A bargain at twice the price

STEVE SMITH

In every city, there are still good places to treasure hunt; places

where bar codes and a regimented sales experience gets in the way of

what is supposed to be a lot of fun.

Call me crazy, but I think shopping should be fun, that is, unless

you have to shop for a bail bondsman. I just happen to be one of the

few men who likes to shop.

For me, at this time, the best place to shop is the Orange Coast

College Swap Meet on Saturdays and Sundays.

At the OCC Swap Meet, you’ll find the shopping experience like it

was at the big fairgrounds swap meet before they got too highbrow and

changed their name to the Marketplace. In the old days, the

fairgrounds swap meet was a place you could go to get bargains from

people who were willing to wheel and deal. A lot of them had 9-to-5

jobs and worked the swap meet on weekends.

Now, it seems that all of the stalls are occupied by people with

retail stores somewhere in Orange County and who use the Swap Meet

just to add another day of sales to their stores.

At the OCC Swap Meet you’ll find the south end full of people who

have emptied out their garages -- and perhaps a neighbor’s garage as

well -- selling their goods for pennies on the dollar.

I’m sorry to tell one vendor that the first-edition book of “Alice

in Wonderland” that he sold to me for three bucks a couple of months

ago is worth considerably more. I didn’t know that at the time, I

just knew that I liked the book and that it was affordable.

The OCC Swap Meet is about a lot more than deals. Doug Bennett,

the Swap Meet administrator, filled me in on the numbers.

“The Swap Meet generates over $1 million a year of supplemental

funding for the college,” Bennett said. “This year we put over

$500,000 of that into paying for over 150 classes that we couldn’t

otherwise offer. With about 18% of our 24,000 or so students each

semester coming from Costa Mesa, the Swap Meet provides a lot of

direct benefits to residents of the city that we haven’t publicized

to the community.”

Bennett has been the Swap Meet administrator for two years. The

Swap Meet has been around since 1982.

A couple years ago, the city shut down the OCC Swap Meet on

Saturdays due to traffic issues on Fairview Avenue.

“We had operated for 18 years on Saturdays without a permit,”

Bennett said. “When the city brought this to our attention, we agreed

to shut down.”

A few days ago, Daily Pilot columnist Humberto Caspa wrote that

closing the OCC Swap Meet was on the agenda of a few members of the

community who see it not as an answer to financial prayers and as a

cultural benefit, but who see it as a bunch of people in skin other

than white who are shopping in a language other than English. Most of

that description, by the way, is my interpretation of Caspa’s

concerns, not his exact description of the situation.

I’m sorry for the people who look at everything from cultural

perspectives; people who put everything in the black-and-white

context of whether a situation fits their narrow view of what is

acceptable; people whose perfect world is inhabited only by people

who look, speak and think like them.

If there are people like that, and if they are going to try to

shut down the OCC Swap Meet because they don’t like the fact that it

is patronized by a predominantly Latino crowd, they won’t admit to

that. Instead, they’ll approach the City Council with smokescreens.

They’ll complain about the traffic or the noise or the pollution or

come up with some other straw men.

Don’t be fooled.

The OCC Swap Meet is a fabulous experience, one that adds a lot of

color -- skin and otherwise -- to Costa Mesa. As it happens, it is

also returning a nice chunk of change to the college, which is giving

more and more students a better educational experience.

And besides, where else are you going to find a sterling silver

candy dish by a famous silversmith for five bucks, as I did two weeks

ago?

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer.

Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at

(714) 966-4664 or send story ideas to [email protected].