stephen's in the Field Episcopal Church in San Jose. Supp called the church's pastor, who knew exactly who "Robert" was: Robert Metz of San Jose--who, as it turned out, had recently had a safe stolen from him.

"I was speechless," said Metz of his reaction when he found out his safe had come ashore. "It just came out of the blue. I was just dumbfounded and didn't know what to say, except 'thank you.' "

Sounding shyly pleased, Metz said, "A lot of the things [in the safe] were from my parents. They were quite old. There was nothing of any real value except to me, my own personal value."

When Metz came into the classroom to pick up the rescued treasure, he gave the class an $80 reward, which the students will use to hold a barbecue, Shulman said.

"The thing that made him the happiest was his mother's wedding ring, a tiny white-gold band," Shulman said. "But he didn't want the safe, so we'll keep it here as kind of a reminder."

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