With Scavenged Goods Owner Hospitalized, Store’s Fans Are All Heart

Chip Litherland, owner of the punk-friendly store Scavenged Goods, at 3229 East Colfax Avenue, woke up in the wee hours of December 3 with a strange fluttering in his chest. But he powered through and opened the store that morning despite the wet snow that was snarling streets and keeping most shoppers away. He busied himself with some organizing, and when he lifted a box of vintage vinyl to take out front for display, he felt something like a heavy weight on his chest. Too heavy. He dropped the box, fell over it and collapsed on the floor. He couldn’t pick the box back up, but he was able to get himself to the hospital.

“It came out of nowhere,” says Litherland, speaking to us from a bed at Denver Health. When he came into the ER, the doctors told him he was in Atrial Fibrillation with Rapid Ventricular Response — a condition in which the heart’s atria quiver irregularly, and the ventricles beat very fast. “They said my heart rate was spiking from 180 to 200 beats per minute.”

While Litherland is still undergoing treatment, he expects to be released from the hospital as early as this weekend. But what he’ll be able to do at Scavenged Goods, and when, is still up in the air. “So far, I’ve had a good friend of mine, Jason Franklin, jump in,” he says. “I trust him, and he knows what he’s doing, but he’s already taken a few days off to help. We don’t price things at the store, so it takes someone who knows what they’re doing to run the place.”

Scavenged Goods has been around for two years, and has made its mark on Colfax with its eclectic stock of found, vintage, punk-inspired stuff. It’s a clubhouse of charming clutter, full of things you might have loved once and lost, or things you didn’t even know existed — but once you see them, you can’t live without. It’s the sort of store where you can dig around and get lost for a while — or just stand at the counter and shoot the shit with Litherland. “The punk community in Denver is like family,” he says. “I’ll sometimes have people come in just to check in and say, ‘Hey.’ The store is at least partially there as a gathering place.”

Running a store wasn’t always Litherland’s plan. He was a photographer by trade until COVID hit, then suddenly found that the work dried up right along with it. So he started buying up storage units and selling vintage items he’d find inside: cassette tapes, old vinyl, show posters, concert tees. Oddities and pop culture ephemera, too — toys, books, knick-knacks, cookie jars, dolls of all sorts, jewelry, old Playboys, Elvis on velvet, Marilyn on just about anything. In short: Anything you might have seen at a garage sale in the 1970s and ’80s.

“I started selling stuff online,” Litherland recalls, “and I finally had enough of it that I could start a store. It’s all punk, rock-and-roll, DIY sort of stuff.”

That stuff and Litherland’s ethos clearly appeal to a large group of friends and fans — so much so that when word got out that he was down, efforts came together immediately to make sure he wasn’t out. “It was actually a customer of mine that started the GoFundMe,” says Litherland. “I didn’t even know it was happening, but she got in touch with my daughter, and they’re sort of running it now.” The GoFundMe is designed to help with medical bills and to bridge the potential interruption to the store’s hours during Litherland’s recovery. The campaign is looking to raise $14K — and only 23 hours into it on December 5, it was already sitting at over $6,000.

“It’s indicative of the punk rock community, the music community here in Denver,” says Litherland, who adds that while it’s tough to accept the help, he’s more than grateful for it.

“Only thing I can keep thinking,” he concludes, “is that when someone falls in the pit, you pick them up.”

Scavenged Goods is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day of the week. For more information, see its various social media platforms — or better yet, pay the store a visit.