Beyond the Obi-Wan Undies
Glad they still serve beer at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet--sorry, the Office Depot Rose Bowl Swap Meet since 2015, can’t get used to that--’cause it’s hotter than ever out here. That business with the ozone, you know.
Get a load of the toy dealer, who, as always, is leaning against his vintage Honda EV-1. He hoarded in the late ‘90s, I’ll tell you. Piled Scrabble and Monopoly high in his coat closet, along with Legos and Viewmaster reels. He even stashed some Nintendo cartridge boxes, just the boxes--got good graphics, he figured. But Beanie Babies and Furbies had about as much resale life as Rubik’s Cubes and Pet Rocks. He gloats about how he called that one.
The logo lady’s a hoot. She used to be “the vintage clothes lady’s daughter,” heiress to racks of the softest rayon shirts and sharpest sharkskin suits anywhere. But the supply just plain wore out. So after her mom died she got wise to logos. Pro teams, with only fleeting allegiances to cities anymore, and jackets embroidered with Arco or Wells Fargo stagecoaches and other merger road kill, that’s her line. Very big with the Japanese buyers.
The retro siblings, what a grouchy trip they are. The brother’s always head to toe in Armani and the sister prances around in Prada. They’re stuck in the ‘90s, though they weren’t even born then! Rumor has it that an uncle who made a killing during that swing revival fronted the money for their SMARM: Swap Meet Active Response Mechanism. Scan an item’s bar code and a real hoity-toity voice intones: “a teakettle conceived by the postmodern designer Michael Graves for a store called Target . . . .” or “Behold this quaint computer terminal, known as an iMac . . . . “ You get the idea.
The underground guy is a creep, peddling long-banned stuff: play guns and GI Joes, redwood patio furniture and furs, a pile of those Taco Bell Chihuahuas. If you’re in the know and ask, he’ll pull out the stash he keeps in that unconverted SUV of his that chugs black market gasoline. The box holds aerosol cans, Styrofoam clamshells and, don’t spread it around, Hooters T-shirts. He is so gross.
To the frugal masses, “swap meet” means bulk tube socks, scratchy dish towels and long-stemmed silk roses sold in parking lots or abandoned drive-ins. To a certain covetous stratum of Southern Californians, however, “I’m going to the swap meet” carries the cultural gravitas of the Van Gogh exhibition--with price tags. On the second Sunday of the month, Pasadena hosts the grandaddy of collectors’ swap meets, an assemblage of shoppers and vendors, speculators and suckers, proper dowagers and tattooed teens. The Rose Bowl has seen it all, from aging baby boomers rhapsodizing over Monkees memorabilia to Gen-Xers with “Land of the Lost” fetishes, from surf wear company CEOs warehousing Hawaiiana to Tokyo-bound dealers on Levi’s buying binges. It’s an egalitarian outdoor auction, where the hoi polloi can duke it out with Diane Keaton. You’re not going to score that splendid Monterey furniture ottoman, Ms. Annie Hall, if I get to it first!
Yes, I am one of them. For years the swap meet rotation schedule (Pasadena City College on the first Sunday, Rose Bowl second, Long Beach third, Santa Monica fourth) charted my comings and goings as mightily as the Gregorian calendar. And, like many swap meeters before me, I’ve taken voluntary breaks, put off by eavesdropping on victory cries over used Air Jordans, my own embarrassing enthusiasm for “Where’s the Beef?” oven mitts, and the escalating prices.
“When I first went to the Rose Bowl, there were esoteric, California-based things,” says Clare Graham, a production designer and collector (carny dolls, prison art) who attended the inaugural swap meet there in 1968. “Greene and Greene furniture was actually sitting at a swap meet--that plain brown grandma furniture!--and Gustaf Stickley and Roycroft, Marblehead pottery.” Then, he bemoans, California movie money got into it--money that transforms everything that was once sweet and undervalued and neglected into a crass and overpriced spectacle. The Sunday mornings when action schlock producer Joel Silver would deploy legions of walkie-talkie-toting assistants to secure every available piece of Roseville pottery come to mind.
Because it’s that time of the century, we have to wonder, some of us greedily, what will define us 30 years from now? In the era of eBay, a 3-year-old online collectible trading company with stock worth half as much as General Motors’, will the swap meet as we know it survive at all? If it does, will people go for the reasons they do now, to recover, or at least to observe, what has been lost?
“Especially for people in their ‘20s, as they see the world change, they’ll look for things that spark memories,” says Dr. Lonnie Bunch of the National Museum of American History. “Remember the grocery store? It might no longer be Ralphs, but somebody might find a sign from the front of a Ralphs shopping cart, and it opens the door. It allows time to think about your mom, the independence of the first time you went on your own to the store, how you wrote a check.”
Yet just as a Little Golden Book can elicit warmth, relics of the Cold War, apartheid or disasters can evoke dark memories. “Some stuff, frankly, is a joy to be rid of,” says Marilyn Nissenson, co-author of the book “Going Going Gone.”
So what will become, as Bunch puts it, of our “prisms into culture”? Paperweights. Snow globes. T-shirts with place names. Any purely local artifact predating the world economy. “As we become global, it’s going to be hard to distinguish ourselves,” Bunch says.
Natural fibers, offers Dale Carolyn Gluckman, curator of costumes and textiles for LACMA. “We may not even be able to grow or raise certain things that make the fibers. And ethnic, regional dress, which is rapidly disappearing. The more global fashion becomes, the more people will look for surviving remnants of idiosyncratic dress.”
Car parts, says Marilyn Nissenson. “People will stop using gasoline.” Glass containers. Smoking paraphernalia. Hotel keys. Wine corks. Institutional memory. Huh? “If you’re a historian or pop culture person who wants to know about marketing and packaging for a corporation that has changed hands, go try and find out. Corporate archives are trashed.”
Marbles, says “Going Going Gone” co-author Susan Jonas. Avon anything. Bobby pins. Mother-daughter outfits. Gliders. “Who’s making gliders on front porches anymore?” she wonders.
Neon signs, laments David Shayt, collection specialist in cultural history at the Smithsonian. “They’re expensive, fragile. Signs will be digital.” Barbershop poles. Lighthouses. Hand tools.
Televisions and telephones, says Martin Chapman, curator of Decorative Arts at LACMA. “Manufacturers haven’t wrestled with design of televisions since the 1960s, so in 2050 they’ll think it looks fabulous, even though it doesn’t work.”
The clothes of Jean Paul Gaultier, says Cameron Silver, owner of the Los Angeles vintage store Decades. “He’s the most important designer of my lifetime. Hold on to your Hermes, the new Gucci, your Prada nylon suits.”
Handmade crafts, offers Clare Graham. “The evidence of life is in it, all the atoms attached to it tell you the life the object has led. Everything about that person who made it is still there.”
Logoed restaurant china, says Tom Patchett, owner of Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, co-creator of “Alf” and collector (neon signs, dinnerware). “There’s a social history written under the glaze.
“I don’t like to be categorized as an old fogey who’s collecting things from my childhood because there’s something missing in my life. I love things that are funny and absurd. You wonder, why in the world would they ever have made that? It begins to look strange, interesting, so ugly it’s gorgeous.”
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Collectors can offer rational, practical explanations for purchasing a doggie fez, though they don’t own a dog. They can play the rube, spotting a 1924 pewter chocolate mold in the shape of a turkey that they know to be worth $80 and ask the seller, with a straight face and feigned ignorance, “Will you take 20 for the bird thing?” They can be seized by near-instant regret, frantically retracing their route to the night stand from the Queen Mary. They are at once detail-oriented and discombobulated. They can recall with savant precision the weather conditions on the morning they bought a Scooby Doo Mystery Machine Burger King giveaway, though they can rarely find their parked car. They are excitable. They enjoy codependent relationships with dealers--”Got those swizzle sticks you asked about”--or harbor resentments so strong from a slight that they’ll blacklist an offending vendor for eternity. They are impervious to a child’s cry of “I want to go home.” They know the rules to their game resemble those of a gambler--decide going in when to back off, set limits but never abide by them.
From a street above the Rose Bowl parking lot at 5:30 in the morning, the air heavy and cold, I survey the scene: early birds in knots at the stadium gates. There are certainly prop masters and vintage store dealers among them, but it’s the hobbyists who reveal themselves. They know and greet each other, some touching gloves like boxers before a bout. They dress in layers. They tote water, maybe a notebook, and often the sort of cart elderly folks roll groceries home in. They rarely stray from carefully plotted flying patterns: beeline for cuff link guy and bakelite couple, clockwise loop on the fence, zigzag the aisles.
I hook up with Bill Stern, restaurant critic and connoisseur of California pottery, who carries oversize duffels that he can unload as needed into the car trunk. He is what we call, and I don’t think he’d take offense, an obsessive collector.
The gates open at 6 and the crowd starbursts. Hordes of young memorabilia collectors, dressed in Patagonia fleece, khakis and Gilligan hats, hurriedly cross a bridge to the flowered ‘70s suitcases and skateboards and pop culture detritus. Stern’s pace, though no less determined, is more peaceful.
“I bought a set of Vernon dishes from a neighbor across the courtyard from me who was moving, a porn star, actually, and they were just dishes to him,” he begins. “I put them inside a Welsh dresser, and then the cabinet said, ‘More.’ I was sure I heard that.” That was 1980. He now owns 3,000 pieces of California pottery.
“Oh, my God, excuse me,” he says. We stop at a table where he caresses two luminescent pink-and-blue Ultra California teacups from the ‘50s (sold!) as I examine an ejection seat--yes, a whole seat--one booth over. Stern can eye a saucer on a tarp, sitting amid dusty Playboys and broken blenders, and declare, “Harlequin, 1938, made by Homer Laughlin in West Virginia.” He raises seemingly perfect Bauer bowls to his ear and pings them to hear the telltale ring of a hidden crack.
We stop frequently to say hello to fellow obsessive collectors, like John (blackabilia), Scott (tile) and Michael (glass). Stern never frets about supply. “There’s a lot of stuff in this country,” he notes.
I leave Stern as he cradles an earthenware teapot designed by Edith Heath (“this is from the heavens”) to join two other collectors who epitomize the sentimental yet pragmatic among our ranks. Kathleen Schaaf owns the Long Beach vintage store Meow and accumulates old print advertising, rock T-shirts, and shoes, shoes, shoes. Kevin Segal compiles the Essential Media Counterculture catalog, with categories such as R. Crumb, Murder & Mayhem and Space Age Pop.
“You need some ironic distance before you can predict retro nostalgia,” Segal says. “We’re just starting to see the ‘80s. Parachute pants, they speak to an era. The past was just more romantic, ideal, it reminds people of a simpler time.”
“A more comfortable time,” Schaaf jumps in.
The ‘80s were romantic? I ask, cringing at the thought of Wham!
“Our era is cynical,” Segal says, “It’s not as much fun.”
Schaaf stops here and there to shop--for her store and self. She’s psyched about the 1970s red Famolare plastic clogs with beyond-chunky heels that look primed for an Elton John LP cover. When she says that her customers might not understand them yet, what she really means is that they’re for her. “I’m dying for a 1971 Diamond Dog Star rock T-shirt,” she admits.
So what’s with the ‘70s obsession?
“Sid and Marty Krofft,” Segal says. “I love that stuff; they were geniuses.”
“Except that scary Witchiepoo,” adds Schaaf, laughing.
“But childhood was a safe, happy time,” Segal says. At least the grinning H. R. Pufnstuf bendables for sale tell us so. Nostalgic desire, drizzled with a little postmodern sensibility, will keep people flooding the swap meet, he says.
I join graphic designer Amy Inouye. Like me, Inouye is a recovering swap meeter. She is also a smooth assessor of all things kitsch, the coolheaded purveyor of the Chicken Boy Catalog for a Better World, which tends to all of your discontinued Beethoven toilet paper cozy needs and, of course, offers that constellation of refrigerator magnets, toothpick holders and pocket protectors inspired by Chicken Boy, a mascot she saved from a downtown restaurant of the same name.
She lumps her purchases into “accidental groupings” of Japanese canned coffees, crochet dolls, Mr. T memorabilia, Hello Kitty bric-a-brac and so on.
As we weave past booth after booth--oh, the mechanical banks and fiberglass geese, the bongo drums and leopard-print bar stools, will it ever end?--she asks, “Remember how everybody had a Garfield in their car window? What happened to those?”
“Don’t know,” I say. We see one three aisles later, dirty and minus a suction cup, for five bucks.
“We’re almost to the year 2000 and look around. This could be 1977, except maybe the lipstick colors are a little more natural,” Inouye says. So what will define the ‘90s?
“Gray, beige and off-white clothes, I guess; I don’t get it,” she says. “You know what’s amazing? When you think of the future and how it was supposed to look, it’s so much closer to the ‘50s and ‘60s. That’s what looks mod, those colors, they’re so fresh and fun.”
She tries on some rainbow Converse, gets a little excited by the fringe on a fez, but ultimately burns out from the madding crowd. “It’s a good sport,” she says. But back then stuff was cheap. “It’s gotten really expensive.”
So there is nostalgia, too, for the swap meets of the past, less crowded and cheaper, when you and only you knew the hidden value of an “A-Team” sprinkler head.
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“Don’t step off the 2 by 4s, you might fall through the ceiling!” my dad shouts through the attic opening. There it is, in the shine of my weak flashlight, a ghostlike face with hollowed eyes. “Found the Luke Skywalker Halloween mask!” I shout down. My family cheers from below. Dad starts humming, “We’re in the Money.”
I am searching for the remnants of my mom’s “Star Wars” stuff, cardboard boxes of R2D2 ankle socks and Chewbacca necklaces and unassembled Death Star models she stashed away 20 years ago because she had a really good vibe that it would see us through college. With the new movie, now’s the time, they figure, to fish it out. And my folks have gotten savvy to eBay.
Jerry and Ruthe dragged me, never howling, to the swap meets that would stuff our house to the rafters with (and this is an abridged list) stamp books, Peter Max posters, key chains, Niloak and Sascha B pottery, tourist patches, Jiminy Crickets, strangers’ scrapbooks, angels and store stickers. And books. About 5,000 of them, from a near-complete set of first edition Stephen Kings to arguably the largest private cache of works by 17th century British diarist Samuel Pepys.
Did I mention Hawaii?
That’s the biggest, most beloved, of the bunch, started after my dad learned in the late ‘70s that we’re distant relatives of Captain Cook. At my bridal shower, I pulled from their gift bag a gleaming bronze 1930s hula girl lamp with hips that swiveled beneath a grass skirt.
“I like the thrill of the hunt,” Ruthe says, surrounded by 17 oil paintings of Diamond Head that hang in the living room. “You might just find that one thing that no one else knows about.”
“Ownership is a large part of the pleasure,” says Jerry. “There’s something wonderful about reading a book in its original printing; it’s a whole different, very pleasurable feeling.”
Plans for future collections? Miniature helicopters, says Mom; books with Hollywood in the title, says Dad.
I ended up, of course, working out my own demons, starting young with anything Snoopy, moving on to British royalty, the Kennedys, theater programs and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “I Have Seen the Future” was its motto. I love the optimistic designs and brilliant orange and blue logos and gorgeous souvenirs. Not to get Shirley MacLaine about it, but sometimes I wonder if I was there. How else to explain my binder brimming with brochures to exhibits I didn’t see, maps to places I’ve never been or the way a lapel pickle pin from the Heinz Dome, sitting quietly on a swap meet’s plywood table, reeled me in hook, line and sinker?
On the evening that we uncover the hidden kingdom of Obi-Wan underwear (soon to be a two-hour Fox special), I ask Dad to help me eBay my 1977 Hardy Boys lunch box. We set a minimum bid of $15.50 and wait. I opt for a counter to record how many people visit it during the seven-day sales window. It feels detached. I don’t know what these people look like. I don’t know whether they, too, had the hots for Shaun Cassidy? Are they impressed with my thermos? No oohs, how cool. No icks, how ugly.
Of the 737 different lunch boxes on eBay, mine contends with two other Hardy Boys, a Partridge Family that started at $9.99 and is up to $70 with 12 hours and 56 minutes remaining, and a Hong Kong Phooey (from the ‘70s cartoon that featured a karate-chopping mutt) that’s topping off at $20.50 from a seller in Louisiana. Click on “Hong Kong” and the “Happy Days” theme inexplicably pours out of the computer’s speakers. A revolving virtual Visa/MasterCard logo snakes across the monitor. The item’s descriptor begins: “You are bidding on a Hong Kong Phooey metal lunch box.”
You know, even if that’s true, I don’t want to see it in print.
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What Will Be Collectible?
Anything obsolete, certainly, due to liability rulings, environmental policy, technology, politics...Herewith, a few predictions.
Fez: With that small-town ethos of civic betterment and fraternal camaraderie swallowed whole by mini-malls and electronic entertainment, relics from those defunct Masonic halls and Elks lodges will be hard to come by.
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USSR wrestler: With the Cold War over, we’re glad we kept any artifact recalling the former Soviet Union. “Popular culture items reflect an era better than fine art,” says Eric Alberta of Sotheby’s collectibles department.
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Cigarettes: While we didn’t think it was possible to underestimate the tobacco lobby, smoking will be verboten--not only in restaurants and on billboards, but in the whole U.S. smuggling Marlboros will get you 20 to life.
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Imac computer: As the iMac inevitably fossilizes, collectors will covet it--actually, the whole set of five original colors. As Dorothy Twining Globus of the Fashion Institute of Technology puts it, “It looks like the VW bug.”
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Starbucks cup: As more people come to their senses and realize that $3 for a cup of coffee really is ludicrous, the Starbucks paper cup, rare with lid, will be the one artifact that defines the era of the world caffeine cartel. “What makes something scarce is that it gets destroyed under normal use,” says Noel Barrett of the “Antiques Roadshow.”
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Foot measure: The future of retail will mean fewer salespeople, less one-on-one interaction and more Internet shopping. Go into a shoe store and tell a salesperson--if you can find a salesperson--your shoe size and he or she will come out with a range of shoes. Notes David Shayt of the Smithsonian: “Foot measures are out the window.”
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Fast-food giveaways: Sure, they are ubiquitous, cheaply made and reek of enforced collectibility. Standing alone, the giveaway doesn’t say much, but, notes the Smithsonian’s Dr. Lonnie Bunch, “when you contextualize it, it shows the way we sell things, how marketing toward children after World War II changed, the impact of the father and mother working.”
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Floating pens: Souvenirs such as these pens, commemorating a place, event or corporate name, will hold their own on the low-end antique market. “Companies will change hands, the economy will completely melt down and reorganize,” says “Going Going Gone” co-author Marilyn Nissenson. “Will an NBC or ABC cap look like a Stetson from the 19th century?”
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Free South Africa pin: With the apartheid regime overturned in the ‘90s, talismans of the freedom struggle, such as this Keith Haring pin, begin their ascent to historical memento status.
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Campaign button: As politicians rely solely on TV and the Internet for campaign advertising, bumper stickers and oven mitts disappear. Candidates “can’t measure the knickknack’s effect” on would-be voters, says Larry Bird of the Smithsonian.
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Aerosol can: When saving the ozone truly becomes more pressing than the need for Aqua Netting your hair, Pledging your dining room table or tagging a bus bench, aerosol cans finally will be outlawed.
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Film: The microprocessor retires 35-millimeter film, just as it made typewriters obsolete. The few not wooed by digital cameras will be bootlegging darkroom film chemicals in their backyard stills.
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Matchbook: The ban on matches won’t be a shock given the prohibition on campfires, charcoal briquettes and fireworks. This matchbook, from a downtown L.A. restaurant, is more valuable in its original wrapper.
Fez
