University of the Pacific President Christopher Callahan has done many things during his career, but safecracking is not on his résumé.
So, unable to pry open an old safe that had been spotted languishing in a dark corner of Burns Tower’s basement, he called in the big guys: a fire crew from Stockton’s Fire Station No. 4, who used the “jaws of life” to preserve the contents inside.
“I took a quick peek and literally the first thing, there was a box and we took out the box, and there was the minutes right there and it said 1851 to 1854. So I had a pretty good sense of what we were looking at,” Callahan recalled of the late-March discovery. “And then I immediately was like, OK, let’s call in the pro. Let’s get Mike (Wurtz, head of special collections at Pacific) and he can do his thing. I was afraid I was going to mess up something.”