Salvage Savvy : From Propellers to Porsches to Phones, Nothing Goes to Waste in the Wrecking Business

Owner Al Head of National Aircraft Parts Sales, one of the largest airplane-salvage companies in California, was right in the middle of explaining how he acquires his inventory when an urgent call came in.

A pilot making an emergency landing at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima had run out of sky about a quarter of a mile short of the runway. The Beech Bonanza was a tangled mass of Al Head’s stock in trade . . . what jaded FAA inspectors, in moments of dark humor, call “aluminum rain.”

“I’ll have to call you later. Sometimes we’ve got to drop what we’re doing and respond immediately--like now,” he said. “In that way, at least, a hospital emergency room isn’t much different from the airplane salvage business.”

Salvage is the operative word at National Aircraft, on Cherry Avenue in Long Beach. There’s no such thing as “junk” anymore. There is only salvage--which involves selling off undamaged parts--and scrap, which is the last step before the irreducible carcass is converted into something brand-new.

In this age of recycling, very rarely does anything, be it plane, car, electronic gizmo or even a building, go completely to waste.

A passion for perfection is also at the heart of chiropractor Stephen Parrino’s longstanding relationship with the Aase Brothers Inc. salvage lot on Cypress Street in Anaheim.

Parrino is one of the Porsche fanatics, a group long noted for fastidious tastes in automotive equipment, and David and Dennis Aase have an acre and a half of “dead” Porsches in their back yard.

“I’ve bought four Porsches of various types from the Aase brothers,” Parrino said. “I find a car that’s not too badly damaged, take it completely apart and rebuild it to my idea of what a car should be. Then after a year or so, I get bored and sell it so I can buy another one to fix up.”

Parrino notes that Porsches are incredibly expensive cars anyway and credits Aase Brothers with allowing him to pursue his hobby. He estimates that trying to restore a $40,000 car with factory-new parts would cost more than $75,000.

“The value of these cars works to our advantage in dealing with our many overseas customers,” Dennis Aase said. “In Australia, for instance, there’s a 130% duty on imported cars, but they only pay 35% for a wrecked-parts car. So we regularly get teams of automotive entrepreneurs from Down Under coming in and buying cars that are wrecked but complete.

“They’ll stuff a 40-foot cargo container full of cars and parts, ship it home and have the cheap expert labor that’s available there rebuild them like new,” he said. “Puts me in mind of how we started, going over to Germany, buying salvage-yard parts and shipping them back here in VW buses with the doors welded shut.”

The Aase brothers are considering adding another car line.

“Up to this point we’ve dealt exclusively in Porsches, but in the past couple of years the price of Corvettes, both new and wrecked, has escalated into Porsche territory,” David Aase said. “And Corvette owners are every bit as fanatical about their cars as Porsche owners, so we’re in the phone-call stage of exploring the possibility of expanding in that direction.”

While cars, and even airplanes, might seem logical candidates for salvage yards, Barry Lawyer believes there’s room in the scheme of things for a telephone junkyard as well.

The outside wall of the ramshackle building on Bessemer Street in Van Nuys that houses his appropriately named Telephone Salvage Co. is painted with a none-too-subtle parody of the old Bell System logo, a Liberty Bell with the crack covered with a bandage . . . and the inside is an electronic cave, the walls literally lined, floor to ceiling, with every sort of telephone and phone-related paraphernalia imaginable. Some of it looks like Star Wars, some like leftovers from the newsroom at the Daily Planet.

“This is where phones come for their last call,” Lawyer said, grinning. “The place may not look like much, but the bottom line is, I’m a major-league telephone junkie. If it has anything to do with old phones, I either know about it and have one or can find out and get one.”

His collection includes everything from antique phones to racks of switching equipment to a five-line business phone in a lurid neon pink. And while the equipment he sells has no written guarantee, some of his customers attest that Lawyer is a man of honor.

“It was his help that allowed us to start the business without going into debt over our heads,” said Dolores Chevron, owner of the Studio City-based Future Players Agency, an entertainment firm specializing in casting “day players” for TV and movies.

“We needed a business phone system, and the phone company quoted us $1,300, which was about triple what we could afford. Barry sold us just what we needed for $300 and came over to repair it for free when a part went bad. And he’s such a spiritual person . . . I remember right after we opened, sitting there worrying about having no money, the phone not ringing. In walks Barry and gives me a pep talk that made my day.”

A vivid imagination is just what it takes to visualize the inside of Apex Electronics, for 34 years a fixture on San Fernando Road in Sun Valley. If Barry Lawyer does business in a cozy little electronic cave, Apex is an electronic cavern, 10,000 square feet of building and a 1 1/2-acre back yard jammed to bursting with every manner of switch, wire, transistor, transformer, diode, solenoid, rectifier, widget and gizmo known to man. And occasionally a couple that aren’t known . . . or aren’t supposed to be.

“A couple of years ago we bought a piece of electronic equipment so unusual that even I had no idea what it was,” said Bill Slater, patriarch of the Apex Electronics family dynasty.

“But we sell lots of that kind of stuff to the movie and TV people for special effects, so we put it out in the inventory,” he recalled. “Next thing I know we’re up to our ears in military officers and FBI men wanting to know where we got the dang thing. Turns out it was some kind of super-secret hardware, but someone fouled up the paper work so it was sold as surplus.”

Though the day-to-day business of Apex is largely the mundane stuff of servicing the needs and whims of electronic junkies worldwide, there is an undeniable glamorous aspect.

“They’re in the hardware end of the fantasy business,” said Kevin Pike, owner of Filmtrix, a North Hollywood-based movie and television special-effects company. “Apex supplied a lot of the hardware, both functional and cosmetic, that we used in effects and set decoration for ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘The Last Starfighter’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ There’s so much stuff in the warehouse and the yard out back that you have to approach it with your imagination in overdrive.”

And if the scale of Apex Electronics seems overwhelming, consider Cleveland Wrecking Co., which claims to be the largest salvage company in the world--a company that has demolished everything from a Beverly Hills mansion to an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania and which sells everything from a 40,000 barrel-a-day petroleum refining plant (to China) to used bricks.

“I achieved a long-cherished personal goal some years ago when I demolished my old alma mater, Los Angeles High School,” said William Fenning, owner of Cleveland Wrecking.

“I still have one of the gargoyles from the roof cornice in my office as a memento, and we’ve got stuff out in the yard to satisfy a decorator’s wildest dream.”

And the wildest dreams of Helen and Jarvis Luechauer are all embodied in a strikingly unusual home situated in the hills above Universal City. Combining a background in general contracting and woodworking with current careers as a husband-wife dentist team, the Luechauers have spent the last 12 years turning their home into a showplace of what the dedicated and imaginative scrounger can find in the Cleveland Wrecking yard on Leonas Boulevard in Vernon, including mahogany staircases, solid oak doors, 25-foot arched windows, enormous chandeliers and artwork left over when Busch Gardens was demolished, and right on down to light fixtures and kitchen cabinets.

“The house is an ongoing project, and it’s great therapy to get away from the pressures of the office,” Helen Luechauer said. “We added 4,000 square feet to the house when we remodeled, and there’s still a garage full of stuff downstairs that we’re in the process of deciding what to do with. I freely admit to having the propensities of a William Randolph Hearst, but its probably a good thing I don’t have that kind of money.”

Several days later and back at National Aircraft Parts Sales, Al Head has transported the wrecked Bonanza back to his salvage yard. He resumes his conversation about recycling:

“If you drink beer,” he said, “you’ve probably enjoyed a cold Bud from a can that used to be an airplane . . . which is what’s going to happen to most of that Bonanza.”

National Aircraft Parts Sales scraps as many as 90 planes a year, in a process almost identical to what happens to old cars. The company has two 1-acre lots at the Long Beach Municipal Airport, where an evaluation is performed to determine whether the plane can be repaired and put back into service or if it has to be dismantled and sold for parts, with the leftover aluminum framework going to the metal salvage yard.

Not that every plane winds up in either an organ donation or as a beer can. Some wrecks are sold, as wrecks, to movie and TV productions with scripts that call for such things. And some are sold to people such as Earl Moffit, a craftsman who gets so deep into rebuilding a plane that what emerges at the other end of his attentions is in better shape than when it first left the factory.

His current project is a Cessna TU 206, a single-engine, six-passenger plane that was stolen from Northern California and found, badly damaged, in Mexico several years later.

“I paid only $1,800 for it,” he said, “but I’ve got another $30,000 tied up in a rebuilt engine and new radio and electronics gear. It’ll be worth maybe $55,000 when I’m done, but it’s not for sale. I’m going to fly charters to Alaska and Mexico with it, and the reason I put so much work into it is that if I’m going to fly into remote country, I want to do it in a plane that I know is perfect.”