On January 3, 2025 I interviewed Mike Doolilttle, who owned “Mike’s Second Hand Store” for 35 years. It has been about 10 years since he retired. Read all about Mike, his passion for old junk, and his love for the Estacada community. Interview by Lily Shaver. Edited for clarity. 

1. How long have you lived in Estacada?

Well, I was drug here in Estacada, when I was about, I think, a year and a half old. We moved from Cottage Grove, and my dad followed the work for logging, he was in the logging industry, and I’ve been here ever since. So I’m over 70, so I’ve been here, you would think I’d had enough sense to get out by now, wouldn’t you. Been here my whole life. One of my earliest childhood memories…there used to be train tracks down there, where the store was, where the building is down there, and I used to play down there. There were tracks there, and bogs there, and woods there, all that’s all gone. And it’s different. [Mike’s Second Hand Store used to be at 200 S.W. Highway 224, where Adventist Health is now.]

2. What do you think people like about living in Estacada? 

Well, I think, to start with, that when people come out here, it’s a quiet, peaceful place. It has a combination of the old with the new. There’s a lot of new development in the center, but yet, you can drive just, you know, a mile or two outside and see the old barns and the old fields, and it’s appealing to people to start with, and then when you get to know the community and the businesses and the people, that’s the attractive part, because we’re still small enough to where we haven’t totally lost that good old fashioned, good old boy comradery in Estacada. It’s attractive to people. And you know, a lot of people aren’t deep enough to see that. I mean, they look at the bright, shiny objects, like the property and, like I said, like the businesses and the restaurants and stuff. But if you go beyond that and you look at the real human element here, that’s what’s attractive. And I don’t know how long we’re gonna be able to keep that, but we’ve pretty much got it so far. 

(Lily Shaver) I went to The Grind this morning with a friend, and the barista knew what my friend was going to order.

Absolutely, absolutely. I had, I don’t know how many thousands of people that went through that store over the years, and I remembered most of them, and a lot of it had to do with their nonverbal behavior. Everybody’s different, and everybody leaves a mark on you. And, I don’t want to use the “a” word, because I’m on tape, but the bad people, the misguided people, your defense mechanisms in your brain kind of tend to forget those guys for the most part. You don’t want to remember those things, but, yeah, but the good people and the good things they say, the compliments, the suggestions, the thank yous, you don’t forget that. It’s imprinted in your mind. And if you’ve got somebody that works almost every day, like the coffee people, and they have the regulars, they know who they are. They ask questions. Say, good things happened and you’re dressed nice today. 

“Where are you going?”

“Well, I’m going to my daughter’s wedding, and I’m going…” And they don’t forget that. I mean, it’s a gift to you. And you have to want to work with the public if you’re going to be good at it. You can’t have a bad attitude. But if you have that attitude, it’s fun. That fun sticks with you.

3. When did you start “Mike’s Second Hand Store”?

I started my store in April of 1980. and it wasn’t very long after that–I’d just got the store set up and was jiving along there, and I looked out that front window on May 18th. And what did I see? Mount St. Helens erupting. 1980. That was kind of a milestone there for how long ago that was. You could see the plume. I was in the old building at the time, but you could look straight up Main Street, and you could look straight up, and you could see the plume up there. I had the radio on. And it was a little while after they had said that it erupted before the plume got so tall that you could see it. Pretty easy to see. And then there was the ash afterwards. You know, for days after that, but it’s the way it was.

4. What was the biggest thing that inspired you to open your shop?

It was my calling. I don’t know whether I did this in another life. I don’t know where it came from, but I have always been a junk packer. I used to get in trouble. I don’t know how long you want me to dwell, but I could talk all day long about it. But I used to get in trouble when I was just little, when I was first allowed to leave the yard a little red wagon, which was a big mistake for my parents to buy for me. And I used to pick up anything that was loose and bring it home. And I used to get in more trouble for that than anything else. You know, the kids would get in trouble for breaking windows, and I was off by myself. And I was a junk packer, and I loved to watch the garbage cans, and I didn’t take anything that I was supposed to. In fact, I’d knock on the door and ask people. 

A lot of people wouldn’t let me have stuff because they thought I was going to play with it and then leave it in the middle of the street. And I’ll never forget, back in those days, you know, everybody smoked, and they always had a cigarette, and I can remember, usually the woman was home at the time, and she’d bend over, and she’d shake her finger at me like that, and she’d say, “You can have it, but don’t bring it back!” So anyway, when you stop and think about some of that stuff that they used to throw away, it’d be kind of nice to find it today. As I got older, my taste changed. I started picking up better stuff. When I went to college, I found myself buying things at garage sales and storing them in my dorm room and reselling them to the other people in the dorm. I don’t know–it wasn’t intentional. It just happened. 

I’ve just done it my whole life, and I don’t know where it came from, my grandpa did a little bit of second hand. He didn’t do very much, but I might have gotten a little bit of it from him, but that’s this junk thing, and I’ll tell you today, I still like to go to garage sales. I still like to go to them. I would still be down there today, if it wasn’t for the fact that my health caught up with me, and it just got to the point where my back kept telling me in my arms and my neck and that, “Mike, we can’t do this anymore.” But I’d done that by myself. For the most part. I had help with unloading the truck when I went to the auctions and my family members came and helped me price things, but I did it by myself, and I did it seven days a week, and I had 9,000 square feet to cover, and that was up and down the steps. And I did it by myself, and I just literally wore myself out.

And the way that I did that by myself, I was able to keep track of everything. And in this day and age, what they do now is they have antique malls and stuff. They’ve got 50 or 60 people doing the same thing that I was doing. Seriously. And, they don’t really know how much something really is, unless they check and the people are mostly good. But there’s a few out there that are “opportunists” (let’s just call them that) that pull the tags off the stuff and switch the tags. I had things sitting out–I had sets of things that had several pieces with them, and I had a lot of complete things. I had mixers with molds and different things that had different parts and pieces, and they were laid out. And I would write out my little hand handwritten price tags, that was all low tech down there. And I would cut out these little price tags, and I would write “all” on something. And when I write “all” on something, it meant all. All of that stuff had to be together, and so somebody would or “opportunists” would come in, and they would take a bowl out of a mixer and bring it up and say,

“How much is this?”

And I’d say, “Where’d you get that at?” 

And they’d say, “Back there.” Well, of course it was back there. Less information back there. “Well, that’s nice. Well, you want to show me?”

“Well, I don’t really remember.” 

And I say, “Well, you know, this is a long shot, but you didn’t happen to get it out of that mixer back there, did you?” 

“Well, I don’t know…”  

But you see, it had to be done that way, the way I did it down there, and then I’ll tell you, you will never, ever in your life again. Ever, ever find, (and I’m not bragging, just stating facts,) you’ll never find another place like that again. You’ll never find one, I’ve never seen one like it. The Goodwills, they kind of have the same outlay as I did. I didn’t carry clothes, but they don’t have the variety that I had and the depth I had and the knowledge I had of what I was selling. It was just different, and it was hard. 

It was hard work. I worked at it seven days a week. I’ll never forget, you know, there should have been a law. You know, there really should have been a law. 
I should be behind bars right now for having so much fun. 
I’m just telling you. There should have been a law. 

mike doolittle

And I can remember I’d go to the auctions at night. I’d work all day long, and then I’d go to the auctions, and I’d get home at one or two in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep because I was so excited about what I had in the back of my truck parked out in front of my house, and I got down there early in the morning and unloaded furniture and stuff downstairs before I ever opened the front door. Sometimes I wouldn’t get any sleep at all. You know, there was no reason for me to get excited because the work was going to get done, but it was just what I did. It was just part of whatever was born in my genes. And that’s why I was successful with what I did. That’s why the people enjoyed coming in, because I had an enthusiasm for what I was selling. And plus, I was rude to the people, a lot of them liked that.

I love the kids, I love the old people.

5. Was there anything in particular that you found that was just like, “Wow, this is really cool!”?

Well, there were a lot of things. 

I had a cannon one time, it was a big brass cannon. It was a ceremonial cannon, it wasn’t an artillery cannon. It was very cool. It was behind the counter, and I sold that. But there was a lot of–I don’t know that there was anything that was a billion dollar piece of stuff, but there was a lot of good stuff.

I never used the internet when I was in business. It became more prominent after I retired. And I didn’t Google things. All I did was I marked things up. 

And I know there was a lot of good stuff that went through that store. There were people that would laugh. They would tell me after they bought stuff, of course, “You know what this thing is worth?” And I tell them I don’t care. I made a profit off of it, and that’s all I care about. And just go out and sell it and make a whole bunch of money and come back and buy something else. But I know that. I know that the art–we’d get these pictures, that they would sell at the estates and the auctions, and they would sell us these big old pictures for a little or nothing, and I’d bring them back and mark them up a little bit. I used to sell big living room pictures that were hand painted and stuff for $10-$20 bucks. Come to find out later on, that now that even the print, some of that stuff was way valuable, but I was turning it.

 And you know when I stop and I think back at how much stuff went through that store down there today, it blows my mind. Because it was just, there was truck load after truck load after truck load of it. And I had to move it because it kept coming in. And people would bring me stuff and sell it. I had to go out and hunt, and went to all the garage sales. But I know, as a matter of fact, if I had to say, if there was one mistake that I made was selling some of the stuff that I did, seriously. Because, if I would have had a big old warehouse somewhere, and I would have taken the better stuff and kept it today, it would be thousands of times more valuable. I flipped it. I turned it so, to just nail it down to something, I can’t really say that, that there’s anything that sticks out–that cannon does, but there were so many things, so many things that—it just, like I said, it still boggles my mind. It hurts my back to think about the work. It’s that psychological, you know? I’m thinking I’m getting a back ache talking about it.

6. Did you have any friends that you would see at those auctions or garage sales?

Oh, absolutely. The junk circle is a small circle. As a matter of fact, if I go somewhere, I don’t go very far. But if I see a really good ad or something, with antiques, I like antiques, and I’ve got a lot of them, and I still buy them. But if I go to a sale, I don’t go very far. But if I go over to Gresham or somewhere like that, I still run into those people. They’re still out there. They haven’t retired. Most of them are mall dealers, antiques mall dealers. They don’t have stores. Some of them do. The second hand store, my friend, is a tough business. It’s not easy. And there were a lot of people when I was in business that came and went in Estacada and they tried to mock me. They tried to copy me. And the reason they did that is because I was having so much fun, I made it look easy, and they thought it was easy money. They tried it, and they failed.

 And a lot of them lost a lot of money. I know they did. I’d seen what they were doing out there, and we’re trying to be in the sales and so, and I still see those people. I would say at least a third of the merchandise that I sold in that store, I sold the people that resell. So there were many of them, and they knew the day when the truck backed up to the door and they were there. They knew that the Fridays, and the Saturdays, and the Thursday mornings that I would come back. Sometimes I would be a little late. I’d put a “Be right back” sign in the door, and sometimes I had somebody that my family members could keep it open for me, but they would watch their clock, and I’d be there just about the same time.

Some of them would even see my pickup looking like the Beverly Hillbillies coming down the road. They’d follow me all the way. And I’d have to yell at them like little kids, and I tell them, “get away from there,” because they want to reach in and pull things out of the truck. It was just fun. And I still see those people. I still see the people in this mall here. (Referencing Wade Creek Vintage Market across from the Estacada library.) I still see them out there picking them and picking. And they’ve got the fever. They don’t have it as bad, I don’t think as I did, but you bet you see a lot of them.

A lot of dealers in there I know, and I’ve known them for years, and they get out there and they like to pick, and it used to be a lot of those that would come in my store, and it was a good place to pick. Because, like I said, the stuff was there, and it was cheap, and I had to talk some of them into things. I take a little bit of credit for mentoring some of them, and tell them that this is better than you think. Like I said, it’s kind of a little circle, and you can get in your car, your truck, and you could drive clear over to Portland somewhere, and you think, “Well, I’m going to get over here, away from everybody, and I’m going to get some good deals. And it’d be amazing how many people would show up, that you didn’t think you were going to see that day.” 

(Lily Shaver) In The Oregonian article from 2015, when they did a story about your shop because you were going to close up, they had pictures, and there were some pictures of the notes that you like to leave. One said, “Never pass judgment on a person until after you’ve met their dog.”

And that note was tacked right back by the elevator door. And the reason it was there is because I had a young gal that came in all the time that I went to high school with, that was in a wheelchair, and she had a little dog that she hauled on her lap, and his name was Tiger. She said the dog didn’t like anybody. Well, the dog didn’t have a chance with me, because I made friends with him, whether he wanted to or not. I just loved that little dog. And so I had that put by the elevator, so when she pushed the button to go downstairs, she could read that, and I told her that was because, I said, “If you didn’t have that cool little dog, I wouldn’t like you either.” So you see, there’s a story, you know, with all that stuff. It wasn’t just randomly placed. I’ve still got some of those signs. 

(Lily Shaver) Another sign said “Second hand store parking: free, museum parking $5.

Well, I always used to say to people that this isn’t a museum. And that place was busy. It was busy, busy, busy. And the old joke was that sometimes the store would get so full that people would park–they would double park, especially on the days when we would bring in the truck full of stuff. And some of them would park across the street and walk over, and some of them would come back the next day, and they would say that we tried to get in here, and we couldn’t get in here. And so the old joke was, especially with the good customers, it’d get busy in there. And I’d say, “All right, anybody that isn’t going to buy anything, get the hell out, because I need the parking.” It was all a joke. But that’s why I would tell those people, “This is not a museum.” They’d stand around and they’d hem and haw about something, and I just tell them, “Hey, we ain’t runnin’ no museum.” Oh, and also, people would complain, because they go and think about something, they would go and have a cup of coffee, and they would come back and whatever they’re looking at was gone. It moved that fast. And so I tell them, I tell them all the time. And I use the double negative, we ain’t running no museum here, and that’s what I meant. And so that’s why I had that, that sign up there, that this isn’t a museum. It wasn’t just random signage, it all had a reason.

What it was, basically, my friend, was Mike Doolittle having fun. That’s what it was. It’s all about Mike Doolittle. Isn’t that sad? Really, it wasn’t. But it was contagious. The fun was contagious. And shucks, I used to have–you know, the customers used to help me. They used to watch things while I was downstairs, loading cars. And they would sometimes, the ones that were very familiar with the place, would reach over the counter, and answer the phone when that was doing something else. And I would tell them that if it wasn’t for them helping me, I couldn’t have done it a lot of the time. But the little kids, you know, I would tell the little kids, some of the parents were scatterbrained, and I would tell kids to watch their parents, and if they moved anything, to tell me. And the little kids that come up, and they’d take me back and they’d point right exactly at what they moved and where they got it at. And of course, the psychology of that was that while they were watching the parents, they’re watching themselves.

I’ll never forget. A lot of the reporters would ask, they would say, “You’ve been here a long time, what is the secret to your success?” And I told this one reporter, I said, “Well, if you really want to know the truth, it’s my magnetic personality.” And there was this guy standing there, he’d come in quite a bit, and he comes over and he stands right between the two of us. And he says, “Mike,” he says, “Trust me. It is not your magnetic personality.” He said, “Just take my word for it. It is not your magnetic personality.” And I looked at that reporter, and I said, “You see where I mean?” She says “Yes. I do.” So it’s just kind of funny how the good Lord just kind of brings everybody together. He was just waiting for an opportunity to catch me on something. 

Robin Franzen [a reporter for The Oregonian] she’s the one who came out. At the time, it was all the hype about The Librarian movie that they were making here in Estacada. She stopped in because of the nature of the movie, there was a lot of old stuff that was put into that movie. And Mike’s was just right for that. And I didn’t know this at the time, but before they started all the hype about the movie and stuff, they go out and they look things over and see, they size things up. And I was busy, and I was carrying an arm load of stuff back into the back of the store, and there were a couple guys back there. One of them had a big old white cowboy hat on, and the other guy, an older guy, was with him, and he said, “Are you Mike?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I know about you, Mike. Do you know who I am? And I said, “I don’t know.” But I said, “If you’re somebody special,” I said, “if you’d just jump off the floor and fly around the room one time without dragging your feet on the floor, I know I’d be impressed.” A lot of people would come and say “Do you know who I am? Do you know what I own?” Well, anyway, you know who that was? It was Kevin Costner. And I didn’t know that at the time.  

So anyway, he kind of laughed, and I kind of laughed, and he left. And I never introduced myself. If he would have just said, “My name is Kevin Costner,” because everybody was looking for Kevin Costner. The set director that was in charge of buying all the props and stuff for the movie, came in later and said that “Kevin came in and told me to talk to you.” Oh, so that’s how I connected the story, see. The way they did business was by renting.  Well, I didn’t rent. I wasn’t in the business of rental, and I was too busy for it, and I wasn’t going to send things out, bring them back. I was busy. And so he they reluctantly bought and they bought, and they bought, and they bought, and they sent those white van trucks in there, truck load after truck load. They bought furniture. They bought a lot of old, rusty junk out of the tool section. And I even got out my little catalog out there, one of these little yellow pieces of paper that said, “save and hold.” But anyway, they bought and they bought. And when Robin came in, she had said, “Wow, what a store.” So then she asked me if she could do an article on the store, and I said, “Yes, you can. But you’re gonna have to…you see what I do in here. I can’t step off into an office somewhere. You’re gonna have to bear with me. 

So she called me and asked me a couple of questions afterwards, and I said, (I was joking) I said, “So, are we front page news?” And she says, “Well, I’m doing an article in the “Living” section. Mike, your front page, full page.” I said, “Well, I certainly hope so.” But that’s where I ran into her. See, it just flowed that way. I don’t think I ever did tell her that story about Kevin. The set director was such a nice fellow. He was such a nice guy, and we got along really well. And, sometimes he would tell me a little bit about what he was doing, when he was gonna do something, and then I could show him something to go with it, not to take credit. For him to come in like he did, and say, “I’m the set director,” was telling me that, that maybe Kevin said, “I wish I would have done that instead of asking who I was, “ (just putting two and two together), because I know from all the good things that I’ve heard about Kevin and all the good things he’s done and stuff, I wish that I would have met him. But at the same time, you know, he got a real dose of Mike Doolittle. And evidently he got enough of it that he didn’t come back. (Laughter)

I told my dad and my mother at that time that afterwards, “I think that’s who that was,” and my dad shook his head and he said, “Oh, you must have bruised his ego.” And I said “I didn’t mean to!” I was just busy, and I was just telling him the same thing I was telling everybody. Because, like I said, they used to come in, a lot of them come in and they wanted to know if I knew who they were, and a lot of times I’d tell them, “You know something, I’m not exactly sure,” but I said, “if you’re anybody special, I’ll figure it out all by myself and you won’t have to tell me.” A lot of them would do this haggling thing, where they thought that if they told me who they were…I had a lot of politicians come in there and put signs up from my yard, and I had some news personalities come through there. I had Patty Murray come through there one time, she was a nice lady, by the way. And so there were a lot of them, but some of them would say “I don’t know if you know me or not, but I own 4000 acres out there and stuff. And just because I own so many acres, you need to give me this for half price.” I’d tell them “I don’t care who you are.” I had a sign in there that said, “We don’t care who you are and what you own. The rules still stand,” you’d have to do just like everybody else does and obey the rules.

And of course, when I started that store, Lily, I was 27 years old. I was just a kid. I was just a young shaver when I was 27 years old. I knew that I knew junk. I had been at it long enough and I knew junk. I didn’t know whether I was gonna make a go of that store. And I talked the guy that owned the building into giving me a two month lease and so I gave him the first and the last and and I moved in and was there for 20 years in that building before I started to build. So, the rest is history. And I just found out that I could do a second hand store, and do it well. 

Like I said Lily, there should have been a law. There really should have been a law. I was never raised this way, but my parents raised me to be respectful of people, and the people would come in and I got to know them so well. And I was so rude to those people, and they were so rude back to me. 

I used to tell people, they’d come in and say, “What’s going on here? There are so many people in there.” And I say, “Well, this is the only place you can go in town and have a ball without buying a drink or getting a haircut.” And that place became the general store of Estacada, the old general store. You could go in there just like “Cheers!” You could go somewhere where everybody knew your name. And people would come in there, and they would visit with each other. Would meet each other. People would call me on the phone. My doctor called me on the phone one time, and his parents lived clear down in California, and they would drive the straight line from California to Mike’s Second Hand Store. They wouldn’t even stop at his house first. And they were old people. He called one day and he said, “I’m sorry to bother you.” He said, “I know you’re busy.” But he says “My parents don’t happen to be there?” And I said “Yeah, they’re here.” He says, “Well, can I talk to one?” I said, “Sure.” I took the phone and his mother yelled, “We’ll be there after a while, honey, we’re just fine.” She was into old glassware and he was into old tools, and they LOVED that place. 

People would come in, and I’d watch people like a hawk. Had to, had to watch people, and my biggest concern of all was safety. And I had that stairway in there, and I hold the record. I fell down that thing twice clear to the bottom, and both times I was carrying something I should’ve had help with. I’d watch people, and I’d watch them, and they’d come in and it was pretty much a rhythm to things. And pretty soon I wouldn’t see him, and I’d go downstairs, and here they’d be congregated down there, sitting on the couches down there visiting. Well, they were comfortable. And someone would have coffee in their hands and they felt at home there. And that was a real compliment to me. 

The little kid came in there one day, and he was, I had a 25 cent bin in there, and I had a 10 cent bin. And the 10 cent bin was full of nuts and bolts and screws and brackets and just stuff. And this woman would bring that little kid in all the time, and he was about that tall, and I had to put a little stool there, so that little guy could stand on there. And she’d ask me…he was such a good little kid. He didn’t go anywhere. He didn’t want to go anywhere. And he’d dig in that bin, and he’d take screws and nuts and he’d put them together, and he’d screw them together, and he’d just play. And so his mom would shop. And so one day she came in and she said, today, (I don’t remember what his name was,) but today is his birthday. 

And she said, “What do you want to do?” 

And he said, “I don’t know.” 

She said, “You want to go to the zoo?”

“Naw”

“You want to go to the park?”

“Naw.”

And then she says, “Well, what do you want to do?”

And he says, “I want to go down and see that crazy guy down there and look at his screws.” 

I’d play with him and I’d talk to him, visit with him. And I was a crazy guy, because adults didn’t do that. And he’d show me what he’d put together, and he just, he wanted the attention, and he just wanted to go see that crazy guy look at his screws.

7. The last thing to just wrap it up is, is there anything that you’d like to tell the Estacada community? A lot of people from around the area and people that live here or have lived here in the past, are going to be reading this. Is there anything that you want to tell them?

Absolutely, I miss them. I miss the customers. And there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t go somewhere…I went down to the grocery store the day before yesterday and got some eggs, and I hadn’t seen that little girl for a long time. You know what she told me? “I miss your store,” she said, “I miss it. I can’t believe how many things I’ve still got in my house that I bought out of your store. I said, “Well, you’re a smart business lady, because some of that stuff’s worth a lot of money now.” 

But I hear that continually. I don’t miss the hard work. I kind of miss the hunt, and I still do that on a much smaller scale, but I miss the people. And, I had some of the finest folks in the country. Now, I did have a few bad ones come in, and I got rid of them. My magnetic personality got rid of them. There was a guy that came in there, and I knew, and I had very little problem with theft, very little problem because prices were so low anyway. They didn’t quibble much. But I had a guy come in there, and I knew he was up to something, and he was into the radios. I sold a lot of the in dash car radios, back in the old days, the cars. They’d tear them out of the cars. It just happened, by chance, I got two of them exactly alike. And then a guy told me, and it was at the garage sale, he said, “This one works and this one doesn’t.” Well, I thought, good, you know what I was up to, don’t you? Well, I put the two radios in there on the shelf, and this guy that would come in there looking at radios, I knew he was a thief. So what I did was I put “works” on the bad one, and I put “doesn’t work” on the good one. 

And then what I did was I turned the tag over and I wrote the serial numbers on the back of the tank so I wouldn’t get it confused. So sure enough, the guy came in, he brought up the one that had $4 on it, and it was the one that works, and he bought it. And he came back in a couple days later, and he told me that it didn’t work. And I said, “Of course it didn’t work. That’s because you switched the tags. And I said…I was blunt, I was bold. I had to be. “I caught you switching tags before, red-handed, I caught him switching tags. And he’d always deny it, but there’s living proof. Here it was right there, and this is what we did. 

And there again, here Mike goes home from work, and he looks in the mirror and he says, you know, Mike, that guy says, you know, there ought to be a law. Mike, there just ought to be a law. There ought to be a law. And I’d say, “I know, but I haven’t got caught yet.”

Send a message to my customers, that I miss them. 

mike doolittle

I had signs all over in there that there was a fine for whining. And I even had a sign out there for a long time that was, the “Come on and whine about whatever’s on your mind.” And that was one of the words we use around there a lot, was whining. And, and you can just tell those people that I miss their whining, I miss their bantering. And I do. And if I was…I had a garage sale here a couple years ago. And it’s amazing how many people I saw. Of course, their eyes were just a beacon. And they said, “Are you going to start another store?” No, I’m too old for that now. But they would, they still say like I said, almost everywhere I go, and “I sure miss that store.” And I tell them, “There’s stores all over the place” and then they say “not like that one there.”

We’re all given gifts, and some of us discover them, some of us don’t. Some of us learn how to use them, some of us don’t. Some learn how to abuse them, and some of us don’t, but it’s a real a real pleasure, a blessing from God, to find your niche and to be able to find–the old saying is, “The secret in life is to find what you love to do and make money at it.” And that’s what I did, and that’s what most of these people, the ones that you like to interview. That’s what they did. They found their niche. And it’s a real blessing. I went clear through three college degrees, clear through college and all that kind of stuff. I went to Clackamas Community College, and got two degrees there, one in Associates Degree in Psychology and another Associates Degree in general studies. And then I went to Oregon State University and got a Bachelor’s of Science in Marketing. And so that’s where I learned bad habits on how to market stuff. 

And was going to be some big thought, big shot. And it took me a while, even after that, to figure out that I wasn’t doing what I loved. Of course, all that education that I got helped me with the business part of the business, with the financial part of the business, with the books. None of it was wasted. 

I think you would enjoy looking at a few of these things….

(Lily Shaver) He showed me a large stack of newspapers that he flipped through and showed me the articles he was in. He also showed me a stack of the old paper signs that he had all over his shop. He still has them! And he showed me his hat and posed for a picture. 

Read the article from The Oregonian below:

Iconic Estacada junk store owner Mike Doolittle closing up shop after 35 years – oregonlive.com