World War I Memento Is Handled With Care--by the Bomb Squad

Los Angeles County Fire Department Capt. John Montoya said he was sure Friday that he was about to become the object of another firehouse gag when one of his men interrupted his morning shower at Station 106 in Rolling Hills Estates to announce: “There’s a lady in your office and she’s got a hand grenade for you.”

He had heard jokes like this before, Montoya said later Friday. “The guys kid around,” Montoya said. “I said to him, ‘Yeah, sure. Ha ha ha.’ ”

But the grenade was no joke.

When Montoya dressed and got to his office, he found Betty Davidson waiting for him. The stylish, 67-year-old woman held a tangerine-sized hand grenade. “Don’t worry,” she said with a smile, “I’m not a terrorist.”

Davidson had been cleaning out her mother’s garage in Rancho Palos Verdes on Friday, preparing to move her mother into her own home in Rolling Hills. When Davidson pried open a trunk containing her late father’s World War I memorabilia, she found Army Air Corps uniforms, letters and news clippings. Then her grandson, John Gentry, 21, discovered the grenade.

“The pin was still in it and we didn’t want to take any chances,” Davidson said later at the fire station. “I drove down here holding it in one hand, because I was worried if it rolled around it would go off.”

Montoya placed the grenade in an empty yard adjoining the fire station until Sheriff’s Department bomb squad member Mel Mulleary arrived. Mulleary confirmed that the device was, indeed, “a very old-vintage hand grenade.”

The grenade appeared to be live, Mulleary said, “with all the fusing mechanism together.”

It took him about three minutes to defuse the grenade, which will be detonated in the next few days at the sheriff’s explosives range in Valencia.

Mulleary said authorities will not know whether the grenade carried a live charge until the device is exploded.

As a knot of press photographers took her picture, Davidson was clearly tickled, saying, “This almost makes sorting through the garage kind of fun.”