Strangeness In Store -- Archie Mcphee & Co. Moves Its Weird Inventory Of `Body Parts' And Other Novelties From Funny Fremont To The Great Unknown Of Ballard

-------- New digs --------

Archie McPhee & Co.'s new location is 2428 N.W. Market St., Seattle. Telephone: 206-297-0240.

Humor the Archie McPhee workers as they run around like rubber chickens with their heads cut off.

They're loading up their Nunzillas ($3.50), edible larvets (12 packets for $13.95), and van Gogh's ears ($1.95) over the next weeks to leave the comforting funny farm of Fremont for the great unknown of formerly stoic Ballard.

"Body parts are up the ramp to your left," says a saleswoman cheerfully, belying the nostalgic sadness for the last days at the old wooden store north of the intersection of Stone Way North and North 35th Street, which closes next week.

Hundreds of thousands of folks around the world get Archie McPhee & Co. catalogs. Thousands more shop the "Outfitters of Popular Culture" online (www.mcphee.com). But only Northwesterners and tacky tourists know the thrill of buying Gurgling Guts and Brain Gelatin Molds in the flesh.

Stairs squeak and floors clunk at the cramped old store, letting customers add a percussion to the backdrop of 1950s Hawaiian guitar music.

The new store has a "fabulous" red linoleum floor, the workers will tell you, and so much floor space that all those 1-cent colored sea shells won't have to be restocked every few days.

The new store has huge revolving hardware bins, freshly painted in bright primary colors, waiting to be filled with 10,000 novelty items, most "Made in China."

"And parking!" says manager Shana Iverson, putting on a brave face.

It's true. The new store just west of Northwest Market Street and 24th Avenue Northwest shares an actual parking lot with the liquor store, prompting Archie McPhee to greatly increase its cocktail section (tumbler monkeys, anyone?).

But as the basement warehouse clears in Fremont, leaving behind the odd cracked pink flamingo and stray glow-in-the-dark eyeball, there's time for one more turn around the old store that has drawn customers for 14 years.

"The saddest thing we're leaving is our bathroom," says Iverson.

The walls have been painted as murals, she says, with old Archie McPhee fortune-cookie sayings and glow-in-the-dark tributes to people and things that are gone. Iverson is represented by a fish, she says.

"Do you want to see it? Oh, wait. Somebody's in it."

Squeak, squeak, squeak, up the stairs we go to the narrow catwalk, made of plywood and two-by-fours, which overlooks papier-mache trapeze artists and a two-headed tightrope walker, who dangle above the customers.

"That's one thing I'll really miss about this place is the mezzanine," says Iverson, sighing. "There's an incredible view from here."

Oh, Juliet, Juliet. The store's lone customer looks up.

"Do you have a grow-a-date?" he asks.

One thing the workers won't miss are the "can-I-squeeze-by-you?" storerooms, where you can rest your chin on the shelf in front and the back of your head on the overflowing shelf behind you.

The store is named for owner Mark Pahlow's late great-uncle-in-law, a practical joker who took the first jazz band to China in the 1920s. No accommodations were made for the intrepid, North Dakota-rooted McPhee on the ship out of Seattle, so he managed the band from the hold, shoveling coal to earn his keep.

Pahlow now travels the globe looking for interesting novelties, which seem to be in no short supply. Some he tweaks - for instance, putting chili peppers in place of standard light bulbs on Christmas strings, and others he just repackages to sell wholesale as "Accoutrements."

Pahlow has an uncanny eye - or maybe two - and a Gomez Addams sensibility. Does Iverson, a caldron of bubbling enthusiasm, ever wonder at what he brings back?

"All the time," she says, passing by a stack of snowshoe-like wooden bog shoes without comment.

Archie McPhee & Co. has a back-of-the-comic-book feel to it. Iverson knows it. But she likes to emphasize that the store, catalog and Web site are not just Groucho glasses.

Take, for instance, industrial surplus, her favorite section.

Perfection specimen urine bottles. Soiled linen bags. Hazardous-waste warning tape.

"They're so cool and they make great gifts."

Taxidermist's eyeballs. Doll heads. Old buggy wheels.

"These are real fallout-shelter signs from the 1950s. People underestimate how incredibly cool they are. When they're gone, they're gone."

Sani-fone covers to ward off talking germs. Weird rubber straps with knobs on either end.

"People call and say, `I need 30 of them,' " Iverson says. "We don't ask questions."

That's another thing that will be missed about the old store. New items were stapled on top of old.

Assistant manager Pete Gibson, standing near the brain candles, squirting eyeballs and other body parts, says people will come in and ask for something the store hasn't sold in three years. He tells them to try their luck by looking on the ceiling or in between items or in corners.

"Like pocket protectors," says Gibson, looking up. "We haven't had them for years and years, and there's two right there!"

Gibson likens dismantling the old displays to carbon-dating a tree. He wonders if staples might be holding the building together.

Sure, they're going to miss the old sloping floors, he says. Sure, it's taken years and years to get the store so perfectly packed with "classic" items.

"But the new store is nice. It has parking."

Brave soldier!

Sometime next week, what's left in the Archie McPhee store in Fremont will be loaded onto elephants ("I'm kidding," said Gibson) . . . no, will be loaded into a U-Haul and carted off to Ballard. There may be only a day when no Archie McPhee & Co. is open in Seattle.

The new store will start selling in mid-March, but the official grand opening won't be until April Fools' Day - or "April Fish Day," as they celebrate it at Archie McPhee, with costume and interpretive dance.

"There are things that make sense only to us and our customers," says Iverson.

Meanwhile, customers are buying fortune cookies that say "You will have a strange urge to go to Ballard," emphasis on "strange."

There's no creaking, no squeaking, but someday the shiny new store will likewise be packed with goods impossible to live without.

"This store is so weird," said a man looking over Pez dispensers representing famous sweethearts - Donald and Daisy, etc. - as his wife thumbed through a book of paper-doll cutouts for cross-dressers.

Maybe so. But now they'll have parking.

--------------------------------------- Last year Archie McPhee sold more than: ---------------------------------------

-- 9,000 wind-up, sparking Nunzillas.

-- 4,000 glass urine specimen bottles.

-- 12,000 rubber chickens.

-- 50 miles of Danger Mines! (in English and Arabic) barricade tape (surplus from Desert Storm).

-- 3,000 Computer Goddesses (angels that protect your PC).