By Casey Jarmes | The News-Review
WHAT CHEER – The What Cheer Flea Market was open for its first weekend of the year from May 1-4, bringing in dozens of vendors and hundreds of shoppers to the small town’s fairgrounds. The News-Review spoke with several vendors about their wares.
Tom Hamilton, referring to himself as Tom the Cast Iron Guy, had multiple tables set up, covered in more than 250 different cast iron pans, some of which were as old as 160 years old. Hamilton has been reselling cast iron pans for 15 years now, cleaning and restoring a good 9,000 different pans.
“I had a buddy of mine that collected antiques and he said, ‘Tom, if you want to get in on the ground floor, here’s something you need to do. You need to start thinking about cleaning cast iron,’” said Hamilton.
“Here’s the big three,” Hamilton said, after being asked why he was such a big fan of cast iron. “Number one, food tastes better in cast iron. Nobody has ever said that’s not true. Number two, the female species needs more iron than men, so you get trace elements of iron in your food, and that’s medically documented. And number three, you’re cooking with the original non-stick cookware, with NO CHEMICALS, and ‘NO CHEMICALS’ is in capital letters.”
This was Hamilton’s first year at the What Cheer Flea Market.
“Unfortunately, somebody stole a lid last night, but otherwise everybody has been very, very kind, and we’ve been very welcome everywhere we’ve been,” said Hamilton.
Angela Snyder sold art pieces she had made out of recycled glass bottles, including bottles that had been decorated to turn them into lamps and decorative decanters and frames containing shards of broken alcohol bottles.
“I spent my entire life working, and just doing art as a weekend thing, or type thing like that,” said Snyder. “And now my children are grown up, and my youngest is 18, and I finally can get out and see the rest of the world…Everything is recycled. Even the frames are recycled frames. I mean, I even make my own glue, my clay. I actually go to the recycling center to get a lot of my paint and stuff also…The bottle thing is, I just wanted to do recycled materials, and my son worked as a maintenance man at Rathman at the Honey Creek Resort, and so he got me all the bottles for free, and so I got a lot of high dollar bottles too that I’m gonna be doing for this new stuff here. I got like 300 bottles, so I thought, well, hey, let’s try this.”
“I was up here, seven or eight years ago, and I hadn’t been back, but I really loved it, and so I wanted to come back,” said Snyder about the flea market. “It’s a great event. I mean, even if you didn’t even want to sell stuff here, wanted to be here for a week and set up your RV, like the people next to me did.”
Rick Burgett sold old bar lights, signs, pint glasses and memorabilia, ranging from the 1960s to the modern day.
“Basically, I just collect, and whatever I don’t want I try to resell so I can buy more for my collection. I have about 2,500 pieces on display in my basement…To me, it’s art. It’s just beautiful. I just like doing it. There’s so many variations of it, it’s endless,” said Burgett.
John Schneider of Tiffin sold imported Mexican pottery, including multiple clay faces.
“I used to go out west and see it, and I was always fascinated with it and where it came from,” he explained. “And I went out and searched for it myself. Traveled to Guadalajara, central Mexico…I just retired from John’s Ice Cream store, after 43 years. I used to travel in the winter time, during the off season, I had a sea salt business. So now I’ve sold my business, we have more time to do this. We were in Mexico last January, we’re going back in September.”
Juree Christensen sold antiques, including old irons, tools, toys, seed bags, and crock pockets from the 1800s.
“We’ve been coming to What Cheer for ten years,” said Chrisensen. “Our father used to do it, so we took over, and decided we would go on with the legend. Got good friends here in What Cheer.”
