Q: There you go. Note to self.
Montgomery: Yeah.
Q: How did Pawn Stars change your life?
Montgomery: Dramatically. It’s amazing how much smarter you are after you have a show that rates well, when in actuality you haven’t changed at all. [Gets serious.] But yeah, I think for us we made a show that resonated, and we did have some, I think, ESP with it. There was this way of drawing something interesting and pithy and knowledgeable out of characters and also making it fun. We kind of talk about these types of shows being laugh and learn. What female shows have continued to work well? Crime and drama, you know? Whenever there is drama in a ton of these female franchises, that tends to work. Then with men, it’s usually action, information, or comedy. Action had already been done, and done quite well, and was in our forte. Most of the people in my company came from making more female-skewing shows like the Bachelor and Wife Swap and What Not to Wear, and all this stuff.
So when we found this little formula of laugh and learn, that became something that was bigger than just one show. We went from a company having two or three shows [at] a time to a company now having thirty-five series going and being the largest independent production company in the country. And so we went from, when we started Pawn Stars, having twenty to thirty people to having eight to nine hundred people now. So it was definitely the foundation of building out a company. Like any other sort of sector of the entertainment world, you don’t want to be a one-hit wonder. So for us, the focus becomes selling and making other styles of shows.
Q: But that have that sort of mission of laugh and learn?
Montgomery: Yes.
Q: Do you think this trash-to-treasure genre is saturated, or do you think there is still room?
Montgomery: I think it went through a point where it was, and I think it’s coming back. I think that it’s been thinned out a little bit. I think it’ll just be the magic formula usually is finding the right characters with the right process and making sure that as the producer you can execute and make it as fun for the viewer as it would be for you being there at the shop. If you can do that, then I think there is plenty of room for more. The great thing is people are nostalgic. People always want to look back. But then there is also all this cool new stuff being created. This analog-versus-digital world is really interesting and topical because as a parent—you’re a parent, I’m a parent—we’re seeing [a change]. We played with toys. We played outside. We played with stuff. And now it’s like a real fight to not just have the kids online the whole time. You know? Kids today are more apt to read about stuff than actually go and feel and see it and touch it with their own hands. I think cool stuff is a way to always sort of keep history alive.
IV
WHERE SHOULD IT GO?
10
ANNIE HAUL
PORTLAND, OREGON
* * *
Annie Hall: It’s so clean out here . . . [in California]
Alvy Singer: That’s because they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.
—ANNIE HALL (1977)
NOT IN LOS ANGELES, but 834 miles north in Portland, Oregon, the proprietor of the junk removal company Annie Haul bares no resemblance to Diane Keaton or the WASPy, flighty movie character from which her business takes its name. Feisty, strong, with steel-blue eyes, owner Kate O’Halloran could be played by a namesake and doppelganger, actress Kate Mulgrew circa Star Trek: Voyager.
“You know it’s going to be a good day when you get to wear a wig and ride a bike!” That is exactly what Kate is doing during an early morning garage clean out. The homeowner was a working mom who dabbled in local theater and as a result had accumulated a lot of old costumes, plus normal kid stuff. This included the 1973 Schwinn that Kate took for a little spin down the block while wearing the giant fake Afro. The woman confessed to having cleared out the garage in her mind many times and decided after ten years it was time to really do it. She read about Annie Haul online. “I thought the name was hilarious, and then saw it was woman-owned and local. That appealed to me.”
The things on the outer perimeter were donateable, but the deeper the dive, the more useless the items became. There were a lot of old cat scratching posts that of course led to Kate singing a chorus of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.” Kate and her crew worked diligently, pulling things out and making piles; donate, recycle, and no use to anyone. Kate looks at everything before it goes on the truck. As the back of the garage came into view the woman was making plans, “I was an artist in my former life. I can get to my paint now, I’m excited.” The bad news was that in the formerly obstructed wall Kate discovered a bees’ nest and evidence of rats.
Rats are a big problem in Portland. Apparently it is so bad that one man in the neighborhood told the local news, “They’re like their own little gang. When I killed one . . . they pulled him back in there like it was like Saving Private Ryan or something.”1
Nothing fazed Kate. Not the bees. Not the rodents. Her only comment looking around at the floor was the deadpan statement, “I just love me some rat shit.”
Given all the shenanigans of the morning, Kate and her crew did the job in no time flat and on budget. The woman whose garage was being cleaned out was a little surprised but grateful. After paying Kate she added, “You are a rock star of junk.”
“That’s what we do,” Kate responded.
After packing up their supplies, brooms, bags, and a blue wheelbarrow that has “Your mom wears army boots” spray-painted on it, Kate and her employees, Maurice and Ricky, caravan to the next location. Somehow the rides between jobs feel like road trips. Jokes fly around and stories are told. Kate often climbs up into the big cab and drives. “I like to have fun. And I’ve always said this about—I’m not working if I’m not having fun. And I want people to have fun at work, too. But I’m also—while I don’t care about labor, spending time doing this and that and going through and donating, I’m also kind of like a speed freak. And it really doesn’t have anything to do with the money. It’s just I want to get the job done. I just like to be efficient. And so, I expect my employees to be efficient.”
Right there is the paradox of Kate O’Halloran. She is the happy-go-lucky lady driving a bright yellow box truck, but she is also a savvy businesswoman with years of experience, in business and in life. One of seven children, Kate’s roots are deep in Portland. Her father was a business agent and sometimes foreman for the Portland Iron Worker’s Union Local #29. He was involved in building most of the city’s high rises and it’s iconic Fremont Bridge. She had her own landscape design business for fifteen years, until 2008. “I actually had some great years. I had a nice, big house, a decent loan, no weird crap going on. It was good. And then the economy changed, and then the phone stopped ringing. I mean, I used to hate my phone. It rang so much. I was a really good designer. I had a good reputation. I was mostly referral. And, the phone stopped. I remember this contractor called me one day and he goes, ‘Can I ask you something?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what?’ He goes, ‘Is your phone still ringing?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s really weird.’ He goes, ‘OK.’ And it took guys a while. They’d mumble around. ‘Mine isn’t ringing either.’ And everybody thought we did something wrong. It’s like, ‘What did we do? Did we piss somebody off? Was I little too mean to that stupid doctor?’ But it wasn’t. It just stopped. And so, my money—I didn’t have any money.”
In her early fifties she was at a turning point when a chance encounter with a woman named Annie changed everything. She knew of Annie; everyone in town had seen her truck with the shamrock dotting the i. One day while snowboarding at Mount Hood, Kate noticed that Annie needed some help wrangling her two kids. Kate stepped in to lend a hand. It turned out Annie and her partner also needed some help with their junk removal business. Kate got involved again and the transition seemed natural. “They broached the subject with me over a couple of Guinnesses. ‘Take it all over for us, Katie. You’ll be grand at it, girl.’ But I was
like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ And truthfully I was a little bit concerned about the stigma of being a junk hauler.”
In January 2014, Kate bought Annie Haul. She paid $12,000 for the truck and $18,000 for the business and received something priceless: a great reputation. “When I bought the business and I pull up and people would be, ‘Oh, hey. Oh, you’re not Annie.’ I’m like, ‘Well, we’re shirttail cousins from Ireland.’ You know, everybody loved Annie. She had that great Irish accent, and we’re a lot alike as far as being very gregarious. And we just make friends. And so, I just kind of rode in on her coattails.”
The business side needed work. It had been a mom-and-mom shop. Some of the client lists were handwritten. The website needed to be updated. The online profile had to be managed. And it was important to protect what the business had already built up, the goodwill. And then there’s the fact that Annie herself was still very much a presence in Portland. At our first donation drop of the day a car pulls up next to the truck. It is Annie. She is wearing madras shorts, a T-shirt, and a porkpie hat. She has black, wavy hair flecked with gray and piercing eyes. Her Irish accent is thick and perfect. “My love,” she says as she embraces Maurice, one of the hardest working fellows you will ever meet.
“This is the woman who saved my life,” Maurice says. “I was homeless.” He had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. As a young African American man separated from his family, he wound up displaced and in a shelter in Portland. His story is long and complicated and, as Annie reminds him in the moment while glaring at me and my note pad, “is his to tell.” She’s protective of Maurice and clearly concerned for him. When Kate suggests that maybe I could interview Annie, she cocked her head toward me and said in a not-too-friendly manner, “She doesn’t have enough time.” Annie declined to be interviewed for this book.
Maurice, who worked with Annie for five years, was a great asset to Kate when she took over the business. He had certain institutional knowledge that, for all her business acumen, Kate simply couldn’t have. She remembers one day that she made a rookie mistake: “I opened a cooler . . .” This cooler was at the center of a roommate war. The roommates left it closed up for nearly two years because they couldn’t agree about who would clean it after a camping trip. Kate was the unlucky person to pop the top. “I opened the cooler, and I about fell over because of the stench. And it’s toxic, the stuff that comes out of there. You can die if you smell that stuff in an enclosed area. That was my first mistake. I opened a cooler, and Maurice looks in and he goes, ‘Miss Kate, you’re going to know, never, ever, ever open a cooler. Don’t do it.’” He insists on calling her Miss Kate.
In addition to the young, wiry African American man from New Orleans and Kate, the spunky Irish American owner, the third member of the crew is Ricky. Ricky is a white-haired, muscular, compact fellow in his early fifties. He has a fast mind and an endless capacity to discuss spirituality and life. While he is all about getting the job done, he does see deeper meaning in why people have made their homes into “warehouses,” as he calls them. “There’s an abundance out there, but if you come from the scarcity mindset, you will hold on to things. If you come from a place of love and abundance, you let go of things. It’s a flow. If there’s a blockage, people hang on to things. They feel they have to hang on. It’s an illusion, and it’s a story. You create a story and then you live it.” He believes some people who can’t part with their things are living a fear-based existence. “The more we have, the safer we feel. People are building a safety net. It is padding life with stuff. If I have enough stuff, I am OK.” Ricky’s relationship to Kate is interesting. Ricky is part of a farm community outside of the city where Kate lives along with their mutual friend, a woman named Jae. Ricky’s late lover is the father of Jae’s daughter.
Ricky, Kate, and Maurice didn’t wear matching outfits and they don’t really match one another, yet they get in a rhythm and have mutual respect that makes them extremely productive, both at junk removal and at donation/repurposing. This team that might not fit in somewhere else works perfectly in the People’s Republic of Portland. They each have their quirks, yet speak quite freely in front of one another about politics, sex, and religion. They always end the day saying to one another, “I appreciate you.”
Annie Haul had three big, multiple-day jobs booked in one week with clientele as eclectic as its team. The first stop was a rundown home in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Any Realtor would be itching to get this house on the market. A woman had passed away and her son was trying to get it ready to sell after a year of not doing all that much. He was a big-bellied guy with a white beard and was wearing a ribbed sleeveless T-shirt under some dirty overalls. He’d gone to live up in the woods and was only in the city now trying to make sense of selling the house. Kate warned me that the late mom had a lot of figurines and a wet basement. It was a real mishmash of things. His mom had an artistic streak and a love of Birkenstock sandals. There were forty-two pairs of them in the closet of her arts and crafts room. There was also a gun.
There was an entire room that had become a closet. Someone had jury-rigged a length of pipe horizontally with two broom handles tied vertically at each end like a porch swing. The whole thing was suspended from the ceiling with rope to create a clothing bar the width of the room, which was probably ten feet. On the pipe hung an enormous selection of Quacker Factory clothing. Started by a spunky zaftig lady who liked a fun outfit, QVC favorite Quacker Factory lists itself as “one of America’s leading brands of embellished clothing.” Its top sellers include rhinestone capri pants, rhinestone dots button-down V-neck cardigans, and lady leopard animal-print sparkle cardigans. The room was filled with unworn glittering items. Kate often sees people who save up one kind of thing. “I think one is that people—we are taught to shop. This is what we do. We are taught as children to shop and to be workers and buy things. I think people self-soothe with eating and some self-soothe with shopping. I mean, you see so many shopping bags and so many things. So many jobs I go to, so many things have never been opened, never been used, never been touched. So I think there’s a shopping epidemic. And then also there are people who just get overwhelmed.”
This was a hard job for Kate because the son and his uncle were constantly picking through the piles of possessions, moving things out of the donate section and into some stack of their own. The elderly brother fished out an old Barbie doll. They both seemed put off that certain things were being categorized as worthless. Kate spent a lot of time talking to the men as she sized up the items. It is something she does in these situations. “I think it puts them at ease, honestly. It gets their mind off what we’re doing. I get them to pay attention to me, although it’s not all about me. I want to hear their stories. I truly do. I’m interested in it. And it just keeps their mind off it. Honestly, it sets them at ease with what I’m thinking. And they have things they want to say.”
Practically, it helps her guys do the work and it is also something she sees as valuable. “We’re sensitive. We’re professional. We know that people are going through losses and stuff in their life that they can’t tell me in ten or twenty or however many minutes we’re there. But I know that there’s something going on. So, just to be sensitive to that and their things.” She asks about a sky-blue tackle box with CLARA painted on it. Clara was a little girl who lived across the street, and they all used to go fishing. Ricky believes Kate’s relatability is the key to her success. “One thing Kate has a gift at is reading people and being the calm and creating the camaraderie that takes place in all this—it is her gift.”
Once the guys have loaded the truck, it is clear they are going to have to come back for the next round—that was always the plan. Take the donateable stuff first and not contaminate it with the wet disgusting things from the basement. At the end of the day Kate goes to settle up with the fellow and he starts to barter with her. He tells her, “The clothes alone are $1,000!” His mom may have spent $1,000, but at this point they aren’t worth th
at much. Kate gently points out the tax deduction is more valuable at this point, and that they had settled on a price earlier and that was it.
The haggling happened again the next day. It was a similar story. Bobby was all about getting everything out of her late sister’s house. She and her husband were in from Alaska and under a time crunch. It was a beautiful home but Bobby wanted us to know it took her two weeks to get it to the point where it was now. The house had bags and bags of bottles that needed to be recycled and boxes and boxes of magazines that had to go. There was also a lot of really old canned food.
“All this stuff should have been thrown away!” the husband groused a bit. He was actually more interested in talking about fishing with Kate. Again there was a method to her chatty madness. “Bobby, she was real tight at first. And then I always put a big smile on. ‘Hey, hi, everything is going to be OK’. And then, you know, next thing she’s talking to Maurice like ‘There’s a song about you, Maurice.’ And then she’s cracking jokes, and her husband’s out there telling me all about fishing in Alaska. And they just relaxed. But at first they’re embarrassed, too. There’s a huge amount of embarrassment.” When it was time to leave the husband started in about how Kate packed the truck and that she could get more in for what she charged. In a firm and funny way she stuck to the original quote.
Of all the junk removal runs I observed and participated in for this book over the course of two years, the only person anyone haggled with was Kate. The things that completely distinguished Kate were her gender and her location. So was this a Portland thing, or a woman thing? “As far as being a woman, the only one that I see around out there. But I don’t see any problem with it. In fact, I think it’s a benefit. Because the customers feel more comfortable with me, I think, maybe.”
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