Main Street mainstay thriving after 120 years

People who work in pawn shops come to know things.

Subtle things. Deep things. Things that sink below the nuts-and-bolts level of daily commerce and into the realms of psychology and intuition.

Dave Somers, a one-time psychology major at the University of Colorado and owner of L. Oppleman Pawn on Lynchburg’s Main Street for 37 years, can tell you all about that.

“You have to know people,” he said. “I guess that’s where my psych degree helped a little.”

Somers, who recently turned the business over to his 27-year-old son Ryan, acquired some of his insight from his father, who bought the business during the Depression.

L. Oppleman (named for Lena Oppleman, the wife of the original owner) bills itself as the oldest continuously operated pawn shop in the U.S.

“I’ve seen a lot of things over the years,” Somers said Wednesday, the first day of the store’s monthlong 120^th anniversary sale, “and met a lot of interesting people.”

He’s also seen the national economy rise and fall like the tides, and learned to tell in advance if the tide was moving in or out.

“Right now, our buy-back rate is right at 64 percent,” he said. “If it ever gets down to 50, we will be in a depression. You can count on it.”

Closer to the front of the store, behind the jewelry counter, Jean Alstad consults her own barometer of the economic times.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this many Rolexes before,” she said, waving her hand over a glass case thick with watches.

You probably know the basics of pawn shops. People in need of short-term cash will bring in their diamond rings, guitars, hunting rifles and a myriad of other items and offer them as collateral for a loan. A price will be negotiated. The owner of the item leaves the store with the money, while the item remains. If no payment is made within a given period of time, usually 60 days, the item becomes the property of the pawn shop and is offered for sale.

Thus, it’s tempting to depict pawn shops as preying on the misfortune of others. Anne-Marie Jones, who works behind the main counter, prefers the sunnier side.

“For a lot of people,” she said, “we are the only place they can go, unless it’s to the payday loan people who charge a lot more interest (it’s 10 percent a month at L. Oppleman). As long as you stay in touch and pay us something every month, we’ll work with you. Plus, it doesn’t show up on your credit record.”

Another misnomer, Somers said, is that pawn shops are in cahoots with criminals who slip in the back door with stolen goods.

“We send the police a list every day of what we got in,” he said. “We ask for identification from anyone who pawns an item. All that has cut down considerably on the stolen stuff. Realistically, no pawn shop owner wants to accept anything that’s stolen, because he loses his money if it’s reclaimed.”

“I used to think that people just came into pawn shops to feed their drug habit,” Jones admitted. “Now that I’m working in one, I realize that we get all kinds of people.”

Like the elderly woman who stood before Pat McNamee’s firearms counter not long ago with an antique pistol to sell.

A quick look around L. Oppleman’s cluttered, old-school interior reveals the variety of items that find their way to the store — not only the standard guns, rings and guitars (“A guitar can’t play the blues,” musician John Lee Hooker famously declared, “until it’s been pawned a couple of times”), but tools, kitchen appliances and even a Weedeater.

Ask Dave Somers for his strangest acquisition, and he has a ready answer.

“That human skull over there,” he said.

The people who pawn are only half of the equation, however. The other side of any pawn shop is the customers.

“I’m in here to put a guitar on layaway,” said Stacy Creasy, part of a brisk Wednesday traffic through the front door. “You can’t beat the prices here.”

In recent years, L. Oppleman has also moved into the world of eBay, mostly from the sales end.

“We’ve dealt with Jay Leno, Erik Estrada, a number of well-known people,” Somers said.

Again, however, there is often more at play here than mere commerce.

“People need the money for medicine, for medical bills,” said Alstad, a native of the island of Trinidad who has been at L. Oppleman for more than 20 years. “They want to sell a ring because of a breakup. It’s sad.”

She remembers a woman who tried to pawn what she thought was a silver ring for $15.

“I asked her, ‘Do you know what you have here? This is a platinum ring, and it’s worth a lot more.’ When I told her that, she decided not to sell it. But that was OK, because I could sleep that night.”

Despite increased competition locally, Somers said, L. Oppleman continues to thrive, in large part because of its longevity.

“Because we’ve been around so long,” he said, “people trust us.”

Longer, apparently, than anyone else.

“The American Pawnbrokers’ Association calls us the oldest in the country,” Somers said, “and USA Today did an article calling us the oldest, and an independent survey by (a major pawnbroker in New York) calls us the oldest.”

A pause. A smile.

“But even if we’re only the sixth oldest, that’s still pretty good.”

People who work in pawn shops learn to be flexible.