An Ellensburg Treasure, In A Lot Full Of Junk

ELLENSBURG - Not just anyone can make 9 acres of junk feel like home.

Stan can.

Pull up a rusty chair next to the fire and expect to stay awhile when you visit Stan Barnett's salvage yard.

"Want a beer?" Stan will ask. Might as well accept because he won't take no for an answer.

"We drink beer here," he says, adding that you have a choice between Schmidt Ice or Mug Root Beer.

Stan has owned Capitol Ave. Repair, Ellensburg's only scrap-metal yard, for almost 40 years. It's a vast accumulation of junk, scrap metal, rusting automobiles and everything else metal. It rises four stories and draws people from throughout the region.

On most days, the 84-year-old king of junk is sitting near the entrance, close to a pile.

Friends visit every day, bringing cases of beer, sharing stories about the past, speaking about metal and talking about who's sick. Stan chats about his projects.

"When I retire, there's enough stuff out there to start a man in the garage business," he says. "There's a lot of junk out there that I have to work on when I get old."

He'll tell you about the Central Washington University art students who buy metal for their sculptures. Sometimes they leave their final projects, which Stan gives prominent display in his lot - the way a proud parent tapes a child's painting to the fridge.

Life on the salvage yard is good, Stan says. Ralph the dog howls at passing trains. And there are new piles of junk every day.

"This is a pleasure," he says, waving his hand around the mountains of scrap. "The best thing about this place is if you get a load of stuff in, you can tell how hard a man works and what he works at by looking at his scrap. There's always something new that comes in that you don't know where it came from."

The junk is a rusting museum of Kittitas County's past. Stan is its curator.

There's a smokestack from a long-dismantled Ellensburg sawmill, turbine parts from an old Kittitas County power plant and jars once filled with gold dust found by a prospector decades ago near Cle Elum.

Old appliances tower in 30-foot-high stacks. Weeds grow around vintage diesel trucks, and dust collects on Model-T parts in his shop. There's farming and logging equipment, bed frames, bathtubs, bicycles and fuel pumps. Stan knows exactly where it's all stored.

He invites anyone to amble the labyrinth of trails. "The dog'll take you," says Stan, who prefers to sit in front of the fire or piece through some scrap metal.

Ralph, a large German shepherd mix, was plopped wordlessly into Stan's lap by a stranger a few years ago. The canine guide will happily pad through piles, mounds and stacks, chasing the occasional cat, snapping at bees and waiting for you to pick a direction to wander.

Keith Hudson recovered from cancer, quit his counseling job and started working for Stan recently. He likes the laid-back attitude and working in the open air. But mostly he likes Stan.

"We live in a throwaway society," Hudson says. "For people who are doing everything from restoring cars to trucks, this is a gold mine to them. Stan sees value in everything. First and foremost, people."

His friends say he's just like his junk.

"It's his honesty. This is the way he is, and this is the way the stuff is," said a friend who asked to remain anonymous.

Stan's wife kicked him out of the house nine years ago because he stayed at work too much. He bought a Winnebago and parked it deep within the chaos. His wife and daughter live in California now. Stan prefers the salvage yard.