From the archives: [Junk] collecting in Gainesville, Fla.

Note: The following was written for Professor John Marvel’s Spring 2006 in-depth reporting class at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Diane & Michael Buchanan

I expected 7 a.m. to look different.

For one thing, it was too light outside.

As a longtime advocate of the weekend “sleep-in,” I hadn’t witnessed too many early Saturday mornings, and I guess I half-expected an all-encompassing darkness that would lend a sense of mystery and importance to my mission.

A car horn sounded: They had arrived.

I finished buttoning my shirt, grabbed my wallet and half-stepped into my sneakers, pressing down on the backs with my hovering heels. I shuffled out the door and toward the driveway where my mom was holding open the gate. We climbed into the backseat of the purring Lincoln Navigator and it rolled in reverse.

It was my first garage sale experience and friends Michael and Diane had offered to show me the ropes. As residents of Gainesville for more than 20 years and garage sale patrons by instinct, they were the perfect tour guides: driven, determined, well-prepared.

From her position in the passenger seat, Diane turned around and pressed a hot cup of coffee into my mom’s grateful hands. The bottle of juice and folded newspaper located on the console were for my use. Between sips of cranberry juice cocktail, I glanced over the likely targets.

My first mistake was suggesting the estate sale on page 3.

“Translation for an estate sale is ‘expensive [junk],’” Michael said as he turned the SUV down 16th Avenue.

“Some people just say ‘estate sale’ because they’re selling their old grandma’s stuff,” Mom offered. (She really was just along for the ride.)

Michael explained how middlemen often jack-up the price of merchandise at estate sales so they can make a profit. His disgust was palpable.

And simply relying on the classifieds was a no-no too.

“If people are running an ad in the paper, it usually means they think their [junk] is more special than everybody’s else’s,” Diane said. The newspaper provided a rough guide, but it was only consulted when the neon-colored cardboard signs ran out. In any event, it seemed Michael and Diane had already scoped out a target: The Duckpond.

Located in the northeast section of Gainesville, the Duckpond neighborhood hovers between downtown and the no-man’s land of the east. The area earned its name from a narrow strip of water between West and East Boulevards, a favorite hangout for waterfowl. They seemed oblivious to the splendid architecture surrounding their murky existence – the towering Victorians, sturdy rock Colonials and old Florida homes with inviting porches are all historic remnants of the 19th and early 20th century. And as the real estate is generally upper class, so was the discarded junk.

“Diane’s got this snobby attitude: She won’t shop in some parts of town,” Michael confided as we headed east on Eighth Avenue toward the Thomas Center.

But the Duckpond seemed bereft of signs that Saturday morning, and as it was nearing 8 o’clock, the pressure of uncovering that first sale weighed heavily upon Michael. In Florida, most garage sales begin at 7 a.m., and if you want to get the good stuff, you need to arrive early; As a general rule, Michael and Diane didn’t shop past 10 a.m.

Michael, perhaps in desperation, began tailing a blue Volvo. It was moving much like the Navigator, cruising at a slow speed and periodically breaking with each yard sign it passed. Our convoy passed a cardboard square with magic marker arrows promising a sale up the road, but after a mile, Michael dismissed it as a decoy.

“I’ll tell you something that’s unforgivable: leaving your signs up –“

 “Yes, that’s unforgivable,” Diane interjected.

“— leaving your signs up until the next weekend,” Michael finished.

The Volvo sensed the decoy too and turned north. We followed.

At the north end of the neighborhood, we came across our first real sale of the day.

Like a shining oasis in a desert of sleeping homes, the two rows of used furniture along that driveway served as a promising beacon. But we certainly weren’t the first to sip from the watering hole; As we pulled up to the single-story home, a station wagon loaded to the brim with odds and ends pulled away from the curb.

“Look at this guy,” Diane said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“The man is probably a professional shopper and has certain items he searches for,” Michael said.

But Diane’s attention was soon diverted.

“Ooooooh, I want that little table,” she said, pointing at a cute wood piece with narrow legs. “Let me out! Let me out!” Our vehicle was still coasting to a stop when she leapt from the running boards.

Yet the man in the Volvo was two strides ahead of her. By the time Diane reached the driveway, he had hoisted up the table by a leg and was carrying it toward the young woman seated casually with her back to the garage door. It was gone.

As Michael bent down to inspect a box of colorful plates, Diane and my mom busied themselves by surveying the other furniture, including a set of side tables and a matching coffee table, each priced about $20. The seller said her husband had purchased the tables — against her wishes — from another garage sale less than a month ago. Ah, the circle of [junk].

In the end, Michael and my mom decided to split the plates and a box of coffee mugs amongst themselves. Michael planned to use his half for mosaic art projects. My mom would employ hers as a bargaining chip to reclaim the expensive set she had loaned to me. They paid for the dishes, and we jumped back into the Navigator.

“I wanted that table,” Diane moaned.

“You just gotta grab it, and if someone else is grabbing it, you just pull harder,” Michael said as we glided over a speed bump. My new dishwasher-safe dining set clattered in the trunk.

It was during our drive to the second stop of the day that I received the lowdown on “shabby chic.” According to Michael and Diane, the term refers to dated novelty items that still retain an aura of “coolness.” (Apparently, “shappy chic” is a garage saler’s “rosebud.”)

Just west of Main Street on Eighth Avenue, we came across a benefit sale for the restoration of a historic building. Area families had donated the wares and arranged the collection on folding tables within a fenced dirt lot. We parked.

“This would not be my neighborhood of choice,” Diane said.

“Yeah, but you get great stolen stuff,” Michael joked.

But after appraising the booty, I had trouble believing we were dealing with stolen goods; It was unlikely anyone would go to the trouble of stealing and then attempting to sell Vicki Carr’s “It Must Be Him” album on vinyl or a knock-off Louis Vuitton purse.

Empty handed, I trotted back to the car where the others were waiting for me; I had come to realize retreating to the Navigator was the official signal for Michael and Diane’s dissatisfaction with a sale or the completion of their shopping. I jumped into the backseat and we were off.

“They didn’t even have stickers on their stuff,” Diane said. “That means it’s too expensive.”

We paused briefly for three more “decoys” before locating our next stop. The first was a “Lot for Sale” sign and the second a plea for the return of a lost house key. An older man was in the process of affixing the third, an orientation sign to his sale, to the pole of a stop sign.

“Just look at this guy,” Michael said. “I can tell this isn’t going to be a good one,” “He isn’t suave, shappy or chic.”

And he obviously wasn’t ready for us. We turned onto Northwest Fifth Avenue and found someone who was.

The owners of a white, concrete blockhouse had littered their front yard with a baby stroller, a cat carrier and a ferret cage. A row of clothes on hangers swung from a low tree branch. The offerings didn’t look promising, but we filed out of the car anyway.

By the time Michael uncovered a pair of used panties near the makeshift clothesline, he was ready to go.

“Now that was an experience,” he said. “Some people just out garbage out on their yards and call it a garage sale.”

“We always run into one or two of those,” Diane said.

By then, it was getting late – 9 a.m. to be exact – and Michael steered the Navigator toward 43rd Street.

Just off the busy road, a group of Santa Fe Community College students and faculty members were conducting a combined sale to raise money for a trip to a radiography conference in Orlando. The goods were plentiful: a stack of bikes with rusty chains, a fake poinsettia plant, a typewriter, a weedwacker, rolls of wallpaper and a bird cage, sans bird. A dancing teddy bear sang Elvis tunes when his hand was squeezed.

Michael presented me with “The Official Italian Joke Book.”

“You can’t get that just anywhere,” he said.

Also among the “limited edition” items was a pair of nunchucks priced at $3 and a set of bullhorns fastened to a leather display board.

“We’re betting the yogurt maker won’t sell,” said Robin, one of the faculty members.

“Who’s going to buy a yogurt maker?”

Well, it was additive free.

But Michael was headed for the car and the rest of us trotted behind him.

In a bordering neighborhood, we came across Fili, a woman purging items before she moved to a new home located off 34th Street. She worked a craft booth at the Waldo Flea Market and among her sale items was an assortment of thread spools, most of which were bright pink.

“People come out, and that’s the color they like,” she said. She wore a fanny pack fastened around her hips – presumably the sale cash “box” — and a University of Florida Gators T-shirt.

As Fili sold a plant to a skinny youth with a handlebar mustache, I sorted through the video collection, including a VHS tape of the 1993 Bill Clinton Presidential Inauguration.

The lady beside me, a middle-aged woman named Brenda, was searching for crafts.

“I’ve probably been shopping at garage sales since I was 15,” she confided, clutching a spool of brown thread. “I never go to the mall.”

Brenda is what many garage sale patrons call a “free-styler.” She scorns the newspaper advertisements, opting instead to drive aimlessly around town and stop wherever she pleases. Other garage salers will plan a route of attack. They scan the Friday and Saturday newspaper classifieds and then map out the order in which they shop. Within this second classification is a subclass of  “professionals,” a few devoted individuals who rise at the crack of dawn every Saturday so they can beat the crowds. Often they arrive at sales even before the hosts open shop. At such times, they’re referred to as “Early Birds,” a distasteful distinction in most garage sale social circles.

John Maxwell, resident of a house off Northwest 35th Way, was not a fan of Early Birds. In fact, he maintained a careful tally of how many flocked to his garage sales before the advertised time. At the time of our arrival, there were nine new pencil marks on Maxwell’s garage door. The first was recorded at 6:47 a.m.

“I’m an accountant – I just do it by habit,” Maxwell explained, tucking his pencil into his left breast pocket.

Maxwell, a retired U.S. Military captain, said he averages about one garage sale every six to nine months; He has to in order to keep up with all the knickknacks his daughter-in-law sends him from Colorado. From the collection of display, I gathered she likes items with a western motif.

“We get it, and we get rid of it,” Maxwell said. “But she’s becoming aware of that after being married to my son for awhile.”

Empty-handed, Michael, Diane and my mom had retreated to the Navigator, and I soon joined them. It was nearing 10 o’clock, and we had one more stop to make.

At a house along 16th Avenue, we came across a mother forcing her daughter do the unthinkable: sell her beloved stuffed animals.

“I made her weed them down,” explained LuAnn Carter.

 “Fine, but you have to take me to Build-A-Bear,” said Katie, 10.

 “I don’t have to do anything – maybe if you got straight A’s…”

This delightful family was attempting to scale back before moving, and a laundry basket piled high with toys was part of the sacrifice.

“I was going to buy one and tell her, ‘I’m going to give this to my dog,’” Michael joked when we were back in the car. “Actually, she was asking 50 cents – I was going to try to talk her down to a quarter.”

The Navigator turned east on 16th Avenue to return to my stop, my house. Michael, Diane and Mom were headed for breakfast. I was headed for bed.