This year I took a different approach to the 200+ mile drive; after loading a heap of stuff in the minivan on Friday, I left on Saturday around noon and drove to DeKalb IL (a nice little college town), where I had an excellent dinner and spent the night in a hotel.
Sunday morning I was up early (as usual) and got to the fairgrounds relaxed and refreshed instead of tired from driving half the night. The weather was chilly and windy; the skies went from partly cloudy to full overcast, and the forecast gave a 50% chance of rain.
Pulled onto the grass on roughly the same spot I’ve parked in for more years than I can easily recall, grabbed my coffee, locked up, and made a quick survey of the other early birds.
It was still early, pickings were slim, so that was all that I bought. When I got back to the car I started to set out my own miscellaneous merchandise.
The MFJ antenna analyzer went almost as soon as I put it out! As they used to say in Maxwell Street market, that “broke the ice”!
Four variacs, old walkie-talkies, a pile of Plantronics Starsets, old Bell telephones, an Olivetti Lexikon typewriter, a little analog shortwave receiver, a few cheap cw paddles (gave two of them away to aspiring cw operators, with the caveat that they were kind of junky, don’t let them ruin your experience!), a phone lineman’s handset; one of those little Pixie 2 transceiver kits, there was a lot more that I can’t remember at all.
There was also a FREE! pile: pens, markers, and a year’s accumulation of Altoids tins (the world’s most popular project housing). They went like hotcakes!
I was really on a roll, selling that stuff like Billy Mays reincarnated, until the first drops of rain started falling! Looked at my watch; almost 9:00! I quickly set forth to toss my ticket stub in the barrel before the first drawing, and get a little shopping done. The club table (with the barrel) was in one of the fairground’s buildings, and I got there just as it started raining in earnest! The sound of rain on that steel roof was little short of apocalyptic!
Maybe I should have bought the Icom 705 (with every possible accessory), the price was very reasonable, but the “autotuner needs repair” part made me pause (and stay paused). It stayed on the table until closing time; apparently everyone else felt the same way. When I looked outside, the apocalyptic sound proved to be sound only; the rainfall was not at all heavy. Many people had packed up and left already, their spirits dampened by the weather. I found a real bargain on a Hi-Lift jack, and that was about it. People continued to pack up and leave early, even after the rain stopped.
On my final pass through the market I spotted an old Signal Electric straight key for a really low price; the old-school laminated silver contacts sold me on it!
By noon, the time of the last drawing, almost no one was left on the grounds; the club members were well into the process of taking everything down. I had packed up the table and the remaining stuff much earlier, so it was definitely time to head for home, still a long drive ahead.
The drive was uneventful; and it was good to be home!
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