The dust and rodent droppings had us cursing our inability to do the cleaning job half-way but in the end, we were glad we did. It had clearly been a while since anyone had seen this part of our house. Our family moved into the house at 1119 Woodside Parkway 15 years earlier. At that time, our parents were preparing to welcome a fifth child, our sister Mary, into our family while our maternal grandmother was entering the final stages of a terminal cancer battle. Amid that frenzy of family activity and moving into the house, no one noticed the old lock-box in the corner.
In the summer before my junior year of high school, our mother asked me and our Bulgarian-pseudo-sibling, Kiril, to clean the garage. When a woman like our Boston-Irish mother asks you to clean the garage, you do it. Still, it had been a decade and a half since the garage had a thorough cleaning and the task was daunting. The garage's space for a car had long since been given over to our family's need for storage. There were bicycles (at one point ten), lawn mowers (upwards of three), and many other odds and ends stacked and stuffed into every inch of space. Cleaning it was a good project for two teenage boys.
The morning was spent disgorging the contents of the garage onto the driveway. Bikes, lawnmowers, toys, baby gear, camping equipment, tools and much more were laid out as neatly as such an exotic array can be laid out. Next came a good sweep and cleaning of the ceiling, walls, and floor. Running along one side of the garage were two wood shelves, one about 5 feet and the other 8 inches above the floor. The shelves aided in organizing the previously mentioned exotic array of stuff. With the famous momism “If you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all” ringing in our heads, we removed a board to access the area below the lower shelf so we could clean there too. Our thoroughness revealed a long-forgotten dining room table along with a lot of dust and mouse droppings. We removed everything and swept the area clean. To our surprise, in the far corner of the area under the lower shelf, our broom encountered a metal lock-box. It looked much older than the rest of the stuff.
We shook the lock-box and heard one heavy object banging around inside. We joked about it being gold coins as we pondered how to open it without a key. Employing old-world skill, Kiril banged it against a rock wall and the lid popped open. Inside the lock-box we found a very rusted old soap-flake can which contained a few hundred silver coins. As if that were not exciting enough, wrapped in a cloudy plastic bag on top of the silver coins were a few dozen gold coins! The coins were old U.S. currency from around 1900 and were in fair to good condition. At the time, the street value of the coins as collectables and precious metals was around $5,000 (in 1995). The mystery of what was in the box now solved, we had to find out how they got there in the first place.
Our parents quickly concluded that the coins belonged to the original and only previous owner of the house. Phillip Vernier, was 92 years old when he sold our parents the house in order to move closer to his own family. He had met our father at Mass and subsequently decided to accept a lower bid from our large family, enjoying the fact that we'd use every inch of the house. We theorized that he hid the coins in the basement for a rainy day and simply forgot about them. Another theory, that the garage’s black-hole-like gravity sucked the coins in was discredited without evidence that the garage possessed that quality before we moved in.
Regardless of how the coins came to be in the garage, they did not leave with Mr. Vernier when our parents bought the house. For 15 years the coins remained undiscovered in a plastic bag, in a soap can, in a locked box, under a shelf in the garage of 1119 Woodside. Mr. Vernier passed away at the age of 103, two years before Kiril and I discovered the coins. Our mother called Mr. Vernier's son to let him know of the find. He was as surprised as we were to hear of the coins and offered no additional information about their origins. He did recall how happy his father was to have sold the house to a growing family and graciously added that he felt the coins conveyed with the home.
In the aftermath of the discovery, the story of finding the coins was told and retold to relatives and neighbors. Other siblings looked in other dark corners of the house for more treasure, but to no avail. The found wealth and excitement of the day did not absolve us from finishing the task our mother had given us. We reorganized, restored, and restuffed the array of gear back into the garage as the summer sun was going down. The coins, and the story of finding them at 1119 Woodside, remain with the family to this day. We were happy to have cleaned the garage right, instead of not at all - which our mother never made an option anyway. ~
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