Mike St. John has an appreciation for...

Mike St. John has an appreciation for old things--old cameras, old cars, old signs. But this week, in the parking lot of TRW, where he works, his appreciation backfired--so to speak.

Monday, in the course of showing a friend a box full of memorabilia he’d found at his mother-in-law’s house, the Long Beach resident came across a little device that looked for all the world like a . . . LIVE HAND GRENADE!

St. John, who is admittedly “afraid of anything that goes boom,” immediately contacted the TRW security guards, who contacted the police, who contacted the Fire Department, which gingerly threw the thing in the lap of the Sheriff’s Bomb Squad.

They, in turn, cordoned off part of the parking lot and told St. John it was a vintage World War II Russian grenade.

Before he could tell them how much he liked old things, they had taken it away for safety’s sake.

“It’s dangerous. It could be a live device,” explained Sheriff’s Sgt. Al Humphries of the bomb squad. “It’s not a whatnot to put on your shelf.”

But when St. John got home, his wife’s parents “were hysterically laughing at me.”

The grenade, they told him “had been in the family since 1919.” His life had never been threatened.

He called the sheriff’s office and asked for it back, but they refused, he said. The grenade, as it turned out, had already been carted off, and was to be blown up.

“Finders keepers, losers weepers,” St. John sighed. “It looked real to me. But they tell me it even said ‘dummy’ on the back. The only trouble was, it was written in Russian.”