Paul B. Campbell
1982

Keys are supposed to keep burglars, stray cats, nosy neighbors, and such out of houses, cars, and other private places. When lost or misplaced, keys are more effective in keeping the rightful occupants out. Because this is true, we try all kinds of ways to give us access to the keys without at the same time making their location obvious to the would-be burglar. Often it only makes them decidedly less than obvious to us.

Let me illustrate. About two years ago we were planning a trip to Seattle. Not wishing to disturb the tranquility of the airport metal detectors, we decided to find a safe location in which to hide the truck keys in the house. That way we would not need to carry them with us. I remembered a detective story about a master detective who was able to find a purloined letter (Edgar Allen Poe, I believe) that had defied a sophisticated municipal police department. The difficulty arose from the relatively open concealment in a letter rack. Why, I reasoned, can’t I find an equally open, but disguised place for the keys? I picked such a place but I should have known better. About the same time I began to worry about my bolt cutters and my carbide hacksaw blade. Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to lock everything up and then provide the burglar, right in the basement, with a set of ready made tools to cut the locks? So I found another obvious but disguised place to hide those tools.

We went to Seattle and had a wonderful time. When we got back home, the question of the location of the keys came up. Where were they hidden? We searched our pockets, our luggage, our glove boxes, our toolboxes—everywhere that we could imagine, but no luck—no keys. About a month later there was an occasion to use the bolt cutters to remove a stubborn bolt. I looked through the entire shop without success—no bolt cutters. Time went on and from time to time I would search once more in all of the obvious places for the keys, the bolt cutters, and the hacksaw blade. No joy.

Winter came and it was finally time to start the fires in the stove and fireplace. Wood shavings from the jointer make a good fire starter. I keep a box under it to catch them, partly for the fires and partly to reduce sweeping. After several fires had been built, the contents of the box got rather low. One day as I was digging out a handfull, I felt something hard. A little extra digging produced a pair of bolt cutters and a hacksaw blade! But no keys.

A year passed. Occasionally I would search once more for the keys, without success. Then one day I was doing some gluing and needed water to wipe off the excess. Hanging on the central beam running the length of the basement was an old frying pan. It was too worn to serve in the kitchen any more, but was still useful when one needed a shallow pan for some liquid. I took it off the nail on which it was hanging, and what do you suppose was on the nail underneath it? The truck keys, of course.

But there is more. This time the keys weren’t lost, they were just not well hidden. Our house in Danboro had the laundry in a small room just off the garage. In fact it was really part of the garage that had been partitioned off to make a laundry room. Therefore there was a steel door between it and the rest of the house. Fire code, you know. One day Lucile and I were doing something in the laundry room when we discovered that the steel door had closed and we were locked out. We examined the nearest basement window and discovered that it could be removed in about five minutes! That solved the problem of getting into the house but left us concerned with our security. We carefully reinforced the windows, and set about to see that we did not lock ourselves out again. Where can we hide a key that only we are likely to look for in that particular place?

In the laundry room was a shelf that was loaded with bottles of bleach, softener, soap, cleaning compounds, and all the sundries of a laundry. Shouldn’t one of those containers be a good place? It would have to be dry, but have something in it to keep the key from rattling if shaken. One can seemed to meet the requirements. It was an oversized Prince Albert type can that contained a polishing cloth. Back in the days when oil companies gave premiums to entice folks to buy their products, we had been given this can and its contents. It had not been used much, and so was still intact. ( It did not smell like cedar, or lemon, or anything nice like that.) But it had the specifications of a key hideout.

Things went well until winter. One day we were going to be away until after dark on a day when our new grandson was going to bring his mommy and daddy over to see us. We didn’t want him to be cold if they happened to arrive before we did so we decided to leave the garage door open for them. That way they could at least be sheltered from the wind while they waited in the car. We were delayed longer than expected, and were quite concerned that they might have had a fairly long wait. But when we arrived within sight of the house, we were surprised to see lights on inside! Colin was playing comfortably in front of the fireplace, and his mommy and daddy were enjoying themselves in the warmth of the living room. “How did you get in?” I asked. “Well,” my son said, “I was pretty sure that you had a key somewhere in the garage, so I asked myself, ‘Where would Dad hide a key?’ When I saw the polisher can on the shelf I thought ‘That’s it’, and sure enough, it was.”

So much for the grand strategy of hiding keys. They can only effectively hide themselves. Carry a spare.