Atlantic City Weekly

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Vineland entrepreneur Rudy Meckel's many ventures have included investing in the self-storage industry in its infancy. His Egg Harbor Township facility, now run by two of his three children (the third headed for an equally successful Wall Street career), is known to many locals as the mega-facility with that cool old-fashioned horse carriage out front. That's not a bad metaphor for Meckel himself, who couples a keen business sense with being a classically nice guy. His memories could fill an MBA's notebook as well as a rural memoirist's finest chapters.

When you first got involved, self-storage was a novelty. What led you to you take the risk?

In the 1970's, I was involved in the highway contracting business and building. I'd always try to chase down new things, different things. If ice skating looked good, I'd have chased it out, see what it would take. Around '75, I was traveling in the Midwest and I saw a self-storage place called Your Attic. From there, I talked with people from the Self-Service Storage Association, which was and continues to be first-class, dedicated to maintaining industry standards. I mentioned the possibility to some people here, but many people are afraid to start something when they don't know what's going to happen. So I evaluated it myself [and] satisfied myself that there was a need.

So you're in front of the trend, and chose EHT.

We found a piece of ground, designed four buildings, pulled a permit, and went forward. I learned someone else was interested, and I tried to contact him but didn't get a callback. I often say if he'd called and said they were proceeding, I probably wouldn't have gone forward myself. Fred Lackland, from North Jersey, opened a quarter mile from us, within a year after we opened in 1979. We became good friends. Eventually I wound up with 17 buildings, over 100,000 square feet of storage.

What made self-storage so popular? Previous generations didn't rely on it.

I'd call it increased life style -- more transiency, more divorces, more relocating for jobs. Before, it would've been "let's use grandmom's attic, the basement, the garage." Now it became finding a secure, convenient site, month to month, where you might not have friends and family.

What happens when property is abandoned?

After a certain number of weeks, we have a right to declare default. We tend to give people more than the law requires. There's a newspaper notice, then an auction, maybe every couple months. Units are sold "lump sum," meaning we roll up a garage door, you look in, and what you see in front is what you get. Once people found a valuable grandfather clock, and once, there were human ashes in an urn. We do try to hold onto anything of obvious personal value. With the urn, we couldn't find anyone, so we buried it near a tree. About five years later, someone called and said, "My grandmother!" So we went out, dug up the urn, and got it to him.

How would you like to be remembered?

As a pioneer, when it's related to self-storage. Other than that, as a regular guy who built things.