After 50 years in the junk business, Kansas City vintage veteran is closing up shop
Terry Sanchez was supposed to be out by the first of the year.
But down in his West Bottoms shop, Weird Stuff Antiques, there is little evidence of an upcoming move. Deep into February, the space is chaotic with vintage objects: mopeds and mannequins, guitars and amplifiers, golf clubs and croquet sets, beer signs and oil paintings. No moving boxes or packing tape in sight. Just Sanchez in a mechanic’s jumpsuit, telling customers to holler if they need help.
“Realistically? I figure it’ll be another five or six months,” Sanchez said. “I’ve been here 8 1/2 years. I’m going to have to work up to it.”
It is as much an emotional challenge as a logistical one: When he finally does clear the place out, he’s not bound for another shop space. After more than a half-century in the antiques business in Kansas City, Sanchez, 70, is retiring from the brick-and-mortar game.
He has his reasons: The rent keeps climbing, his landlord is extending him all the warmth of a loan shark and walk-in traffic has plummeted since the pandemic. Based on Weird Stuff’s growing online sales, he figures his business can survive without a physical presence.
But for a guy who purports to be unsentimental about what he sells — “I buy junk, fluff it a little, flip it for cheap” — Sanchez is having a hard time letting go.
“I don’t know anything else except the junk business,” he said. “And for me, a lot of the junk business is about talking to people and telling stories.”
A hippie and a hustler
His own origin story is pure Kerouac. Sanchez quit school in 1969 at age 15, thumbed his way from Kansas City to Woodstock, got tear-gassed at anti-war rallies, rambled up to Canada to drop acid with draft dodgers.
He came back to Kansas City and got hooked on vintage after selling the coat off his back to a stranger.
“It was an old raglan-sleeve long coat,” Sanchez said. “I needed money to eat, and I got 10 bucks for it. I thought, ‘I know where I can get some more of those for free, or for cheap.’ So I started socking them away in my grandma’s garage.”
He soon opened the first in a long line of Kansas City-area shops: The Junk Store, an unlicensed $30-a-month crash pad in KCK near Seventh Street and Central Avenue where he lived among other people’s forgotten possessions. “Total hardcore hippie situation,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez’s career can be read as a roadmap of Kansas City’s evolving neighborhoods. He opened a vintage clothing shop called Rags at 47th and Troost in 1978, and a few years later a New Wave-inflected shop down the street called Punk Funk. He had a shop in Westport called Flipped Out. He had a live-work space with his wife, Unique, in a grand building at 901 Tracy Ave. that had previously been home to Unity Inn’s theater playhouse and vegetarian restaurant.
“He’s been doing the vintage thing longer than just about anybody else I know of in town,” said Kevin Kinkead, co-owner of the Westport vintage shop Boomerang, founded in 1989. “He’s bounced around all over and has the knowledge and experience that comes with that.”
At one point in the late 1980s, Sanchez bought an abandoned building in KCK that was previously Kaw View Detention Center — a juvenile correction hall where he’d spent time as a youth.
“I fought the city for a year on it and finally paid $5,000 for it,” he said. “I flipped it for $100,000 two months later. That was my first legit gig. But I stayed broke because I took that money and bought at 18th and Locust in the Crossroads. I had a half city block down there and my car lot across the street. You could bowl down the street back then. There wasn’t anybody down there.”
He had side hustles: prop rental for films and TV (he supplied vintage cars for the U2 video for “Last Night on Earth” and episodes of “America’s Most Wanted,” among other productions) and contracts with restaurant management firms like Gilbert/Robinson (Houlihan’s, Fred P. Ott’s) and Haddad Restaurant Group (Winstead’s, Waid’s, Harry Starker’s).
Sanchez was never one for “grandma’s china,” as he put it. His empire of the discarded is heavy on used cars, motorcycles, bikes, neon signs, taxidermy.
“He definitely had more of a masculine eye than other vintage dealers in town,” said Terry Richardson, whose shop Revue shared space with Sanchez inside a vintage mall on 39th Street West in the early 1990s. “He was doing leather motorcycle jackets long before that was a thing. And he cut quite the figure in Westport in the ‘80s and ‘90s with his huge hair. He was kind of a rock star.”
Priced out
For most of his career, Sanchez managed to stay a decade or two ahead of the developers.
“I was always a little too early,” he said.
Down at 1703 W. Ninth St. in the West Bottoms, where Weird Stuff Antiques has operated since 2017, he’s found himself in the white-hot center of Kansas City real estate speculation. But he has a lease, not a mortgage. And with a half-billion-dollar investment in the neighborhood already flowing in, Sanchez says his landlord doesn’t seem keen on him as a tenant anymore, despite the improvements Sanchez has made to the property: new windows, security fences, a heating system.
“No loyalty,” he said, though it didn’t sound like he expected any.
The plan, eventually, is to haul off the good stuff to his home, a log cabin he built in Wyandotte County.
“I’ve got 2 1/2 acres in the woods — deer and raccoons, the whole deal, and I’m on a bluff overlooking the Kaw River Valley. You’d never know I live in this city.”
Sanchez has several shipping containers out there to store his weird stuff, and Unique has helped build out his online presence in recent years, with a website, a newsletter, multiple Facebook pages, an eBay store. “All that crap,” Sanchez said.
But giving up the shop is another matter.
“I have a friend that does estate sales who said she’d come in and liquidate the place for me,” Sanchez said. “I’ve had trouble calling her.”
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
