I don't know how familiar you are with flea markets - whether or not you've ever been to one, or casually visited a few to get the idea, or if you're legitimately under the impression that they have fleas there. Or, maybe you're like me and spend every Sunday morning of the warm weather season snapping into boiled wieners while wading through broken bowling trophies and flipping through faded Linda Ronstadt records. And if you're even further like me still, you had your 'usual' flea market, the one you visited most and simply became known as The Flea Market. For me, that's The Hollis Flea Market in Hollis, New Hampshire. And in February of 2024 during the off season, they quietly announced on social media that they were closed forever.
In my lifetime I've witnessed the collapse of retail outlets, restaurants, mom & pop stores, entire malls, movie theaters, drive-in theaters, hotels, amusement parks, even playgrounds, but a flea market - as in The Flea Market - seemed too abstract to ever be in any real danger from the nondescript bureaucracy that's gradually been boarding up the windows of my life. But, it happened, and even though I've yet to fully confront the pain of this loss, it still hurts far worse than the absence of all the other aforementioned places (which is probably why my subconscious has yet to allow me to deal with it as a reality). I'm not being cute or dramatic, this was like the death of a loved one; I'd been attending The Hollis Flea Market since before I can remember and it came with only good experiences and happy memories. (How many things in your life can you say that about?) During whatever was going on in my life, whatever problems I was dealing with, whatever phase of interests I was going through, that real estate remained the same; despite the timeliness of the junk upon the tables and the tarps, it never felt like any specific year - there was no architecture or technology to indicate anything other than postwar Americana, and all the hubcaps and broken blenders and Stephen King paperbacks and Darth Maul headphones and Tickle Me Elmos congealed into a dusty mosaic that was always in motion yet remained a constant. Like that giant storm on Jupiter.
I can't get too specific about my experiences there or how it's left me feeling, because one, as cathartic as writing this is, the wound hasn't even become a scar yet and I'm not fully braced for the impact, and two, as I've asserted time and time again: nostalgia is nontransferable (and the same goes for grief actually). So instead of boring you with my woes any further, let's look at some shit.
Below are 12 items I rescued from The Hollis Flea Market over the course of nearly 40 years. Not all of them are the best of even the most important purchases I made there but each one provides a chapter in a much larger story that will serve as a sentimental journey for myself, and also illustrate the more universal experience of walking up & down dirty aisles in the blazing sun, looking for gold (and broken Happy Meal toys).
- Paul
California Raisins AM/FM Radio
I bought this just in the past few years, and I point that out not to call attention to a grown-ass man owning a novelty radio with bendy arms from 1988, but to say that even through the lens of adult eyes I wasn't able to talk myself out of getting it. I'm a lot more practical and a lot less impulsive as a grownup, but I experienced only a brief moment of indecision before I consciously admitted I couldn't live without this maroon plastic idol. I don't even think the radio part is functional, but unless it solely plays Motown songs I ain't interested.
Biker Babe Wooden Plaque
This could've come from so many damn places: a carnival, a head shop, an auto garage -- and what life did it lead in whatever dorm room or bar or basement in which it lived? At any rate it found its way to the flea market (big surprise) and its smutty kitschiness caught my eye and tickled a chuckle out of me. It would've ended there but I was faced with two aggressive salesmen who sensed my mild merriment and decided to shoot their shot. My polite response was "Oh I'm sure my wife would be mad if I came home with that!" which was a lie on several levels. They backed off with a level of condescension that shouted "Guess we know who wears the pants in that relationship." Looks like I showed them.
Batman Returns Movie Storybook
Scanning and scouring and digging is often how you find the best stuff - sometimes the only stuff. But there are those cases where every item on a table seems to speak directly to you. This instance wasn't that far-fetched, it was a youngish hipster couple unloading a bunch of their childhood and so our nostalgias lined up a bit. Trouble with that is when people have to part with stuff they're probably still attached to, the prices go up. I don't recall missing out on anything that made me feel deprived, and this maybe had partially been a pity purchase. Still, I'm always intrigued to find different perspectives on the evolution of Selena Kyle into Catwoman. (Unlike a lot of the more juvenile adaptations, this one actually does make mention of getting pushed out of a window by Chris Walken.)
Judy Collins CDs
Do you ever plan your nostalgia? I do. I revel and explore and swim around in it enough that I know how to make today a precious memory at some point in the future. A good way to do that is to embrace and saturate yourself in something new - like, say, a deep dive into the song catalog of Judy Collins. I purposefully bought this CD set as a means to always remember that summer whenever I'd hear any of the songs -- not for any specific reason, it's just good to leave breadcrumbs for yourself throughout the course of your existence. And now here we are, and incidentally a Judy Collins song will forever remind me of this now-defunct flea market.
Screamin' Jason Model Kit
Around the time I was 9 or 10 years old is when I started getting big into Fangoria Magazine, and within those gruesome pages there would always be at least one full page ad for Screamin' Model Kits featuring stylized photography of Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, et al. as fully assembled and painted finished products. And as beautiful as they were there were two big turnoffs: I'd no interest in model building, and I don't think I could've handled an 18'' Cenobite looming over me as I slept. Nevertheless, during the first summer of my big Fango phase there was a vendor in Hollis selling his fully finished Screamin' Jason Voorhees model: the legs and torso were not attached, the strap on the mask was broken, and the cardboard machete was no longer a threat to anybody. Even after supergluing the two halves together he still struggled to stand on his own power; he certainly wasn't scary and he was tough to love, but it felt so cool and grown-up having him in my room. Today all that's left is this instruction manual for this model I didn't build.
Fangoria #110
Speaking of! Flea markets are usually synonymous with nice weather (there are indoor options but that's an entirely different animal), but if you start too early or go too late in the season, the mood (and the weather) can be very different. I recall one very grey, sorta chilly, sorta damp Sunday in the middle of October in the early 2000s, which was most likely their last day of the business season and frankly I wasn't feeling it - my mentality had already moved onto Fall/October things and this predominately Summertime activity didn't fit in with that. And then like the segments of the Lament Configuration, everything aligned as I happened upon this seasonally appropriate periodical. It doubles as one of my favorite flea market memories and Halloween Season memories.
Gremlins 2 Topps Trading Cards
While on the subject of favorite memories, there are few that are as magical as this. Someone, for some reason, was selling an entire box of unopened Gremlins 2 trading cards -- that's 36 packs of cards, folks. This was probably a little over a year after the movie's 1990 release and miraculously (or maybe understandably) someone was dumping these cards at a price that was cheap enough to meet my allotted spending money. A whole box of packs? I felt rich; each pack was like a bar of gold. At that point I was only mildly into the Gremlins scene but I did have a taped VCR-to-VCR copy that I borrowed from my cousin, and so the rest of that afternoon was spent opening packs while Gremlins 2 played on the TV. I amassed the entire set from that box and by the end of the day I was a fan for life.
Hopalong Cassidy Cereal Spoon
This was actually a purchase made for my son who had graduated to big boy silverware but our regular teaspoons were still too heavy and cumbersome. Frankly they're too heavy and cumbersome for me also - conquering a bowl of Coco Krispies doesn't require a utensil that could summon the power of Greyskull. So if there's a situation where we both need a spoon I will be the adult and concede - ultimately we'll both ingest the same amount of mercury or lead or whatever the hell this Baby Boomer relic is made out of.
Pewter Figurines
When I was 11 or 12 (probably both) my biggest (if not singular) hobby was collecting these little bejeweled pewter statues. Any money I could accumulate went towards these, and the rest of the time was spent begging my parents to financially support this habit. These could sometimes be found in greeting card stores or fancy gift shops in malls, but during the brief period of my life that I dedicated to these trinkets, there was a table - a display - consistently set up at Hollis every Sunday morning. The little statues were arranged on shelves that ascended like stairs and draped in a fancy teal linen that made it look like a carpeted entrance to a castle. The price range was a slippery slope - smallish ones could be around $10 while a slightly larger one could be $40, so there were many variables when it came to choosing. I acquired so many little dragons and wizards and sword-wielding skeletons in that short span of time -- and roughly ten years later I set up my own table at The Hollis Flea Market and sold a large portion of my collection. The regret of that impulse decision haunts me more with each passing year.
Beethoven and Chopin Busts
I'd wanted a heavy duty bust of Beethoven ever since I was a kid and noticed one prominently featured in A Clockwork Orange as well as in Hershey's 5th Avenue commercials. The closest I got was when I was a teenager I had a rubber one that sang "Roll Over Beethoven" when you pressed a button. Cut to decades later when I finally find one that appears to be made of stronger stuff - ignoring the fact that it's roughly 5'' tall I still consider it to be pretty perfect. It was also one of those situations where the seller didn't wanna break up the "set" so I got stuck with a Chopin too. I used to feel like it compromised the purity of the single Beethoven statue, but now clearly they both have significance.
Schaefer Beer Sign
There's a feeling you get when you've reached that point where you've seen just about everything and it's almost time to go and couldn't find anything to your liking. In that situation it's not uncommon to panic and buy the last object you spot before you leave and so you end up driving home with a pair of rusty gardening shears with only one blade or a novelty shot glass from Atlantic City. I found myself in one such instance where I'd given up and accepted defeat, and when I did walk past this beer sign it certainly did pique my interest, and had I just arrived there or had I found a buncha neat stuff already then that interest would've faded by the time I got to the car. But instead it ended up being my trophy for the day and has lived in my bathroom ever since.
The Beatles White Album Poster
Yes I've discussed it several times before, and consider this a guarantee (or threat) that I can't stop/won't stop. It was June of 1997 and I had like a week of 8th Grade left so I was in a fairly decent mood that Sunday. It could've possibly been the first Hollis trip of the season, and just like the summer before, I was on the hunt for Beatles stuff! In the days before online shopping it was tough to come by memorabilia for a Rock Group from the 60s; the vinyl industry had only just collapsed so finding records was like discovering The Pyramids, and at any flea market that was always my safest bet in finding anything Beatle-related. But this was way better than some moldy, sun-bleached Sgt. Pepper -- a poster that I was intellectually familiar with from books I'd read, and portions of it were included in my compact disc version of "The White Album" but truly I wanted the real thing: to own it, to experience it. And I guess I just inherently knew the imagery well enough to spot it out of the corner of my eye from several aisles over, held up on the side of a van with some fridge magnets. I don't know what the cost was or what my financial situation was in the moment - all I knew is that I'd just spent two months building a research paper on the Lincoln Assassination that was just a few days away from its due date and I consciously had the thought that I would've set that paper on fire if it meant I could have this poster. It didn't come to that (I don't know who would've benefited from such a transaction) but it was no fleeting fancy; it's still one of my most precious physical possessions.
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