Loan Rangers : Pawnbrokers working in Orange County make transactions big and small. They deal in the business of opportunities--taking them and providing them.

The penniless and the rich come to see retired dentist Paul Kilgore. Mostly the penniless. He doesn’t pull their teeth anymore, but maybe he will give them cash for their gun or wedding ring.

That would be at Hock It to Doc, his original Anaheim pawnshop and the crown jewel of his three stores. He may be the largest pawnbroker in Orange County, although nobody seems positive.

Sacrificed or abandoned to Kilgore for cash loans are an antique Russian rug, disco decade furniture and cutting-edge computers. In return, he offers a financial painkiller--for interest, naturally.

His biggest loan ever was $25,000, Kilgore says, “but usually about the average is $50. There’s only a few high rollers who loan the big bucks. You don’t make as much money at that end.”

Some, such as Newport Beach pawnbroker Alan King, do try for the big fish. People have hocked RVs, a Humvee and yachts to King.

Roman emperor Augustus Caesar founded a pawn brokerage as early as 31 BC, according to the book “God Bless Pawnbrokers,” by Peter Schwed, a youthful clerk at a Depression-era pawnshop who went on to become Simon & Schuster’s CEO. The Catholic Church allegedly opened pawnshops in 13th century Italy to help farmers get from planting to harvest season.

Today, the county’s bankruptcy, federal government shutdowns and aerospace industry layoffs are among the vagaries that propel those down on funds to their local pawnshop.

They include a contractor owed thousands of dollars by the county of Orange--a debt unpaid since the county filed for bankruptcy more than a year ago. The contractor pawned his $27,000 Bronco to make payroll.

Lately, Kilgore has been seeing customers pinched for cash because the check wasn’t in the mail--due apparently to government slowdowns during the federal budget standoff.

“We see every ordinary person you can imagine,” said Kilgore, 74, who runs pawnshops in Anaheim, Fullerton and Santa Ana with his wife, son and another partner.

The business of pawnbroking offers a glimpse from a different angle at the world’s financial picture.

“A few years ago, before it was big news that the real estate industry was in trouble, we’d get business owners in pawning big things,” Kilgore said. “People like paint store owners, real estate company owners, escrow company owners.”

Now in the shadow of Christmas, he and other pawnbrokers say they anticipate a rush in the next two months. Credit agencies report credit card spending as much as 20% higher than last holiday season, and some of those customers are going to be hocking this and that to pay their bills.

Or unexpected expenses on top of those bills.

Let’s say you need a fast $500 to attend your cousin’s out-of-town funeral. So you take a hefty $2,000 diamond broach to your local pawnbroker. He appraises it, decides he could quickly sell it for $1,000 if he’s stuck with it and will lend you half of that, plus interest.

State law sets the borrowing rate for pawnbrokers, which varies based on the amount of cash loaned and outstanding balance. The smallest loans are charged 2.5% monthly. The pawnbroker must hold your broach--or any item pawned--for four months and a 10-day grace period. If you fail to pay back the loan and interest or fail to pick up your broach, the pawnbroker can then sell it and pocket the proceeds.

The state regulates loans by pawnbrokers of up to $2,500. More than that, and the interest rate is whatever you and the pawnbroker agree on.

The interest works much like that of your credit card: You are charged monthly interest on your unpaid balance, says Denis Hooker, president of the San Jose-based Collateral Loan Assn., a statewide industry group with 400 members. Hooker, a pawnbroker of 40 years, said about 700 pawnbrokers are actually practicing in the state.

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Pawnbrokers will tell you about their customers, though you will never find them naming names. They guard identities as closely as plastic surgeons do.

Since money and income are frequently taboo conversational subjects, pawnbrokers see a side of our neighbors and co-workers to which we are not privy.

There was the stockbroker who borrowed a big bundle against an expensive car so he could invest it--wisely, it turned out a few days later. At least two pawnbrokers have loaned money to a wealthy housewife who repeatedly hawks family jewels--her husband’s family’s jewels, that is--to bankroll shopping sprees. She can more easily hide the mall damage by paying back the loan over time.

Beverly Hills pawnbrokers report loaning money on paintings by Renoir and other luxury items, sometimes to Hollywood producers trying to corral the cash to finish a movie.

Of course, most who trudge into the pawnshop have more garden-variety money crunches.

Kilgore has regular customers who are just so lousy at managing their money that he would wonder about them if they failed to show up on the eve of every payday.

Like their clients, pawnbrokers come in all sizes and specialties.

Some will loan money only on jewelry as collateral.

Alan King is a former car dealer, so he tends to deal with vehicles and boats. Pawnbrokers like Kilgore, with 8,500 square feet of space, will accept anything for which they can establish a value that makes the deal worth their while.

Going into pawnbroking is not for the soft touch--or the dull, it seems.

King, for instance, is a smooth-talking salesman whose patter harks from the Rat Pack era. He likes to party at the Balboa Bay Club and once ended an interview by announcing, “I gotta take off this beard dye! I’ll call ya back!” His efforts to cinch a deal win him loyalty, several customers said. But--with good reason--he insists on having collateral in hand.

Early in his still-new pawnbroker business, King loaned a French baron money. Big money. The baron hocked his $2-million yacht and even invited King to spend a weekend on it moored off Catalina Island.

Live and learn.

“Later we find out he didn’t have title to the boat, so I had to go have the thing seized,” says King, chalking up the ordeal as a good early lesson. “Now I never loan money unless I have possession of the collateral.”

An unemployed aerospace engineer on the verge of losing his Nellie Gayle Ranch home borrowed $10,000 from King.

“He’s straightforward, but he’s not insensitive,” said the engineer. “He moved heaven and earth to get our deal done. I pawned two cars, one of which was not running and was 50 miles away. Alan gets a tow truck, because he was not going to loan any money without the cars, and here I was getting my money at 1:30 in the morning to take to the lender the next day at 9.”

King has got himself a new gig with what he deems excellent exposure, if not excellent salary.

After taking out advertising on conservative KDOC-TV talk show host Wally George’s show, King appeared on it. George interviewed him, and the chemistry was so good--King played straight man--that the pair are co-hosting starting early next month.

George--whose trademarks are a helmet of yellow-white hair and ejecting various guests by shouting with his audience, “You’re outta here!”--said King and his unique line of work make him a novel sidekick.

“I’d never heard of anybody pawning a plane or a yacht for cash,” George said of King’s efforts to attract big-ticket collateral for bigger sums. King will need it: The job of George’s co-host does not pay.

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Fair or not, pawnbroking has, in its long history, always had a whiff of the unsavory to it.

“There have been pawnshops since almost Day One,” said Hooker of the Collateral Loan Assn. “But because we deal, in the main, with the economically lower echelon of the population, those that are haughty and worth big bucks like to look down on us grass-roots banks.”

Because the state only regulates interest on loans of under $2,500, the cost of borrowing more can vary wildly from pawnbroker to pawnbroker. As the aerospace engineer from Nellie Gayle Ranch found, some outfits wanted to charge him “200% a month. They were preying on people, like loan sharks,” he said.

Hooker of the Collateral Loan Assn. says that mom and pop pawnshops make up a large share of those in the business. He goes so far as to suggest that pawnshops, which often cash checks and sell secondhand goods, are replacing the general store in some areas.

In fact, Kilgore, the dentist turned pawnbroker, thinks a new generation of operators over the past decade have helped spruce up the pawnbroker’s image and gotten their shops zoned into better parts of town.

When he opened his second store in Fullerton two years ago, it so resembled a snazzy jewelry store that customers walked right by it the first few months, calling later for directions.

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One thing pawnshops give clients that other lenders usually don’t is cash today.

The out-of-work aerospace engineer found King in the newspaper classifieds and held onto the number for several months--until he was less than a day from losing his house. Then he called King’s office at Newport Federal Sales & Leasing. Starting in the evening, King made sure the titles on the engineer’s cars were clear of liens, that they belonged to him and, finally, that he had both cars in his custody. Only then did King hand over $5,000 in cash.

Earlier this month--four weeks after the above episode--the man hawked 4,500 collector magazines to King for another $5,000 to pay his mortgage, King said.

“You could really get on a treadmill,” the engineer admitted, “but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures. Sure it may cost $500 in interest, but that’s to save your largest single asset.”

Kilgore says that every day he sees what people will give up for quick cash: Even though they plan to come back for it later, there is always a risk that they will lose it forever.

There are company owners who have a cash-flow crunch and pawn their gun collections to make payroll.

There are single mothers who pawn appliances because their child is sick and they can’t wait to pick up a prescription until payday.

There are people who show up the same day every week who are just poor money managers. Or they overspend at every holiday--birthdays, fireworks on Independence Day, anything, really.

There are elderly women, “lovely gracious ladies,” Kilgore says, “who pawn a beautiful antique or a family heirloom for the money to take their grandkids to Disneyland.”

He estimates that 90% of them return for their belongings. And computerized records indicate that 60% of his business is repeat business, Kilgore says.

“We have people who come in five, six times a year to pawn the same item. We also have people who actually want to sell something, but for some reason they feel a stigma or embarrassment about it, so they pretend they’re pawning it and never return for the item.”

Not just those on the skids borrow cash from pawnbrokers, though.

Richard Stewart pawned his $250,000 customized recreational vehicle--white leather upholstery, custom wood paneling like a fine ship, step-down bathroom tub--for a quick $70,000 from King. But Stewart, 50, says business couldn’t be better for him. Along with King, he figures he too will make money on the pawn.

Stewart sells electronic banking systems to companies and thinks he is on the verge of business blastoff. He is using the $70,000 from King to buy down a loan.

More routine, said Kilgore, are Social Security recipients who pawn personal possessions when their checks fail to arrive or arrive late.

“You’d be surprised how often that happens,” he said.

Kilgore takes it all in stride.

He figures pawnbroking stacks up pretty well against his previous career. Kilgore had grown restless with his Anaheim dental practice and found the early onset of so-called managed health care in the mid-1980s too much headache.

“Plus,” he said wryly, “my new wife wanted to work with me, and she didn’t know anything about fixing teeth. So we studied the business [of pawnbroking] for two years; my son and another partner were involved, and we all learned a different specialty.”

After 40 years of pulling teeth, he muses, the pawnshop business has proven far more rewarding.

“And now, my customers seem to appreciate me a lot more than they did in the past.”