Smith: Safecracker wanted at Sonoma County Museum

If your proclivities include picking locks, the good folks running the Sonoma County Museum have a challenge for you.

There are two heavy-duty, concrete-and-steel vaults within the museum on Seventh Street, formerly Santa Rosa's 1910 Post Office. One vault has been open and the space put to good use for years.

But the second vault was uncovered with removal of a wall that was installed about 30 years ago. That vault's door is locked and if anybody knows the combination to unlock it, nobody knows who that somebody is.

Museum Director Diane Evans and her staff would like to incorporate that vault into historic displays, so they are seeking a locksmith or similarly adept person to open it.

Evans et al. don't think there's anything in the vault, though there's a chance it's the safe-keeping place of a time capsule placed long ago. To hear the bolts withdraw and the old door creak open will be thrilling no matter what.

There's no money for the person who cracks the vault, but he or she will get a peek inside and a nice picture in the next MUSE magazine. If your photo in the newsletter might be of interest to the FBI, you can forgo it.

If you seriously think you can open the vault, shoot an email to marketing@sonomacountymuseum.org.

At this point, Evans and the crew are interested only in a clean, finesse job to open the vault and don't wish to hear from experts in plastic explosives or cannonry.

BUZZY'S FIRED UP: Buzzy Martin, the Sebastopol music man and author who works to persuade at-risk youth that they deserve better than a life of prison, has a new music video up on YouTube.

It's not the sort that will get you to chair-dancing.

The killing of Michael Brown in Missouri inspired Buzzy to write the music to 'Hands Up Don't Shoot.' Kenneth Hahn of Petaluma pulled together video from Ferguson and Blair Hardman of Zone Recording in Cotati put the production together.

Buzzy's also watching for work to begin on a film based on his book, 'Don't Shoot! I'm the Guitar Man,' inspired by his experiences and observations as a music teacher at San Quentin.

HIGH SCHOOL MUSIC was huge, back in the day, to Michael Hyman.

He led the Pep Band for a time at Montgomery High, played in school musicals and jumped merrily from piano to saxophone to bassoon to whatever tickled his fancy.

'Everything was music for me,' said Hyman, who owns downtown Santa Rosa's nearly 60-year-old Pawn Advantage store.

So the news that the Analy High band's performance of the National Anthem at a Giants game was marred by the loss of a bin containing 14 woodwind instruments spurred him to action.

Late last week he presented to the Analy music department's Kelly Stewart and Dawn Johnson six clarinets from his store. Their gratitude washed over Hyman like the stirring strains of a Sousa march.

'It's very important to me that the music keeps going,' he said.

Hyman's gift of the clarinets was breathtaking to members of Analy's music scene already touched by the community's outpouring of donations of instruments and cash.

'He took them right off the wall (of the pawn shop) and gave them to me,' said Stewart, the band and orchestra director.

She said it also has astounded her and the students for another music lover to donate a professional-quality clarinet worth perhaps $6,000, and for a Sebastopol Rotary Club to contribute all the cash from a special hat-passing, and for people as far away as Lafayette to pitch in to help the band recover from the loss of the instruments at AT&T Park.

As unfortunate as the incident at the ballgame was, Stewart said, it and the stunning public response to it 'has brought the band even closer together.'

Added the band maestro, 'We've barely missed a beat, if you will.'

Contact Chris Smith at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.