By the time the first episodes of "Storage Wars" were ordered,
the Dotsons had been at it for a long time. Both Dan's mother and grandfather were auctioneers,
and in 1983, he opened his own business — American Auctioneers — doing exactly
what he does on the show: Selling storage units. They knew what was going to work,
and what wasn't — and who was just the sort of character the show needed.
Laura's background is a little different. According to what Dan told StorageAuctions.net,
she started showing up at auctions he was running to buy equipment for her restaurants. The first
one she attended was in 1993, and although she showed up again the following year,
it wasn't until 1995 that Dan asked her on a date. They were married in 2000.
Have they changed? Not really — aside from an overhaul in wardrobe, Dan says,
"We're basically the same people we were before the show, and we
still have a big business we're running every day, and our friends are the same."
When it comes to the regular buyers, there's none that are perhaps more infamous than Dave Hester.
"Yuuuuup!"
Hester's actually been in the auction/thrift/consignment business
since the mid-1980s. According to what he told Online Storage Auctions in an interview,
that's about the time he started using his famous catchphrase:
"I used to be a bid catcher at an auction house. [...] I used the
'Yuuup!' yell so the auctioneer would know I had a bidder."
That's just the business, though. Hester said that the first time he dipped his
toes in the water was in 1969, when his father took him to his first swap meet.
Hester isn't just a bidder, he's an auctioneer, too — and has been bonded since 1992. It's
something he's put to good use: In addition to donating to St. Jude's Children's Hospital
for decades, he's also volunteered as an auctioneer at charity fundraisers.
Darrell Sheets has been in the business for over four decades,
but it hasn't always been his passion. Sheets told RiverScene
Magazine that he had originally owned his own landscaping business, although he admitted:
"I wasn't doing a good job, and the guy fired me."
Sheets went back to ask for his job back, and while his client refused
to re-hire him as a landscaper, he did introduce him to another way to
make some money. An introduction to buying and flipping storage lockers came with a
promise that it would keep Sheets going for the rest of his life, and it did:
"He showed me this business and I never looked back. From the very first locker I ever bought,
I tripled my money [...] and I was like, 'Whoa. I'm onto something.'"
Even before "Storage Wars," Sheets was already well-known in the auction circuit. In 2011,
Sheets said on "Unlocked" that when he started going through a storage
locker he bought in the late 1980s, one of the finds was human remains,
wrapped in plastic. The police confiscated the whole thing,
and Sheets later learned that the unit was owned by a man who killed his wife, and left her there.
Before Jarrod Schulz found fame on "Storage Wars," he had a shockingly different job. He told IOL:
"I was in the mortgage and real estate industry for, like, nine years. Unfortunately, some time
ago, the mortgage industry in California fell apart. I was still working for a mortgage company
when I bought my first storage unit, and it was kind of just because I had nothing to do all day."
The next phase of his career was a slow evolution. A relative happened to work
at a storage facility and gave him the heads' up about some of the opportunities that were there,
and it wasn't long before he had bought so much stuff that he got a warning from the
city about keeping "junk" at his house. The next step was a store,
and by the time they were interviewed for "Storage Wars," the business was fully-fledged.
In a 2020 interview with Danny Jordan, Brandi Passante said that prior to kicking off her
television career on "Storage Wars," she had been a stay-at-home mom who worked the
occasional part-time job. She spoke candidly about feeling like an outsider and never really
clicking with the other mothers, and it was a sentiment she'd shared in another rare interview.
Speaking with Spirit Talk, Passante revealed that she had felt like an outsider growing up,
too, questioning even whether or not she was really a part of her family.
In an interview with IOL, however, she credited that family with making her feel
at ease on the male-dominated set of "Storage Wars," saying:
"I grew up with big brothers, so I can take them. It is interesting,
though... it feels like working on a construction site."
At the time Ivy Calvin was hired for "Storage Wars," he had already been
running his second-hand thrift store, Grandma's Attic, for about three years. Before that,
he had a wildly different career: He was an MMA fighter and a football player.
His official MMA record is pretty short, and consists only of a single win by submission.
And prior to that — way back in 1995 — the Los Angeles Times was doing a profile on 23-year-old
Cal State Northridge linebacker turned San Jose SaberCats newcomer Ivy Calvin. In spite of being
described as an almost immediate fan favorite, Calvin was cut after seven games. The team's
director of football operations, Terry Malley, explained that it wasn't anything personal or
professional and that it had just been a numbers game. Unfortunately for Calvin,
his time to shine had coincided with another player switching positions, another moving in
from Orlando, and another getting off injured reserve. And just like that, Calvin was out.
Calvin talked about his pre-football life, too:
"From the time I was old enough to pick up wood until I went to college,
I was a lumberjack. My family used to bring wood to the paper mill. That's how we got by."
Way back in 2012, Mary Padian talked to D Magazine about how she ended up
on "Storage Wars," and it's the kind of story that a lot of people wish would
happen to them. One of the producers walked into her store, Mary's Finds,
and asked if she was the one who had put the whole thing together. According to Padian:
"And then, the rest is history!"
She hadn't even really watched the show before she was on it, and she brought a bit of a unique
background. Instead of other big stars who had been in the auction business for flipping,
she had an eye for design — and it was an eye that she'd developed while working in
New York City for Architectural Digest. She told StorageAuctions.net that's where
"Mary's Finds" came from: It was the name of the column she wrote under the guidance of
Editor-in-Chief Paige Rense Noland. After going to college for photojournalism and
leaving her home state of Texas for the Big Apple, Padian got her foot in the door
at the magazine and — over the course of five years — worked her way up to Assistant Editor.
Once Noland retired, Padian said that it just wasn't the same. So, she headed back home with
the goal of bringing her funky design style back to Texas, and was discovered for "Storage Wars."
In 2020, TV Shows Ace sat down for a chat with Rene and Casey Nezhoda. At the time, they noted
they were one of the few old-school "Storage Wars" teams that were still at it, reaching out to fans
via YouTube and social media. When asked why, their answer was pretty straightforward: It's what
they had always done, long before "Storage Wars," and it was what they were going to continue to do.
"Other people got in the business after 2008 because they needed a job,
but didn't really know what they were doing. We have been doing this
our whole lives and Rene has been buying and selling since [he was] 11 years old."
At the time of the interview, they were looking forward to placing a $30,000 bid on a celebrity
unit, but they stressed that part of the appeal of buying storage lockers was that it didn't take
millions to get into. And they should know: They started their business with $1,000,
grew from there, and stayed the best of friends all along the way.
The network gave Barry Weiss the designation of "The Collector," and it was apparent early
on that he was on "Storage Wars" not to make money — he was already flashing around enough
of that — but to find some neat things. Collecting, he told the Huffington Post,
really was in his blood. While he had been an antique collector as sort of a side thing for
his entire life, his pay-the-bills job was in produce. He clarified:
"Wholesale fruits and vegetables. I owned a produce company, and we exported and imported,
my brother and myself. I did that for years."
After nearly 25 years in the produce business, Weiss retired around 2009. According to Closer
Weekly, he actually sold his way out of the business — which might explain some
of his estimated $10 million net worth. After retirement, Weiss says that he spent around
four years traveling and seeing the world, before a friend of his — who happened to
be one of the creators of "Storage Wars" — pitched him the idea of being a part of it.
As far as the flashy style, showy custom cars, and unmistakable attitude,
Weiss says that's not for the show — that's just who he is, telling the Huffington Post:
"I've never really changed my style in terms of the way I dress for the
show. That's one of the great things about this show. [...] everybody is
pretty much — it's really how they are. And that's just how I was."
Kenny Crossley was recruited onto "Storage Wars" alongside fan favorite Barry Weiss,
and according to his own website, it was a huge jump that got him on the show. Before heading to
Los Angeles, California, the New Orleans native was back home in the south, working a career in
law enforcement with the Sheriff's Department. Sometimes, you just need a full-blown restart,
so Crossley, deciding to give something else a chance, picked up, moved across the country,
and got a job managing storage facilities — which led to the fortuitous meeting with Weiss.
That's not his only other career, either: Head on over to Airbit and check out the
music-makers who have beats for sale, and Dualpersona is there under a profile that
will sound familiar to "Storage Wars" fans: kennydoit. His bio says that he's
been producing music for more than 12 years, with no signs of slowing down.
It didn't take Shana Dahan and Edwina Registre long to become fan favorites once they started
appearing on "Storage Wars," and it was clear from the get-go that they weren't just business
partners, but they were good friends. Those vibes are real, and according to The Cinemaholic,
they go all the way back to when they were in high school together. Dahan was the new kid and had the
good fortune to grab a seat on the bus next to the person who would become a lifelong friend.
They didn't start out planning to get into the antique/storage locker business out of school,
and had very different paths to get to where they ended up. After high school, Dahan headed to the
University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where she finished her Bachelor's — from there,
it was on to finish a Master's in Business Administration. Registre, on the other hand,
enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as both a combat medic and in the communications field,
before enrolling in the University of Phoenix — the same college Dahan
got her Master's from — for a degree in criminal justice and corrections.
The paths of true friends might diverge, but sometimes, people are lucky
enough that they'll cross again. It was only after college and military service
that they decided to give "Storage Wars" a shot, and the rest is television history.