Monte Kobey, Founder of Swap Meet, Dies of AIDS
Kobey’s Swap Meet founder Monte Kobey died early Tuesday of complications resulting from AIDS. He was 54.
Kobey, who built his swap meet into one of the state’s most successful flea markets, contracted the AIDS virus from a tainted blood transfusion during open heart surgery in 1984.
Since its founding at the Midway Drive-In in 1977, Kobey’s Swap Meet has become an institution for many San Diegans. Now held in the San Diego Sports Arena parking lot, it is attended by up to 40,000 shoppers and 3,000 sellers over a typical Thursday-through-Sunday weekend.
Items sold run the gamut from silk-screened T-shirts, appliances and leather goods to paint, jewelry, cosmetics and “garage sale” items.
In early 1987, Kobey launched a downtown swap meet in the old Walker-Scott department store on Broadway. But the location proved unpopular with shoppers, and Kobey left the building after less than a year.
For all his success in retailing, Kobey’s career was overshadowed by his disease, which was diagnosed in 1987. He and his wife, Charlotte, sued the San Diego Blood Bank and Alvarado Hospital Medical Center in August, 1988, alleging that the defendants withheld for six months their knowledge that Kobey had been given AIDS-tainted blood.
The suit charged that the blood bank knew by late 1986 or early 1987 that the blood platelets he received had come from a donor infected with AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The blood bank sent Alvarado Hospital a letter to that effect in February, 1987, but Kobey did not learn until six months later that he had been exposed, according to the suit.
San Diego Blood Bank began routine AIDS screening of donors in March, 1985, six months after Kobey received the tainted transfusion during quadruple bypass heart surgery at Alvarado Hospital.
The Kobeys and the two defendants settled the suit in August, but terms of the settlement were not disclosed because of an order by Superior Court Judge James R. Milliken.
Kobey, a native of Arizona, received an undergraduate degree in marketing and advertising from Arizona State University before serving as an artillery officer in the Army. He then spent time as a radio station manager in Phoenix before becoming general manager of Park N’ Swap swap meet in Phoenix in the early 1970s.
Kobey was active in civic and charitable affairs, serving as board member or major contributor to the Crime Victims Fund, the Kidney Foundation, the American Heart Assn. and the American Cancer Society. In August, the Kobey family sponsored the first Monte Kobey Benefit for AIDS to raise funds for research and victims.
Kobey attended the August dinner, his last public appearance.
“He came on our board about 2 1/2 years ago, just before he contracted AIDS,” said Brenda Marsh-Rebelo, a fellow Crime Victims Fund board director. “He was very much concerned with the plight of victims of crime, and he worked as hard as anyone on the board to do something about it.”
A daughter of Kobey, Kimberly Kobey Pretto, was named to replace her father as president of Kobey Corp. earlier this year and has assumed day-to-day management of the swap meet. Kobey is also survived by his wife, son Cy and daughter Kara Kobey Canogullari.
Funeral services will be held at 3:30 p.m. today at Cypress View Mortuary, 3953 Imperial Ave., and are open to the public. The family welcomes contributions to the Monte Kobey AIDS Fellowships, P.O. Box 81492, San Diego 92138.
