This Saturday, when the parades are stepping off across America and the cherry bombs start to pop, Ron Haring will be exercising his independence at the Kane County Flea Market, setting out his phonographs, cylinder records, and busts of Thomas Edison, awaiting the buyers who storm the grounds at the stroke of noon. Two months ago, wife and three kids notwithstanding, Haring chucked the repair and warehouse management job he’d held for eight years to see if he could make a full-time gig of his moonlight persona–Victrola Man.
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A stamp and coin collector as a kid, Haring knows firsthand the force that drives the Kane County shopper. He and his younger brother spent their Ohio boyhood on a perpetual treasure hunt, grazing the landscape with metal detectors, learning to appreciate anything old. A lover of both history and machinery, he was smitten with the antique talking box the first time he came across one, about 20 years ago. Since then he’s bought and sold more than a thousand of them. He buys them from other dealers or customers at shows, does the necessary repairs (often a broken mainspring, which powers the turntable), and resells them for $150 to $1,500. “Usually, I try to leave the cabinets in their original condition,” he says. Most are purchased as functional pieces of nostalgia.
Haring says he’s seen a shift at Kane County, with more people coming to buy bargain socks and Beanie Babies, and fewer looking for antiques. It’s also getting harder for him to find the kind of thing he sells. The PBS program Antiques Roadshow has raised expectations about values to unrealistic levels, he says: “People don’t understand that there’s a difference between the appraised value of an item and the price they can usually sell it for.” Meanwhile smaller antiques and collectibles are starting to move on the Internet rather than at the markets. Still, after years of working what amounted to two full-time jobs, he’s managed to pay off the mortgage on his Plano home and thinks he might be able to swing this entrepreneurial thing.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Ron Haring photo by Nathan Mandell.
