Gilbert Marty used to tell customers that everything was for sale at his second-hand store on University Avenue — even the store itself.

Someone finally bought it late last year, shortly before Marty lost a two-year battle with cancer. The store, a Frogtown fixture for nearly three decades, will close in coming weeks after its inventory is sold off.

“It’s pretty well picked-over now,” said Chris Rulli, a friend of Marty’s who has worked at the store part time for more than 20 years. Rulli and a handful of others have been helping Marty’s son Todd keep the store open since Marty’s death. None are being paid.

The basement, which used to be packed with unsold inventory, has slowly been emptied.

But people didn’t just come into Marty’s Second Hand Store for cheap furniture and used records.

“It was a hangout for a lot of people,” Todd said. “They would come and go, shoot the breeze, watch a little TV. At night, they’d sit down and have a beer.”

There’s a row of worn-out chairs toward the back of the store, facing a pair of dusty TVs. Rulli and Matt Colgan, another friend of Marty’s, have spent their afternoons in those chairs lately, watching reruns of the Six Million Dollar Man between customers.

“We’ll miss it,” Rulli said of the store. “We’ll still keep in touch, but we’ll miss this.”

After graduating from the Reisch American School of Auctioneering in 1964, Marty spent 20 years liquidating estates and selling off the assets of failed businesses. As many as 600 people would turn out for his evening auctions.

On one memorable occasion in the early 1970s, he was hired to sell a papal diamond, which went for $175,000.

His National Auctioneers Association membership card read “Col. G.C. Marty,” but by the time he opened up his second-hand store in the mid-1980s, he went by simply “Marty.”

“One name,” Rulli said. “Like Madonna.”

Rulli started out as a customer at Marty’s in the early 1990s, but soon found himself working there, too. Colgan has lived in an apartment above the store for seven years.

Both men remember Marty as a born salesman. He specialized in beds. He would buy them by the hundreds from area hotels and sell them cheap.

Marty’s shelves were often cluttered with what some people might call junk, but there was the occasional treasure to be found — Colgan remembers an ambrotype photograph of a Confederate soldier that sold for $7,000.

The last few years of Marty’s life were haunted by the Green Line light rail line. Its trains now pass his storefront every few minutes as they zip up and down University Avenue.

“The light rail was his nemesis,” Rulli said.

Marty opposed the light rail from the start, concerned that the loss of on-street parking would take a bite out of his business. Once construction started in 2011, he found a new reason to hate it.

“They were jackhammering right outside the store,” Todd said, adding that daylight was peeking through the foundation by the time the contractor finished its work.

Marty and two neighboring business owners took the construction company to court. Marty reached an undisclosed settlement with the company, but Todd said it wasn’t enough to repair the damage.

Marty had the last word, though.

A veteran of the Korean War, Marty was buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery. On the way from the funeral home to the graveside service, his procession crossed University Avenue. Traffic in both directions was halted, Todd said, including a Green Line train. It had to stop and wait for Marty as his hearse rolled by.

Nick Woltman can be reached at 651-228-5189. Follow him on Twitter at @nickwoltman.