�� | Jewish herald-Voice | Voices in houston | Fall 2010 | JhVonline.com Jewish herald-Voice | Voices in houston | Fall 2010 | JhVonline.com | ���� | Jewish herald-Voice | Voices in houston | Fall 2010 | JhVonline.com

and get one. If they have something of value and in good condition – a musi-cal instrument, a DVD player, a computer, a gold necklace – they have the opportunity to bring that here and get money.

I have, for example, people who have a roof-ing company, and they may not have been paid on a roofing job yet, but they need to keep pay-ing their workers – so we help them make payroll.

I have musicians who are starting out and they have to wait between gigs. So, they know their instruments are safe with us and they’ll get them back so they can continue to play.

The pawn business it not about taking people’s stuff and selling it. We accept items on pawn and we also buy. We always ask people what they want to do. People also may think that the items are stolen. But, they can’t be. The police get a copy of each ticket and they check everything.

Who are your customers?We get a wide cross section of people

and a lot of repeat customers. We have those who try to make it to the next pay check and those who are multi-million-aires.

Thanks to eBay, we have a client base all over the world. We’ve sold to Australia, Hong Kong, nearly every European coun-try, Israel, South Africa, Thailand. The

list keeps growing. We just sold a watch to South Africa. The customer was a Jewish fellow who has a $15 million car collection.

How has the economic recession affected busi-ness?

Business has been great. Our loans have really gone up. But, part of that is because we do very large loans, thousands of dollars in some cases. Sales really haven’t seen an increase.

If you look around the store today, we have a lot of tools. If construction is

down, I can’t sell my tools. That’s the tricky part of the pawn business – you have to monitor inventory and follow what’s going on in industry and the economy.

What are your top-selling items?We sell a lot of jewelry, from the basics to

the elaborate. We have a lot of jewelry right now, because gold is at an all-time high. Over the years, we’ve also sold a lot of tools.

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There might be several places in Houston where one can go to buy,

sell or borrow against a cus-tom motorcycle, Swiss watch, diamond ring, crystal vase, electric guitar, power drill, iPod, autographed football or bronze statue. But, only one of those places is owned by a German-American Jewish woman, who also happens to be Sisterhood president of United Orthodox Synagogues.

Romana Davies is our local pawn star – the six-pointed variety.

For the past 10 years, she has co-owned and co-operated Fiesta Pawn, 3511 Houston Ave. at N. Main Street, located in a 1930s-era building in Woodland Heights. Her busi-ness partner is Eric Hallberg.

Like the Las Vegas pawnshop featured in the popular History Channel series, “Pawn Stars,” Davies’ business caters to a diverse clientele and oversees a menagerie of every-day and rare items. She also runs a watch business, R&R Watches, Inc., out of the same location.

The JH-V stopped by Fiesta Pawn earlier this summer to ask Davies about her colorful shop and vocation.

How did you get into this business?By trade, I’m a steel trader. I left

Germany in 1989. In Houston, I started with my then-husband a water treatment company, and we ended up selling that to a public company. As it happens, when you sell your business, you suddenly become out of work.

I know accounting very well and I found

an accounting job with Brucettes Shoes. Eric, my current business partner, was a manager at the store. One day, we had coffee and he asked if I thought about own-ing my own business again. He suggested buying a pawn shop – he knew the brother of a man who was selling a store. At first I didn’t know, but then I said I’d look into it if it’s a good business and we can make money. And, it happened in a very short period of time.

It was a very smooth transition when we came in. We counted the inventory and took over the existing loans. I already had a corporation, so I just filed a DBA. We came in on a Sunday to count up and then we opened on Monday.

What is the pawn business?We do a great service. We help people

who don’t have the availability of a bank account or the ability to get to money quickly. Maybe it’s a parent who needs to buy medicine for a child that night – nobody else will give them a loan, but they can come here

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Romana Davies, proprietor of Fiesta Pawn and R&R Watches

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How about sports memorabilia? We get a good amount of local items from professional and college

teams, current and former players. People really like this, and they make for great conversation and showpieces in the store.

What have been some of the neatest items to cross your counter?It’s hard to be specific, because I’ve really seen so much, from beauti-

ful jewelry to antiques and old maps. We just got in a collection of vintage Rolex displays from Europe – they’re amazing! I really like the unique items. But, of course, these are the most difficult to place a value on.

Do you buy everything?We don’t do cars, trucks or boats. The bigger items we do take are

motorcycles and we see a fair amount of these.Artifacts are very difficult. For some people, an artifact may have a lot

of value or maybe it was really expensive when they bought it. But for us, in a retail situation, there’s not a whole lot we can do with it.

For gold, it’s easy to measure value. You weigh it on a scale and check its purity to determine a price. Everything else, especially the artifacts, collectables and art items, the price is very subjective and it may not have as much value to us as it does to the owner.

What are the favorite aspects of your work?You learn a lot about all the different businesses that are out there.

I have one customer who buys locomotives. I have another customer who travels all over the world to buy and sell vintage bluejeans.

To me, it’s always amazing and it’s so beautiful in America the creativity of people and how they make a living. I’m from Germany and it’s a great country. But, I don’t think you can just start a business there like people can do here in America. That’s the beauty about this

county. If you have an idea, and if you put some money together, you can go for it.

What makes your operation unique?We take customer service very seriously. I

have employees who have worked here for a long time. We really get to know people and what’s going on in their lives. We know when things are going well and we know when there’s somebody sick in the family.

We take items that other stores won’t take, such as art. It takes a lot of research and effort on our part, but we try to do it for our customers.

Most pawn stores today only do 60-day loans. We’re one of the few stores left to do 90-day loans. Which means within the 90 days, you have to come and pay your interest and extend the loan or, if you have the money, you take it off pawn.

We also do large loans. Most stores probably do loans up to $1,200; we have loans with estab-lished customers for $10,000.

How does your Jewish identity come through in your business?

In the ethics side. I want people to be treated fairly. I’m for treating our custom-ers fairly, and I’m for treating my employees fairly. If people are happy, they work better for you and with you. c

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military failure to defense budget cuts, improper use of tanks in Lebanon (tac-tics), missing basic tank gear and perhaps most significantly, the inexperience of soldiers in the field (poor training).

Although Chasnoff’s memoir is shaded towards comedy, there’s a serious mes-sage here: The grunts in the 188th still are being trained poorly.

The high – or low – point in the book occurs during Chasnoff’s f inal Friday night in Lebanon. The author has made it through basic training, become a tank gunner, gone through advanced and pre-Lebanon training and is close to the end of a three-month tour of duty without fir-ing a real shot. An infantry soldier spots movement in the bushes near the Israeli base. The soldier fires a shot. The target departs. Since the Merkava tank has the best night vision in the Security Zone, Chasnoff uses his night vision screen to scan the terrain. He locates the target and locks in his laser. From headquarters comes the order: Shoot to kill.

As his tank is about to fire, Chasnoff sees his target lie down in the grass and roll over. He brings the image into focus: It’s a dog. He does a second visual check

and confirms his target. Headquarters tells him to fire anyhow, just to be sure. Chasnoff pushes the tank’s red firing but-ton. There’s an explosion, and the unluck-iest dog in Lebanon is pulverized.

“I’m telling you, Yaniv,” Chasnoff says to his loader, “this army is so f**ked-up it’s a miracle Israel still exists.”

Yaniv replies: “Thank G-d the Arabs

are more f**ked-up than we are.”But wait! There’s more.Having survived Lebanon, Chasnoff

returns to Tel Aviv to marry his Israeli girlfriend. When he applies for the mar-riage license, a rabbi who tells him that even though his mother went through an Orthodox conversion in the United States, the rabbi she studied with was Conservative. Thus, the rabbi’s authority to conduct an Orthodox conversion is not recognized.

Thus, Chasnoff’s mother’s conversion wasn’t Orthodox.

Thus, Chasnoff is not a Jew.The reader is left laughing. You could

make up this stuff. Chasnoff didn’t need to. It’s everyday reality in Israel.

* * *

Joel Chasnoff, “The 188th Crybaby Brigade” (Free Press).

“Retired” from the IDF and liv-ing in New York, Chasnoff, when not on comedy tours across the globe, teaches stand-up comedy and humor writing at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. c

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Here’s the stereotype: Jews are not known for their military prowess.

The anti-Semitic ver-sion: Jews are cowards.

The Woody Allen version: Biting satire always is better than physical force.

The Leon Uris version: The heroic Jew fights for Israel.

And, the Joel Chasnoff version: The skinny, left-leaning kid from Chicago, who falls in love with the idea of fighting for Israel, makes aliyah, joins the IDF and learns that biting satire is better than physical force.

“The 188th Crybaby Brigade” is Chasnoff’s memoir of his stint with

the Israeli tank corps, Company B, 77th Battalion, 188th Armored Brigade. We should mention quickly that before joining the IDF, Chasnoff had aspirations of succeeding as a stand-up comic. He failed an audi-tion at New York’s Comedy Strip. But, he passed the IDF induction physical. Since serving, the author married an Israeli woman (remem-ber Ari Ben Canaan bedded, not wedded, the blond girl), moved to New York, and now has a success-ful career in comedy and doing voice work for cartoons.

In the IDF pecking order, f ighter pilots are at the top. Next come Golani troops and Navy SEALS. The armored corps (the tank guys) are the nose-to-the-grindstone sol-diers. The 188th Armored Brigade is part of the Northern Command, which means it has the role of protecting Israel’s border with Lebanon.

In the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah inf licted heavy damage to the tank corps. An Israeli post-war investigation connected this

Book Review

Ready, aim, laugh!

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