By Christine Ladwig
Sitting
at a mixed wood table from the 1930’s and surrounded by memories of the past,
Hugh Passow, a long-time Chippewa Valley resident and owner of the Main Street Gallery and Antique Emporium in
downtown Eau Claire, takes the time to tell of his journey to become a
successful antique collector and dealer.
Passow--or
Paco as his wife and friends call him--started out 28 years ago with nothing,
and now, “There is no room in the inn,” as he puts it. His antique store
specializes in the unique, the odd, and paper -- lots of paper.
His
first forays into the antique business came in 1974 just after getting out of
the Army and going to college at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire on the
GI Bill.
“I
started running a store for a guy selling closeouts and seconds merchandise over
on 17 South Barstow Street,” he said.
He
and his boss eventually started taking things on consignment from people, and
going on trips to Minneapolis and Chicago.
There they started buying really odd items. Some of the items they sold were
actually antique or vintage, some of which sold better than others. He
discovered that taking consignments worked out so well that he started going to
auctions again, like he had when he was a child.
“Since I grew up on a farm, we went to auctions
all my life,” Passow said of his early interest in antiques. “The day I was
born, my mom stood at an auction all day. It’s in the blood.” His interest in the Victorian Era antiques
and paper developed over time.
“Well,
I did not buy Victorian the first years I was in business, but I started going
to New England,” Passow said. “That is where a lot of the Victorian stuff was.
You could buy the Victorian fairly reasonable because people wanted the early
primitive stuff.”
Passow says he has always been fascinated with
books and is an avid reader of any art or antique books he can get his hands
on.
“Thirty-eight
years ago, no one really wanted old books or paper stuff at auctions,” said
Passow. “Boxes of books would come out of a house and the auctioneer would look
at me and say ‘A quarter’ and throw it on my pile.”
Larry
Meyer, a longtime friend and client of Passow’s, is familiar with the paper collection
in the Antique Emporium.
“One
of Hugh’s specialties is what I would call paper or paper ephemera. He goes to
large extents to collect and to gather up documents of that nature,” Meyer
said.
Passow
spends hours on the road looking for items to add to his collection. Last year
he spent 90 days traveling and looking for items to add to his collection. He studies auctions on the East Coast and
large estate sales, and travels mostly in the spring, summer and fall. He is
also a world traveler, according to Meyer.
“When
he travels, he does not travel just to find antiques, instead he travels for an
understanding of the world and people’s culture, and an understanding of what
they consider old or antique and why,” Meyer said. “Sometimes I think it
interesting to check on prices of things to see how people of that culture
value paper ephemera versus the value in the United States or even Eau Claire.”
As a man who wears multiple hats, namely
antique collector and dealer, Passow sometimes has a hard time balancing the two. He dislikes parting with any of the
items in his store.
“I am basically in this business because I am
a collector and I had to pay for my collecting,” Passow said.
During
his early years he could not afford to keep anything but that has changed drastically,
especially as the store is stuffed full of antiques and collector’s items.
“The
business has been pretty good to me since I started out with exactly zero,” Passow
says of his success. “I am always
learning new things in order to keep up in the business.”
Passow
is possibly one of the largest and most respected antique dealers in the
Midwest, He has repeatedly been to large antique dealer shows held in the Twin
Cities such as the Star of the North and the Minnesota Antique Dealers Association shows. According to Meyer, Passow
is willing to help anyone who comes in his shop, whether they are a college
student with a $20 budget or a seasoned collector. He treats them both the
same, even after more than 25 years in the business.
