Wright

I retired from the US Navy with 28 years of service in 1993. My wife, Kathy, and I started selling knives at gun shows as a hobby that same year. All of the profits from sales went into increasing inventory and, sometime between late 1993 and 1996, the hobby grew into a business.

We opened a small store in La Mesa, California, near San Diego in July, 1996. It was small, about 300 square feet, but it made us a "legitimate" business. We continued to do shows (35 - 40 per year) on the weekends while running the store during the week.

By 1999 we had outgrown the small store and found a larger place just up the street from the old place. We started the move in Sept, '99 but I had to take time out for heart surgery on Sept 27th. (a quintuple bypass). I went in for a physical and they wouldn't let me leave the hospital. I didn't even know I had a problem. That set the move back a bit. We opened the new place on November 15, 1999. These are some pictures of the store.

We carry a large selection of factory knives as well as some custom and semi-custom knives. We have one of the largest selections of Buck knives in the area. We carry the full lines of Chris Reeve and William Henry fine knives and are very well stocked with Benchmade, Spyderco, REKAT and Columbia River knives. There is a smattering of various other makers, including Al Mar, Randall, Barry Dawson, Gary Hicks and some other custom makers.

We also have a very good selection of sharpening equipment including the full lines of Lansky and DMT as well as some EZ Lap, and, of course, the Spyderco sharpening tools, the 203 and 204 Sharpmakers and their ceramic bench stones. Lubricants and knife care materials round out the offerings of Wright Knife and Sporting Goods.

We attended our first Knife Expo in 1996, in Pasadena and have been participating ever since. Expo 2000 was our 5th in a row. We intend to keep it up as long as you keep having them. We would do more if you had them, although we are cutting back on the number of gun shows we are doing. We have to close the store when we go on the road and the new place is doing much more business than the old one so we need to be there more. Therefore, we are doing fewer shows. If we could cut out the gun shows altogether and do only knife shows we would do that but it isn't practical. There just aren't enough of them in the general area to make it work for us.

The store address is: Wright Knife & Sporting Goods, 8759 La Mesa Blvd., La Mesa, CA 91941. The phone numbers are (619) 465-6905 (local) or 1-800-400-1980. E-mail is wrightknife@ixpres.com and, eventually, my website, www.wrightknife.com, will be up and running. The domain is mine but I haven't built the site yet.

Dennis Wright