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The 2 Teenage Orphans Who Broke Into The Impenetrable San Francisco Mint For Fun
In 1938, a pair of 15-year-old boys broke into a U.S. Treasury building that had previously been thought to be unbeatable
Within society, people like identifying things as being the best, and so advanced and complex that they are unbeatable in calcuable ways. However, most of these assertions fail to hold up over any length of time. A famous example includes the “Unsinkable” Titanic. Another less known instance was in 1938 when two teenage boys from an orphanage broke into a U.S. Treasury Mint in San Francisco after the facility had been declared to be impenetrable and “invasion proof.”
The December 20, 1938 issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the exploits of Paul Francis and William Gallagher, two 15-year-old boys who lived together at an orphanage in San Rafael, California. They got into a heap of trouble after being found inside of the United States Treasury Mint in San Francisco by guards. The $1 million plus facility, which was formally opened in May of 1937, had been publicly heralded for being “invasion-proof, bomb proof, earthquake-proof, and fire-proof;” a shining example of architecture and security that couldn’t be bested by humankind; until it was, and by two very unlikely…
