Pittsburg shop with California flair

From East Texas Journal, March 1994

By Hudson Old, Journal publisher

Pittsburg, Texas — There was a picture, like a bad Polaroid, stuck on the cash register at Rick’s, a snapshot of a big grinning Indian about Willie Nelson’s age.

” I call him The Big Indian,” Rick said, pulling a mason jar canned full of hot sauce from the case behind the counter. “He makes this stuff. Leme give you a demonstration,” Rick said, pulling a sleeve of saltines out of an old metal cracker box, and while we ate crackers and hot sauce, he said this:

Lloyd Elder’s from over in Louisiana, migrated into Morris County some time back and he worked around the country tearing down houses until his pump sputtered and they split open his breastbone. A surgeon reached in, did this and that to his big pink heart, eased him back out into life somewhat shakier, but alive and on his feet. It was spring.

Lloyd changed careers, planted a bigger than usual garden, went into the hot sauce canning business.

Rick sold it for him.

Nobody got rich, but everybody got by.

That’s been some time back now and Lloyd’s gone back in the demolition and salvage business. The things he brings to Pittsburg are the things he can sell to Rick — old heart pine siding, oak strips of ancient hardwood flooring, brass hinges, glass doorknobs, mantles painted over and forgotten, needing stripping and refinishing to become treasures again.

Rick Wall, understand, was born with an extra bone in his head, that rare joint in select brains that makes the bodies they drive able to fix anything.

Long ago, Rick’s brain pointed him a the past and commanded: fix it.

He has a passion for ancient jukeboxes and old soft drink machines. He likes old mechanical cash registers, penny scales and the art deco days of lamps so gregarious fleetingly proud owners frequently sold them at garage sales some decades ago.

Furniture comes in broken.

It goes out refinished and plum, matching wood blended into perfection.

Hunks of rusty metal originally intended to ring, spin or spring have gears cleaned and oiled. Paint comes Paint goes on in the original shade, polished steel and glass gleam.

Rick’s Antique Safari is a feelgood episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

You see it the moment you enter — off camera a voice should say: “Welcome to the place where you’re invited to peer through that bottleneck of time you really remember to the expanse of time that’s a combination of emery, dreams and imagination.”

In the background, some 40s-era siren sings to the accompaniment of a big band.

Rick got his start in the antique business in the usual way, sufficing, studying yoga, cruising the Ventura highway.

At 18, he married 17-year-old Sandy, a girl he met on the beach.

“We both grew up on concrete, but being in California, that meant there were places to escape — the mountains, the beach, the forests and parks. We both wanted to leave Orange County, we just didn’t know it until we came to East Texas.

He worked some on a ranch, building fence.

“We loved it,” Rick said. “We lived in a little trailer with nobody around but us — every day, I rode a horse out on the fence lines.”

He was a Lone Star Steeler for a while, bought a nice house on a broad street in Daingerfield. They built a little restaurant in Hughes Springs, sold it and then Rick opened his first “antique” shop,” a combination fix-it shop and art brokerage starving — as starving artist brokerage firm.

He’d developed an import-export business, if you will, fixing up mechanical antiques he found around here, taking the stuff to California and selling it. He brought back paintings and sculptures and such, making his Hughes Springs shop the sort of esoteric collage of art, antiques and furniture that caught the eye of John Holman.

John Holman’s a Camp County lad who took rich at the furniture business in Dallas, then retired near his hometown.

He opened the Pittsburg Antiques Center, a co-op venture of antique dealers and recruited Rick Wall to come to Pittsburg.

Rick next had a shop in the D.H. Abernathy building, next to Mayben’s Menswear, across the street from the city’s museum office in the heart of the one of the richest historic business districts in the state.

“Opening shop in Pittsburg has turned into a mile marker,” Rick said. “It’s like having a bit part in a Mayberry story.

It’s a classic Main Street Texas Main Street story.

“The downtown has a unique business mix — there not every East Texas town has antique shops mixed in with the video stores. There’s still a real soda fountain where they make malts in Taylor Drug. For people like me – from the city – Pittsburg’s a good place to stop and breathe deep. And as for business — every spring, every time there’s any kind of community festival, a few more people discover this town, a few more customers filter in my store.”

He still trades in California -plush for foyers in Vegas casinos sport some of his restored jukeboxes, gadgets for gamblers with pricey tags.

Winter’s the off season for his business, a period that he spends more time at his work bench restoring things for his shop, fixing broken legs on dining room and bedroom suites for his Pittsburg customers.

On a winter afternoon, I dropped in for a visit to check out what old stuff might be new. Rick, ever the scavenger, was in the back, sawing, nailing and sweating over a stack of cast-away lumber. Some had become wainscoting for the staircase leading to a second floor.

The upstairs was taking a new look, the wainscoting progressing around the walls – sun streamed through the windows, poured like honey across the old wooden floor. Downstairs, a small foyer between the store and his hallway workshop had been carpeted. Walls that had been bare studs my last visit gleamed with new wood – a life-sized 60s-era billboard covered the back wall.

“What’s the plan?” I asked.

“Just more room.”

“Well, this right here,” I said, standing in the foyer, “looks like my office — I just need an old typewriter on a cracker barrel. That upstairs is a studio. A photo gallery. A Pittsburg photo gallery.”

The East Texas Journal’s Pittsburg office and photo gallery opens March 7 in the back of Rick’s Antique Safari.