Surplus Sid’s has closed in Carrboro. What’s next for its owner, Barry Keith.
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Barry Keith closed Surplus Sid’s after nearly 40 years; Merch will occupy 309 E. Main.
- Keith moved valuable stock to climate-controlled storage and will live in an upstairs apartment.
- Daughter cites early dementia and COVID effects; neighbors and village groups provide daily support.
Barry Keith may be the “Emperor of Carrboro” — a man of mystery and chaser of women — but to the people who know him, he’s just “Sid.”
As for the rest, “if it ain’t the truth, it’s the way it should have been,” he said last week, while having lunch with his daughter, Nicki Keith, at Esmeralda’s Cafe in Durham.
Keith, 70, hung up the keys this summer to Surplus Sid’s in Carrboro after nearly 40 years of peddling mostly odds but also ends to locals, A-List celebrities, and scores of UNC students seeking Halloween costumes, theater props, clothes, and household goods.
A locked, glass case at the back of the store held his most valuable collections, like the riding crop that may have once belonged to U.S. Gen. George Patton.
Everything is cleared out now, and anything that was worth saving is in climate-controlled storage. The Merch, a screenprinting and design company, is moving into the space at 309 E. Main St.
Keith, who owns the building, will move into an upstairs apartment once he leaves a Durham rehabilitation center. Nicki Keith and friends are renovating the apartment.
A community rallies around Sid
Keith has been diagnosed with an early form of dementia that affects his pattern recognition, sense of time and language skills, Nicki Keith said. Her grandmother had a similar illness, she said, so they chose to handle the store now and make sure her dad was in a safe place. Lingering effects of COVID didn’t help his situation, she said.
Keith has been hanging out regularly with friends at Lapin Bleu on nearby North Graham Street, and a village has helped fix up the apartment, offer car rides, and check in on him, Nicki Keith said.
“You know, in dark times like these, when we are all so divided, seeing just a little bit of light in the world in just the smallest ways really is a reminder that there’s still hope,” she said.
Keith didn’t miss a beat when asked how he’s going to spend all his free time.
“Chasing women,” he said, with a dead-pan smile and mischievous eyes as he brushed a head full of silver-gray hair out of his eyes.
Around the world, from Durham to Carrboro
Keith grew up in Durham and attended UNC-Chapel Hill in the 1970s, where he got a job working for the man who owned Poor Richard’s, a local military surplus and camping store at Eastgate Shopping Center and later at Kroger Plaza (now Village Plaza).
In 1976, Keith graduated with a political science degree, specializing in South American history, and, contrary to his father’s wish that he join the military, left Chapel Hill to work for the government.
That’s when he became known as “Sid,” Keith told Carolina Connection last year. His father, who served in the military, was known as “Big Sid,” he said. He became “Little Sid.”
Keith declined to say much about what he did for the government, but the job took him around the world. He speaks “the better part of” six languages, he said, including Spanish, Russian and Arabic.
In the 1980s, Keith sold a couple of restaurants he owned in South Carolina and returned to Chapel Hill. Poor Richard’s owner was considering retiring, and Keith offered to buy his warehouse out near present-day Meadowmont.
“And that was a trip unto itself,” Keith said, recalling vast piles of old Life and Playboy magazines and “51 tons of old newspapers that he had saved.”
Keith salvaged what he could and, in 1988, opened Surplus Sid’s at 302-A E. Main St.
New uses for second-hand goods, broken items
In 1992, he moved across the street to 309 E. Main St., a building constructed in 1945 as an Uzzle Motor Co. car dealership and which was replaced by two different newspaper offices and an auto repair shop before Sid’s.
“I felt like I didn’t have enough in there,” Keith said, but he filled it to overflowing, in part from scavenging UNC students’ castoffs at twice-yearly yard sales and giving broken items a new life through creative tinkering.
He became “a procurement specialist” for theater groups in need of a particular prop, he said, recalling one time he removed the base from a Greek urn and cut the facepiece, adding a plume to the rounded bottom to create a Greek war helmet.
“I’d have broken pieces of something or something left over. I’d end up turning that into something else,” Keith said, stopping to ask if the DaVinci-style wings he made from broken pieces of furniture were still hanging in his shop.
“We took those down, but we saved them,” Nicki Keith said, as she scribbled notes on a pad. She’s collecting her dad’s memories and might write a memoir one day, she said.
A cast of stars and local characters
There might be more than one chapter about the famous people who shopped at Surplus Sid’s. Their names — Steven Colbert, Kirsten Dunst, Eddie Vedder, Robin Williams, and others — were written in marker on a sign in the shop.
Williams wore sunglasses when he came in 1998 while filming the movie, “Patch Adams,” at UNC, Keith said.
“He showed up, kind of half-ass in disguise in the store, and then started running around the store,” Keith said. “He went running up to a lady looking at a round rack of T-shirts, and he came flying up front and jerked one of the T-shirts off the thing and grabbed her hand, and said, ‘Madam, look at the quality of that thing.’”
The still-unidentified man and a film director with him asked about camouflage netting to replace some stolen from the movie set on campus, Nicki Keith said. Williams accused him of taking the netting, so the crew would have to buy more, her dad added.
“I’m going, “Now, wait a damn minute,” Keith said, when he realized it was Williams.
“I didn’t get a chance to have a real long conversation with him, but it was cool to have him in there,” he said.
Still, the local “characters” are the most memorable and “unbelievably entertaining,” Keith said.
He recalled the “TV Monster,” a local man who patronized Franklin Street bars, insisting that they “put the news on,” regardless of what sports event might be on. It was rumored that when the man’s apartment was searched later, all they found were two trash cans turned upside down to make a desk and a typewriter, Keith said.
He thought about having a deck of cards made, each with one of Carrboro’s “street” characters, who were “harmless for the most part,” and himself as the Joker, Keith said.
“I have grandly appreciated everybody that has come and done business with me over the years, because I have met and seen and experienced a tremendous number of delightful people,” he said.
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This story was originally published October 14, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
