Finding happiness behind a pawn shop counter

Katina Stewart is not the person you would expect to find behind the counter of a pawn shop. Her polite joking, youthful face and sweet manner are the antithesis of images of drive-a-hard-bargain Louie-the-Legbreaker types.

But just as surprising is the fact that Stewart seems comfortable among the rows of guitars and guns, fishing poles and chain saws, hammers and wrenches at Alaska Best Pawn, which she helps run with her father and sister.

"You do have men who don't want to talk to you," the 30-year-old woman said between answering phone calls and helping customers. "Some people see a woman back here and think she is there to do the filing and sweep the floor."

But this woman does a lot more than all that.

"The 16-speed drill press?" she asked one customer. As she tabulated the bill, Stewart joked with the man about presidential politics and gun laws.

Most customers who come to the Valley shop, she said, are good people. There are a lot of characters, she added with a laugh, and some of them become more like friends than customers.

"A lot of times we feel just like bartenders, listening to all their stories about why they need money," she said.

One of the more amusing aspects of the job is the way people feel as if they have to justify their need to pawn a belonging. She said one guy came in recently and said he needed to pawn something so he could get $10 for gasoline. Once the deal was done, he said, "Good. Now I can go get a pack of smokes and a beer."

But the job isn't always amusing. She said there are also a lot of sad stories. She recalled one woman who came in to pawn a ring.

"It was a beautiful, sunny warm day and as she walked out I said, 'Have a nice day,'" she recalled. "She turned back to me and started crying. She said, 'How the hell can I have a nice day when I'm dying?'"

Deals can often be emotional, Stewart said. People come in because they have to buy a plane ticket to get to a sick loved one, or to sell items because there has been a death in the family. Other times they just need to pay bills or bail a friend out of jail. Stewart said she recognizes that money is often a touchy subject for people.

In addition to sad stories, Stewart said she also has to put up with out-and-out lies. People will bring in stuff and try to pawn it for much more than it is worth.

"I have to say, 'I'm sorry. I can't give you $100 for a toaster," she said.

This is where catalogs and the Internet come in handy, to accurately assess the value of items. The gun or ring is the shop's insurance on getting its money back. The Stewarts lend half of what they think it is worth and if the person doesn't come back for it, they have to be able to sell it to get their money back.

The pawn business has a bad reputation among some people, but Stewart said it is mostly undeserved. She said it is rare for them to come across stolen goods and she doesn't think thieves traffic through pawn brokers because their identification and the items they bring in are matched up through the businesses' computers.

As for the reputation of it being a dangerous business, Stewart said she reads in trade publications about shootings, robberies and other terrible situations at pawn shops in the Lower 48, but she said she herself has only occasionally felt threatened by customers.

Her parents, she said, don't feel it is the safest occupation for their daughters so they hope one will focus on selling tools and the other will operate a storage rental so they aren't left to run the pawn shop without their father.

In the meantime, though, Stewart can often be found beside her father at Alaska Best Pawn. She admits the business didn't come as second nature to her.

"With the guns, the biggest thing was learning how to open them up and look at them … just the mechanics of it," she said.

Along the way, she has also learned a lot about tools, jewelry, electronics and everything else under the sun. Stewart has been helping her father run the business, which includes both a tool shop and pawn brokerage, for the past seven years. And while she imagines that she and her husband will stay in the Valley and she will continue to work beside her father, it wasn't always assumed that she would get into the family business.

She graduated from high school in Anchorage, where she grew up, and went on to receive a business degree from the University of San Francisco. She spent some time as an exchange student in Norway and, during the course of her life, she has seen a lot of the United States and Europe.

She came back home to Alaska with plans to eventually go on to law school, but instead she decided to stay put with her family. When asked what made her choose her home state in the end, she said the crowds, pollution and crime in other places always bothered her and she never did feel well-suited to the high heels and make-up of her life in California.

That doesn't mean she's ready to head to rural Alaska, however. Her mother is Yupik, originally from the village of Alakanuk near the mouth of the Yukon River. Stewart said she visited there when she was younger but when asked if she has ever thought of living there or in other areas of the Bush, she laughed and said, "Oh no. I have a hard time even going camping. Honestly, I have to have running water."

So as far as she can see into the future, the Mat-Su Valley and Alaska Best Pawn are home for Stewart.