Salz Lock & Safe Co. keeps its customers secure for almost 50 years

The door chimes don’t stop ringing for long at Salz Lock &Safe Co. in Kaimuki, as customers and technicians bustle in and out, in unison with buzzing phone lines.

Judging by the foot traffic streaming through the small storefront on Waialae Avenue, business is humming for a family company that has lost some key players, but still tries to strike the same notes as its founders.

“My parents built this business up almost 50 years ago from nothing,” Linda Salz-Goto, the current sole owner, said. “One truck, one little shop. … As a result of all their hard work and their philosophy about guaranteeing our work, and taking care of our customers, we have a lot of longtime commercial accounts that have stayed with us.”

Since 1970 the company has maintained the old-school values of founders Herman and Tomiko Salz, yet has kept pace with technology to meet the needs of a growing metropolitan community. Linda and her brother Joe took over after their parents died, but last year Joe suddenly died of heart trouble. He was in his early 50s. “It was a shock to lose another family member,” Salz-Goto said.

“Joe never said no to a customer. He learned that from my parents,” she said. Pointing to an urn of his cremated ashes on a shelf high above the counter, she added, “This was Joe’s life; that’s why we brought him back here.”

Shelves, counters and walls throughout the shop are crowded with family photos, mementos, maneki neko (Japanese good-luck cat) figurines and artifacts like large, old-fashioned keys and dated padlocks.

For sale are rows of novelty keys and accessories, in endless colors and designs, including Hello Kitty and National Football League logos. Glass counters are filled with merchandise, some of them funky things hardly seen anymore, such as secret safes disguised as soup cans and garden rocks. Top-of-the-line safes are also for sale.

Salz Lock specializes in opening safes for owners who’ve lost their combinations. The company can also install electronic doorknobs, and can make car-chip keys much cheaper than a dealer. With five trucks and eight employees, the company services vehicles, mailboxes and safes for commercial and residential accounts.

Salz-Goto’s parents started with a tiny shop on Monsarrat Avenue. Her father, a pilot during the Vietnam War, took a correspondence course to learn locksmithing as a hobby, always enjoying tinkering with things. He turned the hobby into a profession once he returned from overseas.

After about five years, the shop moved to Kaimuki, then 10 years after that to a bigger place in Salt Lake; 10 years after that, it was back to Kaimuki. The company downsized to its smaller current shop about 15 years ago, Salz-Goto said, because her father was dealing with cancer.

She didn’t realize how sick her father was until a couple of years before he died in 2006. “He didn’t tell us he had cancer. He never really talked about it and never complained,” Salz-Goto said.

He would bend over backward to help his customers, she added. “My father had this gruff exterior, but he was just the nicest guy and the kindest person.”

Her mother was closely involved in all aspects of the business until she died two years ago. She learned the trade alongside her husband and was an equally adept technician. She could re-key an entire hotel in no time — necessary back in the day when a maid lost a key, Salz-Goto said. “She was very, very skilled.”

Alfred Banas, a condominium manager who has used Salz Lock for 15 years to make specially cut keys for the condo’s common areas, praised the company and the late Joe Salz in particular. Even when a resident was locked out in the middle of the night, Salz would come or send someone, Banas said. “It’s a business, but it’s like your family. … They’re awesome, good people.”

Bev Guzman, district manager for Jeans Warehouse in Hawaii, said Salz Lock has done work for her company, including seven neighbor-island stores, for more than 30 years. “They’ve always been very reliable, very customer-oriented, not only the family but the whole staff. Whether it’s during store hours or late at night, they come to bail us out.”

Another member of the family working for the company is cousin Mark Yealey, a locksmith technician for 15 years and a member of the Safe and Vault Technicians Association. He said it’s been very difficult to carry on without Joe, as good locksmiths are hard to replace, but moreover because “Joe was my best man at my wedding. We were not just cousins, I considered Joe my brother.”

In recent years, Joe acquired higher levels of skill in safe opening that required government certification, which Yealey intends to learn, too. Salz employees take pride in what they do, Yealey said. “We do things the proper way. … We like to say, we want you to come back, but we don’t want you to come back mad.”

Joe Salz’s wife, Christina (“Tina”), who started working in the office in December, wants to carry on Joe’s way of helping customers out of difficult situations and taking the time to explain things. The company can get several emergency calls a day, she said, “and we do try to scramble. We try to accommodate them because we know they’re so scared, and they need somebody to help them right now.”

Salz-Goto is determined to keep the company going. “I’m doing it for my parents and my brother, and our families. And I love it, coming to work, and I’ve got a good group of people.” The employees have become like a second family, she said. Many are the children of locksmiths who had their own shops. “Their parents knew my parents,” Salz-Goto said. “They’re really dedicated and loyal. They go the extra mile, and I am really appreciative.”