COVER STORY : Entrepreneurial Tent City : The Saugus Swap Meet attracts thousands of bargain shoppers every Sunday, reinforcing the credo: ‘One person’s trash is somebody else’s treasure.’

In pre-dawn’s chill, they queue up in motor homes, vans, campers and pickups--some having slept the night away parked outside--waiting to pitch their tents and wares.

And when the gates open at 6 a.m. each Sunday, the venerable Saugus Speedway, home to the roar of 100-m.p.h. stock cars just the night before, now seems only to whisper--with hundreds of vendors hastily setting up shop, their metal canopy poles clankety-clanking onto the paved oval track and infield, as well as part of the parking lot.

At 7 a.m., when the grounds open to $1-a-head shoppers, many of these 700 vendors--who pay $20 to $55 per space, depending on location--start giving shape to what will become, by midmorning, an entrepreneurial tent city. And inside the tiny security booth, 75-year-old Alice MacWhirter juggles the public-address system and the phones, cheerfully answering the first of more than 100 calls before day’s end: “Yes, we are open--and it’s a beautiful day!”

This is the Saugus Swap Meet, a Santa Clarita Valley institution since 1965, which attracts crowds of bargain shoppers or browsers ranging from 7,000 to more than 20,000 every Sunday, reinforcing the credo that “one person’s trash is somebody else’s treasure.”

It’s only an hour’s drive north of downtown Los Angeles, but it’s an interplanetary journey from Rodeo Drive, the glitzy malls or even your everyday shopping strip.

Here, on numbered spaces within lines neatly painted red, the merchants peddle--in the promoters’ words--”everything under the sun” from beanbag chairs to body oils to bread boxes, from toy animals to tank tops to T-shirts (some commemorating the L.A. riots), from porcelain clowns to papaya to pepper spray for self-defense.

Here, too, some potted plants for sale are fake, but the people are decidedly real.

*

“Is that red wagon for sale?” a woman customer shouts.

“Yes, everything’s for sale,” vendor Arthur Baker, 72, of Mission Hills, yells back, “including her .”

He nods good-humoredly toward Babe, 74, his wife of 40 years and co-partner in one of the Saugus Swap Meet’s countless mom-and-pop dealerships.

“This is an old-timer,” Baker says, not having to explain that he’s talking about the toy wagon.

“But it’s got heavy-gauge steel, it’s been done over, and it’s got wall-to-wall carpeting,” he adds, referring to a swatch of plush, off-white carpet that fits the wagon’s bed perfectly. “I’ll tell you, it didn’t look that good when I got it.”

Arthur and Babe Baker offer vintage toy wagons and other small odds-and-ends that he restores at home, as well as antique signs and other collectibles, which aren’t the norm at Saugus.

By definition, swap meets differ from flea markets. Swap meets are generally perceived as more commercial--and top-heavy with contemporary, cut-rate merchandise, including clothing and electronics. Pasadena’s once-a-month Rose Bowl Flea Market, for example, caters more to upscale shoppers lured by its strong emphasis on antique furniture and collectibles.

Baker, a lean and rangy retired mail carrier (“Got a lot of exercise that way,” he says) who wears a rumpled cap inscribed “Adult Under Construction,” has worked the Saugus Swap Meet with Babe since the mid-1980s.

Like many other vendors, they now try to ride out the whiplash economy, which they say “hurts an awful lot.”

“Most people go down to the other end of the grounds,” Arthur says, “because it’s all new merchandise there. They’re not looking for this kind of stuff.”

“We have junk, but it’s clean junk!” Babe quips.

To be sure, the Saugus Swap Meet--which, according to some veteran swap-meet watchers, ranks with one in Costa Mesa among Southern California’s largest such weekly events--offers a kaleidoscope of sights, smells and sounds of shoppers bartering with vendors.

It’s a woman customer who doesn’t mind being photographed in a blue sweat shirt emblazoned “Shopping University,” but says she’s too busy to talk. It’s a contractor’s van inscribed “The Jesus Way: Finish Carpentry,” bearing a bumper sticker that reads: “Have you tormented the devil today?” It’s signs advertising comic books: “Death of Superman: $5” and “Funeral: $1.25.” It’s signs of these and other times: “No pants over $2--as low as .75”. . . “Yes! 8-Track Tapes (New!) $1,” . . . “Refinance Now! 7 3/8% Fixed!”

Here, the aroma of hot coffee and cheese-apple strudel wafts across the grounds. And so do the sounds of portable radios blaring Patti Page, Creedence Clearwater and Bryan Adams, of mothers ordering children to “Sit still!” and of one vendor telling visitors, “I didn’t vote for Clinton. Now I have to work Sundays!”

As the Santa Clarita Valley starts to fill up with heat more typical of mid-August, the swarm of shoppers--many in halter tops and walking shorts--grows so quickly that it’s easy for some youngsters to get lost. A little girl is inadvertently separated from her parents, who rush to the security booth, where Alice MacWhirter sits at a small open window during this, her 25th year at the swap meet.

On the microphone, MacWhirter describes the lost child as “Lindsay, 6 years old, with a brown, long ponytail.”

“We average about four lost children a week,” MacWhirter says, adding that a few years ago, she helped reunite a mother with her 4-month-old girl (who had been brought to the booth by a stranger) by letting the child cry over the public-address system. “The mother recognized her crying, which I think was fantastic,” MacWhirter says.

Out among the hordes of vendors, however, the talk isn’t of lost children but of lost jobs and lost revenues.

“I’m an artist during the week--and this is what I call my day job,” says Joela Nitzberg of Encino, who has sold ski clothing at Saugus for 15 years. “Here, you can be your own boss--and there’s very little overhead.”

She talks on as she and a co-worker unload gloves, boots and other paraphernalia from an old blue van parked on the racing track, her pet Airedale, Bingo, tagging along.

“This place,” she adds, “is where we see the recessions coming. My income now is down about one-third. It’s scary.”

Babe Baker agrees, working alongside Arthur among their vintage signs, one with a Gucci logo but no Gucci price: $8.

“The customers touch every one of these,” she says. “They look at ‘em. They ask, ‘How much?’ But then they walk away because they can’t afford ‘em. And I can’t afford to give ‘em away for nothing.”

Behind the grandstand, Jack Schneider, 69, of Encino, greets visitors to his enclosed booth, where he sells mostly women’s wear.

“You really want to know where we are today?” Schneider asks rhetorically.

“Well, the customers used to be easy. They didn’t even look at the products, the price tags. Today, these same customers are very, very tough. They say, ‘Can you give me a deal?’ much more than they ever did.

“Girls used to come in and buy three or four pairs of pants. And you’d say $60. . . . No problem. Today, they’re watching you every moment you write the sales slip. Their minds are calculating with you. Then, two minutes later, they say, ‘Maybe I better not take this,’ or ‘I’ll take just one, and maybe I’ll be back next month.’ ”

*

Schneider, who buys his merchandise from downtown Los Angeles wholesalers, has worked Saugus for 27 years--long enough to know that California’s recession has left scars.

“I feel sorry for these couples whose mortgage payment is $1,800 a month,” he says. “He’s got a new car with $350-a-month payments, and she’s got one for $280. And then all of a sudden, he gets laid off. It hurts them. It hurts us .”

Even in a California recession with no end in sight, the Saugus Swap Meet somehow hangs on and on--a paean to the American Dream.

“I think everybody has this dream of being in business for himself,” says Ray Wilkings, the Saugus Speedway’s promoter/general manager. “They may work for somebody else during the week, pushing papers around and taking a lot of words from a lot of supervisors.

“But on the weekends, they can be their own boss. They can come out here and barter with people. They don’t have to listen to anybody. It’s good therapy for them.”

As a teen-ager in the mid-1960s, Ray Wilkings ran errands for his father, a food concessionaire whom the speedway’s owners would appoint in 1970 to general manager in charge of both the stock car racing (now in its 54th year) and the swap meet.

Now, at 40, Wilkings--having succeeded his father, who died in 1985--has turned the Saugus Swap Meet into an always-on-Sunday family avocation, his wife and two children working the concessions, his mother still keeping the books.

The swap meet survives, Wilkings says, in part because it shares revenues and resources with the stock car racing, which operates on Saturday nights from March through September.

“It used to be that when times were good,” he says, “racing would go up because it’s more expensive to get into and more of an entertainment item--and swap meets would go down because people didn’t need to make the extra dollars.

“When times got tough with the gasoline crunch in ‘74, the swap meets took up the slack because people weren’t driving far from home, they needed to make extra dollars or they could spend the day just walking around. It was cheap entertainment.”

Today, Wilkings says, revenues from racing stay constant--even in the slumping economy--”because people still need entertainment. But the swap meet has been down. . . .”

Even so, on the first summer-like Sunday after winter’s unusually heavy rains, Wilkings is pleased that the swap meet had attracted as many as 12,000 visitors--making it, as Alice MacWhirter happily keeps reminding telephone callers, “a beautiful day.”

*

For first-time vendors such as R.C. Denney, 33, and his wife, Rhonda, 24--their two small daughters in tow--it’s a beautiful day for selling tires, hubcaps, wheel rims and baby clothing.

“I’m pleased I won’t have to cart anything home now,” R.C. says at midday. “Those baby clothes went”--he snaps his fingers--”like that. They were gone!”

Adds Rhonda: “In some ways, I like it better as a vendor. We’re both people watchers.”

For the family of 6-year-old Lindsay, the lost little girl with the “brown, long ponytail,” it’s a beautiful day. Not long after Alice MacWhirter broadcast her advisory over the public address system, Lindsay and her family are rejoined, thanks to an assist from the speedway’s security staff.

But for Paul and Rosalyn Ake--20-year Saugus veterans from Burbank and vendors of porcelain and alabaster statuettes--it’s a not-so-beautiful day, even though they say the swap meet “has been very good to us.”

On this day, however, Paul complains, “somebody broke a leg off a turtle, and somebody else stole an eagle,” which cost $17.99.

*

What does it say about Saugus’ changing scene?

“It says a lot,” Paul Ake says. “Why do you think we keep so much of this stuff under glass?”

For all these annoyances, however, it’s still a beautiful day for most--particularly the woman customer who finally tells Arthur and Babe Baker: “Yeah. I’ll take the wagon. Oh, my little boy will be so-o-o-o happy!”

It’s a beautiful day, too, for Jack Schneider, the women’s wear vendor, even as he bemoans the stodgy economy.

“Listen! I’m not here so much for the money,” he says. “I enjoy it. Everybody’s got a story. You get the pulse of the whole world right here!”

As their world at Saugus turns, in bad times and good, Schneider, Arthur and Babe Baker and most of those other “everything under the sun” vendors will, in just seven days, come back to pitch their tents and wares--and take the economy’s pulse--all over again.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: Saugus Swap Meet.

Location: Saugus Speedway, 22500 Soledad Canyon Road, Saugus.

Hours: 6 a.m. (vendors) and 7 a.m. (customers) to 3:30 p.m. Sundays.

Admission: $1 per customer. $20 to $55 per vendor, depending on location and availability. Free parking.

Call: (805) 259-3886.