License to Pawn: Deals, Steals, and My Life at the Gold & Silver

by Rick Harrison

  These are originals, and they’re in pretty good shape. You might have seen the transaction on the show. I don’t have the whole set, but I’m working on it. I have them framed and displayed toward the back of the shop, and they’re some of my absolute favorite things, ever.

  Knowing the importance of that battle, there’s something humbling to me about looking at those battle plans and thinking about the preparation and courage it took to pull it off. And the fact that this man kept these plans throughout the war and then gave them to his son afterward is kind of awe-inspiring, too.

  They ended up with me because the son needed to sell them to help finance his daughter’s wedding.

  He clearly didn’t want to sell them, but he felt he had to. I told him, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but thank God I don’t have daughters.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Pawn Stars

  The rise of reality television got me thinking: What better place than here?

  Nearly every day, I would sit in the shop and think about how awesome and crazy this life is. The people, the stories, the stuff they’re selling—it’s truly the most amazing job you could ever hope to have. I would hate it, absolutely hate it, if I woke up tomorrow morning to find that overnight everyone in the world had been transformed into a normal, responsible citizen. That would be so damned boring. I love the diversity we see in the shop—every race, every religion, every socioeconomic situation, every opinion. Every day it’s a window to the world’s soul.

  And the night window is a window to the darkest places of the world’s soul.

  So why not let everybody in on it? Why not go after a reality show with the same resolve that marked our quest to get a full-fledged pawn license in the first place?

  After all, we were underdogs then, too.

  I decided to see if I could make it happen. It became sort of an obsession with me, starting about 2005. It was rejected out of hand by a few people, received with a pacifying nod by far more, embraced by just enough to keep me going.

  By the time I set off on this wild chase, the shop was a financial success and we were pretty well set. Old Man was still micromanaging every single penny, I was having a blast learning about everything from ormolu clocks to Olympic medals, and Corey was showing himself capable of running the day-to-day operations. We were well established in Las Vegas, and all of us in the Harrison family were assured of having comfortable lives with or without television.

  Tracy and I had been married for seventeen years when we had an unexpected addition to the family. Jake was born in 2003, and even though having a new baby in our late thirties—with a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old—might not have been completely planned, it’s been a great thing for all of us. He’s bright and energetic and generally awesome, and he keeps us young. He and I ride bikes together and do homework together and go out into the desert and ride the quads together. I’m a big kid, so being able to act like it without having to explain myself is a great thing.

  By necessity, Tracy had to work when Corey and Adam were little, but the success of the shop has allowed her to stay home with Jake. There were a lot of things that happened with Corey and Adam that I wish I could have back, and one of them is the amount of time we were around. Unfortunately, it’s tough to have someone stay home when there are years you make $20,000 and have no idea if it’s going to get better or worse the next year.

  Tracy was happy to leave the shop behind, although she misses some of the excitement. And sometimes she misses the transvestites. But, in contrast to the way Adam and Corey were raised, we’re hoping that by having Tracy stay home and raise Jake we can smooth out some of life’s inevitable rough edges. I’m lucky to be in a position to do that, and we’re also in a great position to help out with several charities we’ve adopted throughout the area.

  So, you might ask, with everything running smoothly and profitably, why would I make the awkward and potentially unsuccessful move to push for a Gold & Silver Pawn Shop reality TV show?

  It clearly wasn’t because I thought any of us fit the role of the traditionally handsome Hollywood leading man. As you can tell, genetics in the Harrison family lean toward the overweight side of the scale, which is why I’m in the gym every morning before 6 A.M. Now, if I could force myself to eat better and cut out the damned smoking . . .

  And it clearly wasn’t because I wanted to show off my wardrobe. Before the show, I favored bib overalls. Hey, they’re comfortable, and I really didn’t care what I looked like. (Maybe it was the latent influence of Old Man’s North Carolina backwoods roots.) If I had walked out of the house in matching clothes, Tracy would have had a heart attack. The concept of matching up my clothes just made no sense to me. Whenever we would get ready to go somewhere, Tracy and Corey would cringe, and Tracy would give me that “You’re not, are you?” look. That was my cue to change.

  Now I’ve solved the problem by always wearing Tommy Bahama T-shirts and jeans. It’s foolproof—Garanimals for men.

  So those are a couple of the reasons why not. Here are three reasons why:

  First, and this should come as no surprise by now, I thought it would be profitable. Second, I thought it would be a hell of a lot of fun. Third, I thought—no, I knew—that it would work. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time in that building to understand just how unusual this life is.

  Then there was another motivation: From the time I first started having seizures, I never imagined even living into adulthood. Those harrowing experiences of my childhood created a certain kind of background music in my head. If there’s something I want, and I believe it’s achievable, I am going to go after it with every fiber of my being.

  Even though I gave up drugs and long ago stopped worrying about epilepsy, I haven’t completely abandoned the recklessness of my past. I’ve had a total of eleven surgeries, most of them the result of dirt-bike and quad riding in the desert. One of the worst accidents came when I wrecked and tore the knob off the inside of my ankle. It slid down my foot toward my heel and sheared off several ligaments. They opened up my foot, lifted the ankle knob back into its rightful position and screwed it back in place. Another time I got twisted up on the bike and felt an ungodly amount of pain from my right foot. I looked down at my boot to see my toes pointing the wrong way.

  The point is: I still do crazy stuff. To a lot of people, both inside and outside my family, chasing the dream of a Gold & Silver Pawn Shop television show was in keeping with the craziness. It didn’t matter to me, though. I’ve tried a lot of things that have worked and a lot that failed. I wasn’t afraid of failure, and I knew if I could make this a success it would be a huge success. It didn’t seem like a risk at all.

  I didn’t know where to begin, so I did what I always do: I researched it. Acquiring an agent was the first step, and I hired an agent and tried to drum up interest from production companies. There was always interest, but I learned to decipher their language of love—everything’s always great, always just about to happen—and wait for something concrete before getting too excited.

  Old Man would always tell me, “Rick, you’re wasting your time. You’re not getting a television show.”

  There were times I believed him, but I also knew he wasn’t looking at the world the same way I was. He’d never even watched one second of a television reality show, so he couldn’t get his mind around the idea that someone might be interested in seeing how things work in a family-run Vegas pawn shop. I had seen enough of those shows—and enough of the really bad ones—to know if it was done right, it would do well.

  Tracy’s response was always the same: “I’m fine with it, just so long as I don’t have to be in it.”

  After four years of hustling around trying to make it happen, our big break came in a strange way. A television station in Los Angeles did a feature on the ten best places to shop in Las Vegas, and we made the list. I told Corey, “You watch. After this airs, we’re going to get a bunch of people calling us about a TV show.” Sure
enough, we had fifteen or twenty calls from production companies wanting to talk about pitching a reality show to the networks.

  So, after four years, we were discovered overnight.

  There were two major players at the beginning: HBO and NBC Universal. HBO was hot to produce a pilot, so we went with them.

  A year later, there was a pilot, and it didn’t work for me. I have nothing against HBO. I loved The Sopranos, and I’m a big fan of several of their other shows, including Boardwalk Empire. HBO does certain types of shows really, really well. Our show, unfortunately, was not one of those shows.

  HBO decided to turn it into the pawn-shop version of Taxicab Confessions, the show where people on a hidden camera tell their sad stories and depraved ideas to a cabdriver. Granted, there is a gritty side to our business. You could sift through the recordings from our night-window camera and get a view of the world that is quite different from the one you get on Pawn Stars. I don’t shy away from that; it’s part of life, and it’s part of my business. We talk about it, laugh about it, and cringe about it in the shop. As you can tell, we aren’t hesitant to admit there’s a darker side to our shop and its clientele.

  But the world depicted in the HBO pilot was not representative of the world I live in. They focused on the night window and treated the customers like animals in a zoo. They interviewed the customers about why they were pawning their stuff, and they would shrug and say, “This is how I get my money.” It’s pretty simple, but if you’ve never been exposed to it, it’s like a foreign country.

  Desperation is a part of our business, but it’s a small part, and to make it the center of a reality show was misleading. It was also depressing, with no room for humor or the joy of discovery. It didn’t give off the proper vibe of head-shaking wonder that takes place several times a day. Any pawn shop can lay claim to having destitute and desperate customers, but what sets us apart is the rare and unusual items and the stories behind them.

  A story and a price, not a story and a vice.

  The pilot never aired. We broke it off with HBO under what I would politely call “creative differences.”

  I still didn’t give up. I knew there was a show to be made if we got the right people to share my vision. In late November of 2008, we got a call from a group called Leftfield Pictures. They called out of the blue—out of left field, I guess—to inquire about shooting a sizzle reel for a possible pilot.

  It turns out some of the guys from the company had come to Vegas for a bachelor party and decided to check out the shop. It was good fortune for us, but I’d had so many high hopes and false starts that I was naturally skeptical about this one. When they said they were interested in coming out in February—three months from then—I told them there was still interest from NBC Universal.

  “With the HBO thing falling through, they may want to move fast,” I said before dropping every name I could remember from NBC Universal.

  The lady from Leftfield said, “Let me call you back.”

  Fifteen minutes later she called back and said, “We’ll be out there next week.”

  My belief in the worth of this show was so strong I had to do something to get their attention. I couldn’t let it drift another few months; if they were interested now, I needed to get them into the shop now, before they could go off and be distracted into thinking something else was a better bet.

  (Once the show started and became a hit, I told them the real story—NBC Universal was interested, but I had no idea whether a visit from them was imminent.)

  Leftfield came with a crew and shot the material for a spark reel. They went back to New York and spent the next three months putting it together. Once again, this got my hopes up. These guys seemed to get it better than the HBO guys. They saw the enthusiasm we have for the work and the eclectic cast of characters coming through the door. This felt like it might get somewhere.

  Of course, the feeling wasn’t unanimous.

  When I told Old Man that Leftfield was going to come in and do a sizzle reel for a show, I’ll tell you what his exact words were:

  “Rick, you’re never going to get a fucking TV show. All this is going to be is another week of bullshit we all have to go through.”

  As you can tell, he’s not really acting on the show. In fact, he’s not acting at all. That exchange is typical of his curmudgeonly attitude. The cranky old man you see on television is the same guy I have to deal with every single day.

  Anyway, they shot the sizzle reel and showed it to History on a Friday in February, and by the next Tuesday they’d ordered a pilot. It’s unheard-of in the television industry for a network to move that rapidly. History had only one bit of advice: They wanted “Antiques Roadshow with attitude.” That’s a pretty good summary of what we do.

  We caught it at the right time. History had hired a young woman named Nancy Dubuq to change the image of the network from “The Hitler Channel” to something more relevant and hip. She had turned around the A&E Network, and we fit into her new vision of what History could be. It could be fun and informative—classic “laugh and learn” television.

  It couldn’t have worked out better for us, either. In a way, the evolution of the show has followed the same path as the evolution of Gold & Silver Pawn Shop. Pawn Stars started out with modest aspirations—we were paid $8,000 per episode for the first season—and blossomed from there. (We’re working under a much sweeter contract now.) Instead of focusing on the sordid aspects of the pawn business, Leftfield wanted to emphasize the rare and unusual items that come into the shop on a consistent basis. Through those items, they gave me and Corey and Old Man the chance to give little history lessons on the items or the events they represent—the invention of television, maybe, or the Civil War—in short cutaways. They put together a format that works, with just enough family infighting and goofy Chumlee-ness thrown into the mix.

  The original name for the show was Pawning History. One of the guys from Leftfield came up with the ingenious idea to call it Pawn Stars. That was one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-it moments. Right away, we knew that was a winner.

  Leftfield and History also left room for us to bring in ancillary characters like the various experts I call to give me their opinions about the veracity and worth of rare items. My buddies Tony Dee (antique firearms expert), Sean Rich (antique explosives expert), Mark Hall-Patton (the ubiquitous administrator of the Clark County Museum), and a bunch of others are regulars who add historical heft to the show. I don’t always need them (don’t tell them that), but it definitely makes for more suspenseful television when customers have to come back and get the final word on the legitimacy of their item from someone who is a known expert in the field. And there are times, I have to admit, when I’ve been surprised by what my experts have told me about some of the items people bring in.

  One of our favorites, Rick Dale of Rick’s Restorations, has been featured numerous times in the first three seasons of the show. He is our guy when it comes to cleaning up and restoring vintage items like Coke machines and a really cool antique golf cart we gave Old Man. Well, his appearances on the show prompted the first Pawn Stars spinoff. Rick is now the proud star of his own History show, American Restoration.

  So Pawn Stars has been good for the economy. It’s definitely been good for ours. As I’ve said, we had twelve employees before we got the television show. We now have forty-seven. When the show started, we expected an immediate spike in foot traffic. We were surprised when it didn’t happen. The first few months we saw business pick up some, but nothing dramatic.

  And then, as the ratings increased and the show became something of a cult hit, the spike happened. One day in December of the first television season, I looked out onto the sidewalk in front of the shop and saw more people than I could count. It hit like a storm—boom, full house.

  This called for a change in how we do business. The hordes of people waiting to get into the shop forced us to hire extra security for outside, and it served to increase the expos
ure of Antoine the Doorman. A word about Antoine, who became yet another character from the show to get his own line of T-shirts in the swag department: He’s about six-foot-six and close to four hundred pounds. If someone is getting out of line in the store, or if he suspects someone of trying to steal, he just stands up off his stool and hovers over the guy. And then as he’s hovering, he puts his arms out to his sides and says, “Really?” It’s hilarious—and effective.

  We have had a line out front when we open the store at 9 A.M. every single day since then. We installed misters out on the sidewalk to keep our fans from wilting in the heat. A lot of people show up early and get confused when the front door isn’t open, because the sign says “Open 24 Hours.” They don’t realize the night window is the only thing open from 9 P.M. to 9 A.M. And yes, people have been angry about that.

  The show has created more of a draw for the odd and unusual items. I get a lot more stuff now that we’re on television. People want to be on television, and we’re always on the lookout for stuff that will play well on the show. Space stuff is always a hit, as well as presidential memorabilia and anything that makes you think, I can’t believe there’s a market for that stuff. Cap guns, for instance, or the guy who had an entire room of his house covered almost floor to ceiling with Transformers.

  If you’re out there looking at some of these collections and thinking, No way, I’m here to tell you there is a way. No matter how funky, there is a way.

  For Old Man, this whole slice-of-fame thing has been both invigorating and frustrating. An old navy man through and through, he operates by the old saying “A bitching sailor is a happy sailor.” The television show has completely changed his life. Instead of sitting in his chair in full view of everyone, picking through the envelopes to see what came off pawn that morning, he has to hole up in one of the cramped back offices and rely on other people to tell him what’s happening out on the floor.

  If he goes out, all the customers start pulling at him and asking him to pose for photographs. We have a chair set up at the far end of the showroom, near the bicycles and motorcycles, past the rows of swag, and he’ll go out there a couple of times a day to pose for photographs. He’s good for about twenty minutes a session before he has to come back in and smoke a cigarette.