The first time my father drove past the original Ax-Man Surplus location on University Avenue in St. Paul, he pulled over immediately. This was some thirty years ago, but he still becomes radiant when recounting the momentous occasion of his first visit: “I was overcome—I didn’t know where to look. Finally, I calmed down, got a hold of myself, and started looking.”
More than a surplus store and not quite a dollar store (though a dollar will go a long way), Ax-Man is a sort of curiosity shop with a bit of an art-gallery vibe. On any given day, Ax-Man’s extensive, eclectic stock includes marbles, vacuum tubes, wading boots, and crime-scene tape … and French mess kits, hazmat suits, and plastic bottles of every shape and size. That’s just for starters; put simply, you haven’t known stuff until you’ve visited Ax-Man.
That may well be because “no one needs [Ax-Man’s] stuff,” as owner Jim Segal admits. And that may explain why Ax-Man is so mesmerizing, luring artists, tinkerers, inventors, do-it-yourselfers, handymen, hobbyists, and the curious to its three metro locations on a regular basis. They are all looking for something just so.
Like many Ax-Man disciples, my father is part craftsman, part artist, mostly do-it-yourselfer. On a recent visit, the two of us pawed through barrels and bins and crates and boxes of gemstones, wheels, bowling pins, magnets, gas masks, leather scraps, home-alarm key pads, and doll limbs of various skin tones. The giant phone is not for sale, but plastic brains were, for $19.95. There were Beetle Bailey lunch pails, wrapping paper, and bullets in various stages of rusting. Pop poked at stuff, bounced small objects in his palm, and examined everything through his bifocals. “Usually I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he said. “But if I see what I’m looking for, I’ll know it.”
Sometimes even Segal isn’t quite sure about the stuff he has for sale, but that’s no matter: “The customer comes up with how it should be used,” he says. Many items are broken down, their various components sold individually. “I love seeing the creative process at work with the customers, when they don’t rely on preconceived notions about what a thing should be used for.”
Segal, who has a business degree from the University of St. Thomas, doesn’t consider himself particularly creative. “But I like the idea of creativity,” he says. That’s why he lets the staff create the signs for the merchandise—a small perk, he admits, in an otherwise routine retail job. This artfully executed signage usually consists of sassy dialogue pasted onto photos from old magazines. Shelves displaying various mugs and glasses, for instance, feature the iconographic photo taken at the conference of Yalta, with speech balloons emerging from the mouths of Franklin D. Roosevelt—“Can you believe Churchill showed up hammered again?”—and Joseph Stalin: “Da, da.”
Segal, who bought the business in 2001 and is its third owner, is circumspect about where Ax-Man gets its inventory. “Sure, I could tell you,” he says, “but then I’d have to kill you.” This much he’ll say: It comes from basements, warehouses, manufacturers with leftover parts, and trade shows. “We want to give things a second chance,” he says.
Things like flashcubes. Segal describes discovering a pallet of those little glass cubes for old Instamatics at a car-parts distributorship. Ax-Man now has a lifetime supply. Caught up in the spirit of the place, I suggest over-enthusiastically, “Christmas tree ornaments! Earrings! Pretend ice cubes!”
My dad and I left, however, not with flashcubes, but with armfuls of small wheels that my father will use on toy trucks he makes for the grandchildren. His favorite purchase ever was an oversized porcelain hand-and-forearm, perhaps once a glove display in a department store, which stands upright in a graceful twist. “My vision was to use it for a display for your mother’s jewelry,” he grumbled. Mother, however, was disturbed by the shiny disembodied hand emerging from the dresser like the scene at the end of Carrie, so my father’s great find is now used to hang wet rags and gloves in his workshop.
Arriving home from our Ax-Man visit, my father remained in a trance. Thumbs hooked on his tool belt, he had a faraway look in his eyes, perhaps imagining some distant past where he himself might have lorded over all that stuff. “It’s a young man’s game, I guess, but that would have been a fun business,” he said. “I would have loved digging through all that crap every damn day.”
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