Rose Bowl Swap Meet Turns 21 Sunday

When Beverly Kiviat started selling silverware patterns at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena 20 years ago, the monthly swap meet was a new bud on the City of Roses’ calendar.

Back then, says Nancy Kiviat, Beverly’s daughter and now a partner in the business, the swap meet was a place for people to go “when they needed to clean out the garage.”

Sunday marks the 21st anniversary of the Rose Bowl Swap Meet, and though you can still find plenty of garage-sale bargains, the event has grown to 1,500 exhibitors, hawking everything from new Levi’s and gold jewelry to old Vogue patterns and Soviet Olympic coins.

“I was brought up at the swap meet,” says Nancy, who started coming to the meet with her mother at the age of 9. “It’s different now. There are more business people, and for some (the swap meet) is like an extension of their stores.”

But Beverly Kiviat didn’t realize the business potential of the swap meet until she liquidated her own business and took the leftovers--sets of silverware in old patterns--to the Rose Bowl to sell, Nancy says.

“People didn’t want the complete sets,” Nancy says. “They wanted pieces.”

So Beverly obliged, and today the Kiviats’ pattern-matching service deals in hard-to-find patterns from the late 1800s to 1960. Nancy, who has a business degree, says she does “better at the Rose Bowl than in any corporate job.”

“The amount of foot traffic makes it worthwhile,” she says. (Officials estimate a 20,000-30,000 average attendance each month.) And the job “gives me freedom. I’m out shopping all the time, but I work primarily on weekends.”

Another Rose Bowl Swap Meet veteran is Stan Milatovic, who specializes in Early American furniture. A native of Yugoslavia, he recalls that in the early days the swap meet was one of the few places that handled antiques. Now that antique stores are in vogue, “it’s harder and more competitive than it used to be,” Milatovic says. But that’s good news to buyers, because he claims swap meet merchandise “sells a little bit cheaper than in the shops.”

And Milatovic, like Kiviat, couldn’t fathom trading his plot of cement at the Rose Bowl for a shop of his own.

“I could have opened one, but I don’t like stores,” he says. Holding regular hours just doesn’t allow the flexibility of his mobile business. And there’s a camaraderie, Kiviat notes, especially among the veteran dealers and those who deal in antiques and collectibles.

“There’s a lot of good merchandise,” Milatovic says. “You can always find a bargain, but the sharp collectors get here early. Everything cheap and unusual is usually gone early.”

Milatovic and his wife, Mary, pack a rented truck almost every weekend for swap meets at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena City College and Long Beach. They’ve been selling their antiques for more than 15 years at the Rose Bowl and, according to Stan, “we’re not ever going to retire.”

vl,2 Rose Bowl Swap Meet, second Sunday of each month, 1001 Rose Bowl Drive, Pasadena. Regular hours: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Admission: $4 (early bird admission before 9 a.m., $10).