For Silver, Met is golden opportunity

Mitch Silver is happier than a kid with a new comic, which is not much of a stretch as far as metaphors go.

First off, anyone who knows him will tell you that Silver, though in his early 50s, is still very much one big kid. And second, as I sit facing him in the upstairs conference room of the Monroe Street headquarters of Silver Collector Car Auctions, it is impossible not to notice the wall at his back.

It is lined with classic comic books. Hundreds of them. Each one protected in a plastic sleeve.

“Look at this,” he says, sliding a book across the table. “This is one of my favorites.”

The comic’s cover depicts a buxom space babe, circa 1950s. She is straining suggestively against the clutches of a nasty-looking robot.

It’s the kind of pop culture that shaped Silver and the rest of his Baby Boomer peers.

But Silver’s juices aren’t percolating over his comic book collection. Or all those fancy bottles of wine he keeps in an earthquake-proof basement storeroom. Or his old pinball machines. Or his gazillion record albums …

Silver has a grab bag of passions, but today only one of them has hold of his heart. And that is being a step away from owning one of Spokane’s downtown civic treasures – The Metropolitan Performing Arts Center.

Silver and Cindy, his wife of 30 years, have offered $808,000 for The Met, 901 W. Sprague. If Mitch had his way, they’d be putting the ink on the bill of sale right now.

Unfortunately, he must wait until a bankruptcy auction is conducted on the property. At this point, however, the auction appears to be a formality since no other bidders have come forward.

Anyone who cares about the future of The Met should be saying a silent prayer that this deal goes through. Having the Silvers take over would be one of the few positive things that emerge from the scandalous collapse of Spokane’s Metropolitan Mortgage, which owned The Met and filed for bankruptcy last February.

Silver is a godsend on two counts:

1. He understands the important role the theater plays as a venue for local arts organizations with limited resources. Silver says he plans to keep the pricing affordable for things like ballet recitals, dance troupes, bluegrass jams, etc.

2. Silver has the resources and promotional savvy to take The Met to a new level.

Keeping Met manager Michael Smith, Silver agrees, is key to his plan. If the downtown arts scene has an unsung hero, it is Smith. He could have turned The Met into a venue for strictly professional touring acts. But Smith has always championed the theater as a home for amateurs as well.

Silver shares that vision.

The Met “doesn’t have to make money,” he says. “If you have a successful business, you can go out and do some things that are right and appropriate for the world.”

Silver’s business is more than just successful. He turned his love for buying and selling vintage wheels into the world’s second-largest collector car auction. The last time I asked, he told me he was staging over 30 auctions a year throughout the Western United States and British Columbia. Selling 5,000 cars at those events translated into $20 million.

Not bad for a guy who walked away from a safe college job to chase after a dream. Silver was director of Eastern Washington University’s Institute for Extended Learning. He left in the mid-1980s for his car hobby.

He caught the nostalgia car boom just as it was beginning to explode. But as Silver explains, it never was just about making money. With Silver it’s all about following things that interest him.

Right now it’s The Met. Learning it was for sale triggered a deep emotional response. He went there as a kid, back when the place was the State theater.

Silver moves fast. It’s one of his trademarks. The next day, he was downtown looking the joint over and crunching numbers.

Making good use of time has never been more important. Labor Day marks the one-year anniversary of when Silver took sick at a car auction. A month later, surgeons discovered a cancerous tumor in his appendix. More surgery and chemotherapy appear to have taken care of that problem.

But Silver came a whisper away from dying last winter when he developed blood clots following a surgery. The close call got him thinking about his mortality, but it apparently had nothing to do with wanting to buy The Met.

It’s no legacy thing, he maintains, “I’m way too pragmatic for that.”

This is all about seizing an opportunity to own a hometown landmark.

“I was out there again yesterday and it excites me,” adds Silver. “It’s just so cool.”