Woody Allen Meets Sanford and Son

Steve Mogol grew up in Los Angeles with really nice toys. Like other kids, he collected baseball cards and model airplanes, but also read the classifieds in order to find the best stuff. “I was kind of particular about design and function and quality,” he recalls. His sense of value seems to have been unusual from the beginning. “I remember reading that P–51 Mustang fighters from World War II—this is thirteen years after the war or so—were selling for $15,000 apiece,” he says, off on a tangent. “I really didn’t know much about what money is. You start learning about money when you’re eight years old—valuing what something’s worth. You learn that a soda is five or ten cents, that a candy bar is ten cents. But I didn’t understand thousands of dollars per se, other than I knew a car cost hundreds of thousands.” He smiles. “You know, whatever. But I told my dad, ‘Dad, the P–51 Mustang is worth $15,000. The motor in it cost $150,000 in WWII.’ See, I knew that. So I said, ‘Here’s something that won the war and ruled the skies of Europe. Wouldn’t that be a good investment?’ ” Mogol smiles again, suggesting that his father, a hard-nosed businessman, didn’t bite on the idea. “They’re worth over $2.5 million today.”

But it wasn’t until his senior year in college that Mogol saw the possibility of making a living based on his eye for antiques. He was studying business administration and history at the University of Minnesota—the family had moved to the Twin Cities, where his father, Bernard, owned the Gold Medal Beverage Company, which he sold to Beatrice Foods in 1971 but continued to run—and during Steve’s senior year he got a job digging trenches for a plumbing firm. “I was making $1.85 an hour because I was like a summer temp, so on Friday I had a paycheck of $125 or thereabouts. One Friday, I stopped at a garage sale on the way home and bought a dresser for ten bucks. Next day, I sold it for $135. In about a half-hour, I made as much as I made during a week of digging trenches.”

After graduating in 1970, Mogol began buying and selling distressed office furniture as well as some Arts and Crafts pieces. In 1976, with the help of his family, he bought a 10,000-square-foot building in St. Paul that he used as a warehouse. In 1985, when the city claimed the property under eminent domain, he needed thirteen semitrailer trucks to haul everything away. “Nobody could believe I could get that much stuff in that building,” he says.

In 1989, he moved his art business to Los Angeles, where he noticed that the market for mid-century modern furniture was beginning to heat up. “But I didn’t have the trucks, and transportation and space were issues, so in 1990 I moved back [to the Twin Cities],” he says. In 1991, he bought a large chunk of his initial inventory at a Ramsey County courthouse auction. Half the furniture he paid for was destroyed, he alleges, because the county needed the storage space for parking. Mogol sued, taking his case to the state supreme court, where he lost. In 1992, his parents financed the purchase of the building on Franklin.

His parents helped him get going, but Mogol swears he paid for his entire inventory. In fact, he says, “most of this stuff has been paid for many times over—because of my leasing business. That’s why [so much] isn’t for sale—because I make more money keeping it. My stuff only gets more valuable. It doesn’t depreciate. Worst-case scenario, I can sell it for scrap if necessary—steel prices are high right now.” Mogol jokes that sometimes when you get something for nothing it costs too much. “I’ll pay a lot of money for a piece if need be, but most of this stuff—there’s more money involved in the labor of picking it up and storing it than anything else.” Granted, he adds, his unusual approach to buying and (not) selling makes people wonder, not least among the wonderers being his dad. Steve says, “Somebody asked him, ‘What does your son do?’ And my dad says, ‘He buys and sells things, but he mostly buys things.’ And the other guy says, ‘What do you mean—he buys things and doesn’t resell them?’ And my dad says, ‘No, he just buys things.’ ”