Behind the blinking neon keys in the windows at 249 E. Seventh St., George Gall tends to business cracking safes and making keys.
Although the natty neon signs have drawn key customers to the Kat-Keys Safe & Lock Co. in Lowertown for well over 50 years, Gall says that safes account for most of the firm’s annual revenues of about $500,000.
He sells and installs new or used safes for business or home use, repairs safes and even rents them at the State Fair.
When a jewelry or money safe won’t open because of worn parts or burglary damage, Gall can crack it. He opens two or three safes a day, at $100 and up per safe. In 26 years he has never encountered a safe he couldn’t open.
“People treat a safe more like a tool,” he says. “They spin the dial so fast, they can break off the main drive. I treat it real gently.”
To open a safe, he dials the combination a few times to test it. Then he usually drills a hole through the front and peeks into the locking mechanism to see what to do to make the door open.
His longest cracking job took 16 hours. The dial and parts on a steel safe with 4-inch plating were smashed in a burglary. When the main lock was damaged, a relocking mechanism was tripped and had to be released before the door would open.
To reach and release the lock and relocker, he drilled a big hole in just the right place at the rear of the safe.
“It takes years and years of notes just to find the location of the relocker,” he says. Then he mounted a steel brace on the front door to help force it open.
Gall, 40, grew up on the West Side and worked part-time at Kat-Keys until he graduated from Humboldt High School in 1968. The locksmith business appealed to him because he was mechanically inclined and enjoyed working for his uncle, Omer Katke, who founded the business in 1924.
Katke was a jack-of-all-trades who made keys, ran a private detective agency and sold TVs and radios. He put the classy neon keys up in the Depression, Gall says, and they have generated comments ever since.
After Katke died 20 years ago, George and his father, Richard Gall, operated the business. They dropped TVs and radios so they could add safes. The younger Gall bought Kat-Keys in 1978 when his dad retired.
Gall says the locksmith business is extremely competitive, with one firm trying to outbid another for work.
“It’s awful hard keeping a small business like this going because everything is a bid job with plenty of competition.”
The firm has seven employees who tend the store and operate four repair vans in the Twin Cities and western Wisconsin. George’s sister, Peggy Buhl, keeps the books and a brother, Richard O. Gall, works as a service technician.
Along with duplicating keys, the firm makes custom keys for churches, synagogues and the county jail. It repairs locks, installs deadbolt locks and vault doors and buys and sells used safes. It has thousands of keys in inventory in boxes of 50. Its oldest key maker is a Yale hand-cranked machine built near the turn of the century.
Gall keeps a demanding schedule, working 12 hours a day, six days a week in the shop or on call. Since the firm offers 24-hour emergency service, seven days a week, he sometimes works without a day off. Business is best in December and slow in the summer.
“You’ve got full control over how much money you want to make,” he says. “It all depends how much hustling you want to do.”
Selling and installing safes accounts for a growing share of the business, Gall says.
More and more people are buying safes because safe deposit boxes are going up in price and more break-ins are taking place.”
He repairs safes traded in for new models, and has a collection of old safes dating to 1864. Attorneys like to buy the antiques as conversation pieces for their offices.
Residential safes usually are installed in basement concrete floors, sometimes with the help of a jackhammer. For less than $500, a homeowner gets the steel safe installed with a plate covering it. Carpeting usually covers the plate.
Safes are rated according to the fire and burglary protection they offer. A concrete-lined, steel-plated safe can offer 350-degree fire protection for one, two or four hours. A thick steel safe is rated for the number of hours it should deter a burglar from opening it.
A high-rated safe for jewelry storage, such as the TLX 60, sells for $10,000 new and about $5,000 used. Moser is an American-made safe with a blue chip reputation, Gall says, and ISM is a top Israeli-made safe.
With spotty sales this year, Gall hopes to increase business by opening a branch shop Oct. 1 in West St. Paul at 1254 S. Robert St. He also is looking at the Eagan-Burnsville area for possible expansion in 1991.
Since gasoline prices rose after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Gall says it costs a lot more to operate the repair vans. If gas prices remain high for six months or longer, he may raise the service call fee for the first time in six years.
But with business flat and competition strong, he is reluctant to boost the fee because he suspects that a recession has started. “At every business I deal with, it seems accounts payable are slow,” he says.
