Prisms, Bungee Cords and Lexan

By Doug Stokes

It’s sort of a cross between an alchemist’s lair and a ’60s magic shop. Or, maybe it’s more like the original mad scientist’s private stash. Then again, it just could be the place that you’ve been looking for (but really didn’t know it until you stepped into the doorway that fateful afternoon) all of your life.

This joint is just cram-jammed-packed-chocked full to the gunnels with bits and pieces of incredible, unnamable techno-stuff that seemingly range from the Jurassic period to present day. To put an even finer point on it, there are actually hundreds of items that the guy who’s been in the biz some 34 years can’t even ID! (Hang on, we’ll meet him in a minute.)

This is a wall-to-wall toy store for the seriously mechanico-technically enabled among us. This is one humongous science fair kit that thinks it’s a store.

Giant lens packs, prisms, segments of high-tech electronic devices, trains of gears, gun cameras, beakers, shrink tubing, tiny pumps, propellers, surveyor’s sextants, exotic tools, military strength nuts, bolts, screws, whole huge sheets of bullet-proof Lexan™, industrial strength bungee cords, the biggest/widest damn tie-wraps you’ve ever seen, and thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of other wonderfully curious items are all neatly arranged like so many shoes or handbags in a department store.

Only this department store is for racers, inventors, gizmo builders, experimenters, performance artists, tinkerers, toaster repairmen, trade school dropouts, off-duty aerospace engineers, wizards, wookies, and movie makers. Yup, this is where Hollywood comes for all that cool-looking, wild, weird-wired, retro-techno stuff that you see in movies (and not just the science fiction ones) up there on the big (and small) screen.

This is one of those authentic “just one look” joints. A quick scan of the stuff arrayed in the front window and you are either all in or not in the least bit interested. Let your hypothalamus be your guide. The siren call of this tiny shop at the top of Highland Avenue in Duarte is either all-consuming or totally inaudible, there’s no in between. No way, no how.

And that guy mentioned earlier, he’s the kind of a shopkeeper who spots the real enthusiasts three-point-one seconds (or less) after they come in the door. Squealing: “Whoa … that’s an actual _____ (please insert one highly technical name here) _____,” gets you instantly and forever pegged as “a friendly” with all the rights and privileges ascribed thereto.

By the way, Rick Rasmussen is the above-described proprietor, greeter, company president, warehouseman, sweep-up guy, tour guide, guest lecturer, go-getter, fable-teller, company cook, electrician, sign-painter, visionary, and historian. And the incredibly exotic stuff (some of which even he can’t fathom a guess at) is always thoughtfully arrayed on a high counter mid-store where the man fully expects visitors to take multiple wild-assed guesses at the probable uses of any of those highly-technical, cool-looking, whatsits, wigets, and wacky pieces of tech flotsam and mechanical jetsam.

If you happen to be an old timer at this, you’ll instantly recognize the name “C and H” (no, NOT the sugar company) as in C and H Surplus on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena for a couple of three decades or so. Gentrified out of “Pasahogan”, the Duarte shop is the “condensed” version, somewhat smaller in size, but each and every bit as feral, imagination-provoking, and seriously wondrous as the original Pasadena location.

His Grandfather and grandfather’s brother started the joint, they were Carl and Henry Izbicki, and young Rick went into the business right out of high school (Monrovia, where he still lives to this day).

Oh, and then there’s prices, the money that Uncle Sugar paid for many of these items was well and truly beyond astonishing. But then it was “nothing but the best” for our side. No, you won’t be finding any $800 toilet seats or $1,200 hammers here. What you will find is pennies-on-the-dollar prices for a shopful of wondrous items that amuse, astonish, and which might even have some actual or practical use somewhere (of course that’s really not the point here) somewhere, someplace, sometime.

The new shop is in an “old” location. Right at the top of Highland Avenue at Royal Oaks, Rasmussen’s store occupies a veteran building that goes back to pre-war days in Duarte (that’s pre-World War I by the way!).

C and H Surplus
A Rassco Company
805 Highland Avenue
Duarte, Calif. 91010
626-256-7907
candhsurplus@yahoo.com

The writer is the Editor of Monrovia-based LA Car and almost lives next door to C & H Surplus in Duarte, California.