Grand Opening : Buzz Over Box Gives Way to That Empty Feeling

OK, Geraldo, your turn to laugh.

Dozens of Valley residents showed up Monday afternoon to watch the opening of a steel box discovered in the ruins of the old Southern Pacific rail station in Canoga Park. Television cameramen and photographers elbowed for position and history buffs peered over their shoulders as mechanic Bill Brady--who found the box--supervised the opening.

What secrets would the box--presumed to be a time capsule secreted in the building’s foundation about 1912--contain? What mysteries, what treasures of the past would be revealed? Jewelry? Love letters describing a passionate affair between a rail worker and his mistress? Blueprints for an underground Valley railroad?

The atmosphere was similar to that surrounding talk-show host Geraldo Rivera’s much-ballyhooed opening of “Al Capone’s secret vault” in 1986.

It was believed that the crude-looking box, comparable in form to an oversize car battery, was put there at the time of construction of the station, which became a hardware store in the 1950s, was later abandoned and served as shelter for squatters and transients.

Members of the Canoga Owensmouth Historical Society were salivating, hoping the booty inside would justify their unsuccessful effort to have the building declared a historical site before it burned down in 1993.

After members of the historical society (Southern California’s largest group of its kind) salvaged windows and bricks from the site, Brady, past president of the society, found the capsule while rummaging through a pile of rubble in May.

He had invited his cronies and every media vulture in town to his European-car repair shop, Bonnet to Boot (meaning Hood to Trunk on this side of the Atlantic). With his elegant accent, the Scottish-born auto repairman kept the crowd in thrall as he scraped the layers off.

“Imagine what it must be like opening an Egyptian tomb,” Brady said with suspense in his voice.

He and his buddies even invited 18-year-old Michelle Knapp, the great-great-granddaughter of one of the station’s builders, to strike the first blow to the box.

One woman in the crowd posed a complex but typically Los Angeles question:

“If there is gold inside, who gets the money from it?”

Canoga Owensmouth Historical Society President Betty Allen was optimistic. “Even if there is nothing inside, we’ll have the box no matter what,” Allen said, smiling. “And we can just let everybody wonder” about where it came from.

Wielding a chisel, Brady cut through the steel and an inner layer of concrete. The mystery was solved.

But all the box contained was a few dozen circular metal thingamabobs that looked sort of like bottle caps, a hardware store reorder sheet, and a lot of moist sand and dirt.

“I’m a lot disappointed,” Brady said afterward. “I thought maybe we would find gold.”

No need to fret, Geraldo thought the same thing and came up equally empty-handed, on national television.