Importer, collector, antique dealer travels far and wide in his unique West Plains business
By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter
It's an interesting, eclectic and head-turning collection that Mike Ferguson has assembled on his property along I-90 between the exits at SR-902 and Four Lakes.
You know the place. An English double-decker bus, fiberglass cows, fake palm trees, and of course the UFO with the alien standing on the steps at Ferguson's business, called Way Out West.
If the items look familiar, they should to those who drove Ruby Street in Spokane where Ferguson once operated Ruby Street Antiques at the intersection of Ruby and Mission Avenue.
So what is it exactly that Ferguson does for a business? “I went from selling 100 percent antiques to 25 percent.” The antique world is dead, Ferguson said. “Any dealers that are still alive have the lowest overhead, they live in their stores.” Now 75 percent of what he sells falls into the “import garden” line of products.
“In my heyday in 2007, just when everything hit the top with the economy, we were actually providing merchandise to 52 separate stores on the West Coast.” Business has dropped off substantially he said, noting his network was just seven stores last year.
In his former life Ferguson, known as “Big Mike,” was a registered nurse, “a CDMHP, a county designated mental health professional,” he explained. He did psychiatric evaluations or the county. “If you were suicidal or homicidal I'd be the guy to call.”
His last job in that career was in 2003 at Eastern State Hospital. There he worked in in-patient psychiatry, something Ferguson had done since he was 18, starting as a psych-tech. “Then at 25 I got an RN license.”
“Almost 20 years I've never been KO'd, I've never been on the bottom side of the attack and I got KO'd real bad when I was at Eastern State. I got sucker-punched for the first time.” Despite that attack, it didn't hasten Ferguson's departure from the profession as he had already made up his mind he was leaving that line of work.
“I've always been a junk dealer, I've always liked to buy and sell,” Ferguson said. “It's always been my passion.” Nursing has always been too comfortable of a fall back profession Ferguson said. “It's always made better money until I took kind of a leap of faith in 1997 and swore I would never work fulltime in the medical field.”
Big Mike the picker
Ferguson boasts about his abilities to be a “picker” saying, “I'm as good as they get in our town,” in the art of scouring and scrounging after buried treasurers. “I learned from the absolute best picker in our area, Neil Gallagher.”
Gallagher “was kind of a hippie,” Ferguson said ,who once lived at the Tolstoy Farms commune near Davenport. Gallagher would attend East Coast auctions on the circuit in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania and Ferguson would accompany him. “That's where I really learned at a fairly accelerated rate,” he said.
Seventy-five to 80 percent of the domestic antique furniture in America comes though New York, New Jersey or Pennsylvania. That's where he learned both the picking and import business, the latter being the direction his business has taken in recent years. “Those guys are also the largest importers,” Ferguson added.
Ferguson's biggest find was a Gustav-Stickley 619 desk, something he calls one of the most desirable pieces of furniture in the world. “That's still the crowning piece of furniture,” which he said he found in the basement of a Korean thrift store in Spokane. It was being used as a workbench and had a vice bolted to it.
His reaction to the discovery was, “Obviously very excited,” the 50-year-old Ferguson said. “They didn't let it go all that cheap. They didn't know what they had but they really liked that workbench a lot, so I had to pay like $250 for it.” But that was still a huge bargain considering he flipped the desk for a cool $2,500. “It ended up selling a month later at an auction in Seattle for $12,500.”
The move west
“We moved out here in 2004,” Ferguson said. It was a hard move out to White Road along I-90 just west of the Medical Lake exit. “Oh my God, so much to move,” Ferguson said. “We did 28 runs from there (Ruby) to here.”
“From 2004 to 2008 we really rocked,” Ferguson said. And it looked at that time as if he was going to have to plan to make this a huge business. “Huge meaning a multi-million dollar a year business,” Ferguson explained.
“We put hundreds of thousands of dollars into it getting ready for big business,” he said. “Then boom, the Recession, coupled with back-to-back horrid winters.” But he plugs along waiting for things to turn around. Ferguson “pedals junk” as he likes to say or gladly takes consignments as he strives to survive the tepid economy.
How does Ferguson make his finds? “Some guys get in their pick-up and go door-to-door,” he said. “I fly 7,000 miles and walk through 40 factories,” he said of trips to China. “If I can buy something and turn it for a buck, that's where my life is,” Ferguson said. “I'm back to hustling anything and everything.”
A curious collection
Singling out one specific item on the property is difficult. However, one of the most unique things one sees on the property is the bus.
It originally belonged to a pizza restaurant. “They were going to cut the bus in half to get it out of the building and the owner had the where with all to say ‘no,'” Ferguson said. They cut open the building instead. It first went to a bed and breakfast where it sat for years until the owner became tired of the upkeep and Ferguson traded the bus for one of his conservatories.
The space ship is probably another of a number of attention-grabbers. Who buys something like that – complete with an alien that stands guard? “Grandparents for grandkids. They've been out shopping Rainbow systems and know how crazy that money is,” he said, talking about elaborate wooden swing sets.
“Fifteen years from now they'll be mowing those down and hauling them away whereas the space ship will last forever,” Ferguson said.
There's one other popular seller. “Fence and gates right now are the only thing selling,” Ferguson said. “People in weird times think about security.”
Ferguson also hopes to boost sales when he starts selling remakes of classic neon signs. He's waiting for a home he owns on Spokane's South Hill to sell and then will invest some proceeds into a container full of the retro gas station and oil-related signs. Ever the antique guy, Ferguson's house is even on the National Register of Historical Places.
As tens of thousands of vehicles speed by his place on the Interstate, Ferguson's challenge remains. “We have 1,000 feet of frontage, but how do you get people to stop?” he asked. “Yellow Pages don't do it. We give them a phone number because they get lost all the time. Aside from that there's no reason to stop,” he said.
The best way might be the simple curiosity people have over finding out why a guy has a giant white rooster or old church bell in his front yard.
Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].
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