The Barney Kaplan Grow House Story

2014

A true story about my friend Barney Kaplan

Written 07/17/2015* 1896 Words*

By Howard Yasgar

At this writing in February 2014, my good friend Barney Kaplan is now 96 years old.

He has been retired several years.

Barney’s business started its decline 15 years ago.

Barney had specialized in supplying automotive electrical parts, primarily for U.S. made vehicles and heavy-duty equipment.

Once the Japanese and other non-U.S. vehicles started appearing in the U.S. domestic market, it destroyed Barneys parts business.

The Japanese had studied the traditional U.S. sales market and then they designed their replacement parts business to defeat it.

It took the Japanese several years to do it but they did defeat it, and Barney’s business was one of the casualties.

I first met Barney Kaplan in 1975. His company was called “Barney Kaplan Surplus” but he later shortened it to “BKS”, it was located on Wabash Avenue in Detroit Michigan.

In 1975 when I first met Barney, he was buying and selling all types of automotive electrical parts that the big automotive manufacturers were getting rid of.

So, when I visited Barney’s Wabash Avenue warehouse, it was absolutely loaded with tons of wonderful things that my company needed.

Once I had met and started doing business with Barney, he soon became one of my

Companie’s major suppliers, and then he also became my good friend and my mentor.

For 35 years Barney kept us supplied with tons of new, and used, surplus automotive parts, they were automotive parts that helped to make our company very successful.

When Barney located parts that he thought were for us, he would call us to advise us of what he was buying.

After a while, as Barney and I became closer friends, Barney would call me in the evening to discuss everything.

Sometimes his call was just to talk, but most of the time it was also to tell me a funny story or a joke.

As Barney got older, I heard some of those same stories and jokes from him many times.

Once a month Barney would do business in Chicago, and that’s where he purchased small 8-ounce Kosher Salami’s.

So, every month there would be a UPS package arriving in Miami with several salamis in it.

Following Barneys instructions, we hung the salamis from our office ceiling to let them dry out properly before eating them.

One time we hung them up and they turned white with mold, and I was going to throw them away.

I told Barney and he yelled at me, he said, “Don’t you dare”, just rinse them off with water, and he was right, I rinsed them off and they were perfect.

Sometimes around 1985, Barney became my mentor, and he never stopped advising me as to how to improve my business and to make it grow.

His advice, both good and bad, never stopped coming for over 35 years.

Barney seemed always to have an idea for solving just about every kind of problem that anyone came up with.

He would even advise me on how to set up our work benches, and even how to set up our shop’s lighting.

When Barney first started mentoring me, he told me all the things I was doing wrong.

At first, I took offense, but over the years I had to call Barney up many times to tell him that he was right, and I had been wrong.

Eventually I calculated that Barney was right over 70 percent of the time.

To conduct his business, Barney contacted manufacturers as well as junk yards, he looked everywhere to find and buy any vehicular parts that had been discarded. That’s how Barney found electrical parts for everything from locomotives to lawn mowers.

Around 1976, Barney had absolutely filled up his Wabash Avenue warehouse to its

capacity, so he decided to rent additional space above a scrap paper company.

I just loved going there with Barney as we would stand downstairs next to one of the big scrap paper baling machines, and he would reach in and pick out all kinds of books that other people were throwing away.

Barney would always find something in the paper scrap that he would take home, just to give it out free to his friends and customers.

Back in the 1970’s there were hundreds of abandoned houses in Detroit.

Barney once told me that the city of Detroit would sell an abandoned house to anyone for only a few hundred dollars, but only if you promised to fix it up.

Right across the street from Barney’s Wabash Avenue warehouse, there was a two-story wooden house with two families living in it.

Then one day, I noticed that the people seemed to be gone, and I wondered what had happened to them.

On my next trip to Detroit, I kept my eye on that house, and I saw that the City of Detroit had nailed up plywood covering all the doors and windows.

On my next visit, I again kept my eye on that house.

It wasn’t long before I saw that some of the pieces of plywood had been removed from the doors.

Barney said it was probably done by drug addicts.

A month later, I noticed smoke and burn marks around the windows, a sign that there had been a fire inside the house.

Barney told me he also was watching, as some guys ripped out all the plumbing and the electrical wiring out of the house.

By the time I made my next trip to Detroit, the house was nothing more than an empty wooden shell that you could see right through it.

The next trip to Detroit, the city came in and knocked down what was left of the house, leaving nothing but an empty lot.

I joked with Barney back then, telling him that soon all of Detroit would end up the same way.

I think that Barney having watched that house deteriorate right in front of him, it became his wakeup call, he saw that his Wabash neighborhood was also deteriorating.

Since Barney needed more space anyway, that was when he decided to look for a larger building in a better location.

One day, Barney called me in Miami to tell me he had purchased a large 28,600 square foot warehouse on Epworth Street in Detroit and he said he was moving his company there.

Having the new Epworth warehouse gave Barney the additional space to spread out and buy more merchandise, and over the next 20 years he continued to do so.

This now made Barney one of the largest stockers and sellers of specialized, hard to find electrical parts in the United States.

Barney was always proud to take me along on his buying trips and introduce me to all his suppliers.

Barney was anxious to show me how he was always welcomed and appreciated by all the factories that he bought from.

Then, by the late 1990’s the market in the United States started changing. Many more items were now being imported from, Japan, Taiwan and China.

Little by little, the market for older, and odd ball U.S. industrial parts diminished, and Barney’s business began declining with it.

America was becoming a throwaway society, and the rebuilding business was now in decline.

By 2006 Barney was now 88 years old, and his heart was broken over the changes in the automotive market.

He no longer had the items that were needed by rebuilders.

So reluctantly Barney decided it was time to liquidate his inventory.

The immense job took him several years, but with the assistance of his son Jerry, Barney was eventually able to sell off and scrap most of the inventory that he had accumulated in over seventy years of being in business.

By 2012, with most of his inventory now gone, Barney had an empty Epworth warehouse to deal with.

With the city of Detroit now in a tailspin, and the entire United States economy in decline, there were no customers to be found for his warehouse.

Barney called me in the evenings, he was depressed and lamenting over the cost of taxes, and insurance bills for his building, and there was no income coming in.

Then one day the graffiti artists found Barney’s Epworth warehouse.

The city of Detroit wanted to fine Barney unless he cleaned up the mess they made.

I spoke to Barney often, and my only advice to him was to sell his building at a loss.

I told him that he should sell the warehouse at any price.

I felt Barney needed to get the building out of his name, and as soon as possible.

It was the only advice I could give him, as the buildings were now was a big liability for Barney.

Eventually, Barney sadly agreed with me, he realized there was no way he could ever recover his original cost of the warehouses.

That’s when he then reluctantly put the warehouse in the hands of a real estate agent.

By 2013, nothing had happened, there were no buyers in Detroit for an abandoned warehouse.

Barney now realized that just getting rid of the buildings at any price would be a blessing.

He was now calling me every evening to lament over the poor job the real estate agent was doing.

Barney was now 96 years old, and he fully realized that there was no hope of doing anything about selling the property.

Then, with the assistance of his two sons Larry and Jerry, Barney came to visit me in Miami, we knew it would be my friend Barney’s last trip.

As soon as Barney returned to Detroit, I received a call from him.

He said the real estate agent had found a client, but the client was only offering $35,000.00 for all the warehouse property. I advised Barney to take it, as soon as possible, and he reluctantly agreed.

Barney said, after all the commissions and taxes were paid there would be little or nothing left over. But I said the buildings would be gone, and they would be out of his name, no longer a liability.

Barney called to tell me that the sales transaction went like clockwork, the buildings were sold quickly and the new buyers had even agreed to keep all the leftover furniture, it was truly a blessing for Barney.

About three months passed, when I received a large brown envelope in the mail. It was a picture of Barney’s building and a story cut out of the Detroit newspaper.

The pictures were of the open front door of Barneys Epworth building, with its big BKS sign there for everyone to see.

It appears the Detroit police had just raided Barney’s building.

The new owners were using the warehouse as a marijuana grow house. The BKS Epworth building was now a very famous place in Detroit.

Many of my good friends in the Detroit area, knowing that I was close friends with Barney, sent me the pictures and stories out of their local Detroit newspapers.

It was ironic, because the front door of Barney’s building was wide open, and the scavengers were now ripping everything out of the building’s interior, like the copper plumbing and electrical wiring.

It was just like they had done to the house across the street from his warehouse on Wabash.

My dear friend and mentor Barney Kaplan, died peacefully on October 1, 2014.