Lindsay 2025

Jon Upton
12 minutes ago
7 min read

Lindsay had something for everyone this year… mud included!

I’ve heard from unofficial-but-reliable sources that the AACA may be ending its involvement with the Lindsay automotive flea market, with the torch being passed to another community organization going forward. I sure hope that the event continues, because Lindsay has all the good “old car” stuff that used to be in Barrie.

I went with Eric Vettoretti, as usual, and it was my turn to drive. The trip from Ottawa to Lindsay after work on a Friday is a four-plus hour journey, so I just put the pedal down and saved any detours for the Saturday return trip. It had been a very rainy week in the Kawarthas, and the forecast for “market morning” called for—no surprise—more rain. We brought our rubber boots and some garbage bags just to be safe. The drainage on the Lindsay field is poor, and we’ve seen the mud before.

We arrived a little before 8 am. The indoor vendors were not yet open to the public, so we started wandering the field. The Lindsay vendors are a hardy bunch, and rain doesn’t much deter them. We spotted a few things over the first half-hour, but nothing we were inclined to buy. Eric had a prior deal set up with one of the vendors, but he was a local and wouldn’t be arriving for a little while yet.

The indoor vendors were finally open, so we went into the hall. Right next to the north door, there’s an older guy who typically has several crates of plates for sale. The vendor is chatty, and typically makes small talk about plates. “There’s a club for people who collect them,” he said this time. We replied that we’re both in it. Not that it mattered.

Some of the plates were priced, and some weren’t. Eric was interested in a pair of 1939 Ontario plates, but there was no price. Time to ask the vendor. Eric asked for the asking price. “Try me,” the vendor replied.

This was a short pair of 1939s. Not a low or important number, but just a short passenger variant. The condition was somewhere in the “good” range, with golf-ball-sized patches of rust here and there. Eric, having been an active buyer and seller of plates for a couple of decades, offered $40, which is within the standard ballpark. We’ve purchased “good” calibre pairs of this era for $40 many times— including with this particular vendor, in past years.

“Forty dollars? You think these are worth only forty dollars?” I initially thought he was just playing the drama card as part of the haggling process.

But he went on: “You guys say you’re in the club, but you wanna pay only forty dollars?" He railed on, insinuating that we were there to scam him.

“It’s a reasonable offer… I don’t know how much you paid for them,” Eric said, losing patience.

The vendor became irrational: “I paid ninety dollars for these! And you come here offering forty? What kind of club are you with?”

“Honestly,” Eric said, “If a vendor says “try me,” I just come out with an offer. Price them!” And Eric walked off without another word.

It was a mistake for that vendor to invest $90 to resell that pair of plates—assuming he was even being truthful. These were nothing special. Top end of the ballpark value might be $60. The solution to a $40 offer is to counter with something, like maybe $50 or even $60. But to bust a gasket? Either he’s playing games, or he’s confused. But that wouldn’t be the last we’d hear of him.

While wandering through the rest of the (rational) indoor vendors, I stumbled upon a vendor who had a few highway signs. I do collect King’s Highway shields, but I’ve been trying to stop. I have more than I can show in my home garage, and the best I can do is rotate the display every couple of years. But this vendor had a two signs that I couldn’t resist:

Highway 27 was an arterial two-laner that used to run from western Toronto / Etobicoke up to Barrie and ultimately cottage country around Penetanguishene. The southern portion was absorbed into the 427 Expressway in the early 1970s, and all but a mile of the northern portion was downloaded onto the regions and counties in the mid 1990s. The only portion that still legally exists as Highway 27 is a tiny section that exits from the 427 and tunnels under the 401 through what is the largest interchange in the province. As such, it is completely surrounded by provincially-owned land, so there was nowhere to download it. My sign is old enough that it could date to the pre-427 days.

The other sign is for Highway 7A. The condition was amazing, and I like signs with a distinguishing feature like the alpha suffix. 7A is a more southerly, direct alternative route to Highway 7, which is the Trans-Canada route through central Ontario. Highway 7 is an east-west route, but it meanders substantially north and then south again between Port Perry and Peterborough. Highway 7A bypasses that section. There are very few signed "A-for-alternate" highways in Ontario.

Eric found the vendor with whom he had a previous deal. He had a variety of interesting plates. I picked up a few things from him, including a 1923 pair that will upgrade the one in my collection. He had a gorgeous pair of 1937 plates that are on-par with the ones in my collection, and I decided to keep them, as I’ve done with a couple of other pairs… I just can’t get over that red colour.

We ran into Paul Frater a couple of times that morning. Paul was there when that same vendor pulled out a display board of cool plates from the 1920s, some with short numbers and some bearing several zeroes. Some were cleaner-uppers, and some were perfectly find as-is. Paul took the bunch of them, and had a screwdriver on-hand to free the plates from their boards. Nice find! I’m looking for a three-digit 1920 plate in clean condition, but haven’t had much luck there. I probably would have taken the four-digit 1920 if Paul had passed on it. We also ran into Terry Ellsworth while Paul was unscrewing his plates. Terry loves going to Lindsay because it’s great to find milk bottles, as well as plates… among other things!

We had bumped into Terry a second time elsewhere on the field, and the conversation turned to Mike and Alannah Franks, who live in town, but none of us had seen yet. As if on cue, I spotted Mike and Alannah walking down the field in our direction. Mike had driven his 1980 Chevy pickup to the event and had it parked in the show lot. We generally exchange notes about vendors so one can show the other where to go. There was only one plate dealer in the indoor section—the one who busted a gasket earlier, and we mentioned that to Mike, who smiled knowingly.

“Yeah, that guy on the end by the door? He was complaining about a couple of people 'from the club' who he said were trying to low-ball him.” Eric was incensed, and recounted what happened. I wasn’t worried about being identified by the guy; he was probably too weak with the details to remember what we looked like. But even so, he was crapping all over us because he’d forgotten to price his wares and didn’t remember how haggling worked. That’s not a person I’ll ever want to deal with in the future.

We will not be browsing this guy's table again.

We had been fighting the rain off and on all morning. The east end of the market field was in awful shape. The mounds of slick mud made me wonder how Woodstock or the First World War trenches compared. A dually pickup was spinning all six of its wheels while trying to drag a trailer around. My legs were aching after three hours of hoisting my feet from the suction of the mud. Some vendors brought in chunks of plywood to walk on, since their plots had long since been consumed with brown sludge.

Our joint finds had been made at two or three vendors, as opposed to making finds sprinkled all over the field. We made plans for lunch with Paul, Mike and Alannah, took a quick look at the show lot, and called it a day. We went to the Pie-Eyed Monk, a brewery and grill downtown that Eric discovered a few years ago. Nicely-restored rustic brick building, good food, nice atmosphere.

Left: Number 444-AAA would have been issued as a regular passenger plate around 1986-87, and it has since been remade as a personalized plate.

Right: A "loophole" 1976 plate, in legal use on a '76 Olds Delta 88. Sold by me when I was operating my YOM business. That was six years ago; first time seeing it in the wild.

As for sights while on the road– We passed through Omemee and Havelock, where we found two ad-hoc antique dealers… the kind where if the garage door is open and wooden chairs are arranged on the sidewalk, it’s a signal to come in. We ran into Terry again at another antique joint just outside of Peterborough, where I picked up two non-plates: A porcelain Soviet door sign, and a uranium glass plate (because I have a Geiger counter in my classroom at work, and I wanted something that would trigger it). We also did a little driving of sideroads to check out a rail line, which went from “in use” to "decommissioned" to “rails pulled out” to “hiking trail” all in a couple of miles.