EVOLUTION OF LOCKS
Vast collection at museum
It sits inside a sprawling, aged industrial building under the Van Horne-Rosemont overpass and is probably the last place you would expect to find one of the most unusual museums in the city. The Aaron M. Fish Lock Museum and Educational Centre wouldn’t be out of place in some chichi downtown location, but its builder and curator, Aaron M. Fish, sought a location close to where he grew up and has spent much of his working life.
The museum — which will be unveiled Saturday — essentially occupies one large room in the building, but it is a veritable treasure trove. Fish has a collection of some 2,000 locks dating back to ancient times and moving into the present.
Most of the locks on display are truly works of art, created by craftsmen who spent years fashioning them: veritable mini-sculptures made of bronze from Turkey, Niger and Israel going back to 60 A.D.; replicas of Roman wooden locks from hundreds of years B.C.; a magnificently ornate lock created for a Parisian church in 1423 that wouldn’t look out of place in the Louvre.
In addition to the locks, the museum houses a number of key-themed items: antique keyduplicating machines, chess sets with a stunning array of different key-shaped players, avant-garde sculptures forged with keys, postage stamps with key themes and scores of first-edition books on the subject. In the latter group is Fish’s own autobiography, appropriately titled Under Lock & Key. Eye-popping, fascinating stuff. “Well, it’s unique anyway,” understates Fish, who just turned 85 on Thursday.
He points out that locks have been around since the dawn of civilization: “One of the ideas behind this museum was to show the evolution of locks from wood replicas to the bronze age to the iron age to the more modern stuff of last century to the electronics of today.
“People use locks every day, but few know anything about them.”
Locks have certainly played a pivotal role in Fish’s life. He was turned on to the craft by his father, who had been a blacksmith in Poland before immigrating to Montreal and becoming a locksmith.
“I’ve been in the industry since I was 8, helping out,” Fish says.
After finishing Baron Byng High School, Fish, 17 at the time, started peddling keys. “I had $20 and a bicycle, and my uncle lent me $100 of key blanks. So off I went selling keys, from one shop to another on the Main, which was convenient because we were living nearby on St-Urbain.”
While remaining active on the lock front, Fish was later to diversify into furniture handles.
“There were a few years of struggle, but then I got a phone call from Bell Canada in 1961, which was to change my life. I was asked to develop a lock for them. I asked where they got my name. From the RCMP, they told me.”
Turns out that Fish had done some training in the lock division of the RCMP’s crime-detection lab. “I did a lot of stuff we don’t need to talk about.” Gotcha.
So Fish developed one of the most innovative push-button locks ever created. “There were push-button locks made before, but not like this one where you could change combinations and equipped with electrical supervision,” he says, pointing to that first push-button lock now in the museum. “So we made the lock to Bell’s specifications and requirements.”
And Fish was to go on and live happily ever after?
“No! That just about put me into bankruptcy,” he says with a shrug. “I used up all my money developing this.”
So a few years later, Fish raised $35,000 from seven investors for a business specializing in pushbutton locks, key blanks and key-duplicating machines as well as furniture handles. “But again I was cleaned out.”
Then Fish took the bold step of going public in 1967, with help from Montreal lawyer Peter Blaikie. Sales were only $180,000 that year, but Fish’s perseverance paid off.
“When I sold our company (Unican Security Systems) in 2001, we were making four and a half million key blanks daily, two million push-button locks a day, and our annual revenues were $475 million.”
Unican was sold to the Swiss conglomerate Kaba for $720 million. “OK, I didn’t get all the money,” he quips. “We were a public company with a lot of investors.”
But all wasn’t well with Unican’s employees after the sale. Staff got whittled down from 600 to 200, and remaining employees prevailed upon Fish to buy it back, so their jobs could be saved. And so in 2007, Fish bought the company back — for less than $10 million — and jobs were saved.
“Business wasn’t as good, but that wasn’t the point. My people had their jobs, and that has been one of my proudest achievements.”
That business is still located in the space upstairs from the museum.
“I’ll be honest: lock museums aren’t popular,” Fish says. “There’s a beautiful one in Paris that got moved into a basement. There are others in Germany and Connecticut that don’t get attention. People don’t go. That wasn’t really my goal here.”
Fish’s other principal goal with the museum relates to the “educational centre” aspect.
“Walk into any school today and ask the children what they want to be when they grow up. You’ll get everything from doctors, lawyers, computer specialists, electricians and plumbers, but you won’t get anyone saying I want to be a locksmith or security consultant.
“But security is one of the most fantastic occupations of all. You’ll never run out of work. There’s always going to be crooks,” he cracks. “Think about it in those terms. So I want to
bring in students from vocational schools and get them to consider becoming locksmiths and security consultants.”
Inquiring minds want to know: Can a man who makes locks pick ’em, too?
“Oh yeah,” Fish shoots back. “They used to tell me I could make more money by picking locks than by making them. But I’d end up in jail, on the inside looking out.”
Of course, he could always break out. “Crooks are brilliant on planning how to get in. Where they fall apart is on the escape. So I figured out long ago it was better to make locks than break them.”