AUBURN — Rene Cloutier never pawned a thing before he became a pawnbroker.

The businessman from Turner spent more than 20 years operating Ace Custom Homes and grew weary of the physical toll and the need for reliable help.

“It was wearing me down,” Cloutier said. “It was getting to be too much.”

So he rented a shop in New Auburn beside Pontbriand’s hardware and opened Auburn Pawn. He knew no one who’d done it, but he figured he’d like the variety of tasks.

“You pawn,” he said. “You sell. You buy.”

He got a list of rules and went to work.

“Honestly, my wife thought I was crazy,” Cloutier said, “She said, ‘Your business is going so good. Why are you doing this?’ I said I was going to get out of the construction business when I was 45, and I did.”

Sixteen years later, the shop is still in operation.

In 2007, he moved out of the former hardware building and bought his own shop around the corner at 36 Mill St. At about the same time, he was joined in the business by his son, Justin.

The pair have been working together ever since.

“He picked it up really quick,” Cloutier said of his son, now 24.

By the time he started at 17, he was an old hand at the pawn business, having hung around the shop since he was a kid.

“When I was too young to work, I was out back playing video games,” Justin Cloutier said.

He listened. He learned to quickly find the value of the item, to make a deal that preserves profit for the shop and to only buy items that work.

“If we can’t check it or test it, we’re not going to buy it,” he said. “We have to see how good it is.”

The elder Cloutier seems relaxed with his son’s deals.

“I can leave here and not worry about it,” the elder Cloutier said. “He can run the business just as good as I can, probably a little better in some areas.”

Justin Cloutier is especially good with the computer items, even offering to repair computers for a price. Father and son are also branching out in the coming weeks to buy and sell firearms.

There are lots of places to specialize.

The shop is a collection of hardware and tools, laptop computers, tablets, games, movies, watches, rings, gold and coins. One wall has guitars. Another has a collection of pool cues. And in the center of the room, beside the DVDs, the store features an electricity generator.

Then, there are the unusual items: a skinny-barreled, 19th century boot pistol, an antique Napali knife with a curved blade to efficiently cut throats and a pair of World War II artifacts, a Japanese sword and trench warfare binoculars.

The popular TV show — “Pawn Stars” — gets the variety of items right, Rene Cloutier said.

“You never know what’s going to walk through that door,” he said. “It’s a fact.”

Some can’t fit through the door, though.

The father and son have accepted motorcycles, pickup trucks, boats and RVs. They once accepted a piece of land.

“We don’t go searching for things to buy,” the elder Cloutier said. “Everything in here came in because somebody walked in and sold it to us.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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