We surely crossed paths! I was there for pretty much all of the 1980s, and the first bit of the 1990s, selling most years. The best thing about selling is that you have a place to drop off the stuff that you buy. :) For many of the years that I sold, I quickly threw together a few random things to populate my spot, but really only wanted a place to put stuff that I bought. It was once said that most of the buying and selling took place before the event opened for non-sellers. :) I made a lot of friends there, many of whom I still have. I still have some gear that I purchased at that flea market, and some of it is on exhibit at LSSM. The flea market was the most important part, for most people it seems. It certainly was for me, and all of my friends at the time. Heck, there were some years that we never even went anywhere BUT the flea market. When you see tens of thousands of people outside at the flea market, and maybe a thousand or so inside the buildings, that tells you something. What really killed it was moving from the Trenton State College location to the Mercer County Community College. Though the latter was much closer to home for me (literally a five minute ride, I lived in Mercerville at the time), the event shrunk dramatically in that transition and a lot of the magic (and great hardware!) was gone. -Dave On 3/4/21 12:39 PM, Jeff Galinat via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Yea, I sure miss those days. I was a vendor at TCF for over 40 years starting in 1978. TCF was the highlight of my year and preparing for it was my version of "getting ready for the BIG GAME". I always took the Friday before off to test, label and load the truck to the roof. I sold & got a lot of bargains over the years and had a great time meeting fellow enthusiasts. The flea market really got killed when TCF moved to March and the "flea market" got moved to a conference room. I continued to sell at TCF but in 2019 they told the vendors they had to be packed up & out of the room by 3pm. With 4 tables of stuff, I had to start packing at 2pm. I vowed that would be my last TCF which proved to be a moot point since I moved to Tucson, AZ in early 2020.
I am glad to see that others have similar fond memories of the TCF flea market.
Jeff Galinat
On Thu, Mar 4, 2021, 6:11 AM Christian Liendo via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I think you could in time. I thought I was the only person who missed TCF's flea market,but there seems to be many others.
I wish TCF realized how important their flea market was and how by killing it they killed their show.
On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 10:45 PM Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
We can only hope that someday we could fill that big parking lot with vendors! That would be incredibly exciting!
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA