Early Bird Swap Meet

On Presidents Day weekend, the Blue Gate and the Gold Gate open at the Washington State Fair Event Center in Puyallup, and the Early Bird Swap Meet fills five buildings: the Mattress Firm ShowPlex, the Pavilion, the Expo Hall, the Centennial Building and the AgriPlex. The 59th meet is set for February 12 and 13, 2027, a Friday and a Saturday. The fair lists it as the Early Bird Autos, Bikes, Boats, Antiques & Collectibles Swap Meet Bargain Fair. Its promoter, Silver Dollar Sales, calls it the Early Bird Vintage Treasures & Antique Hunt and bills it as “Washington State’s largest vintage garage sale.”

Selling goes on indoors and out. Silver Dollar’s pages promise VW hot rod parts, rat rods in the making, cars, trucks, bikes and boats of all makes, and new and used goods in the ShowPlex. Food and drink are sold on the grounds, and the Weenie Wagon is parked for photographs. Mount Rainier, the same pages say, stands as the backdrop. Hemmings Motor News has counted several hundred vendors and thousands of buyers in a February.

Teapots, jets and milk-can stools

Barry Kluczyk walked the rows for Hemmings at the 2025 meet. He found a grille for a 1971 Ford F-100 and more De Soto taillights than he could account for. JR’s Blue Oval Barn had most generations of early Ford trucks covered, and a circa 1970 EMPI Imp dune buggy that “needed tons of work” was priced at $1,000. A 1978 Bentley T2 was offered at $25,000. He watched someone carry bar stools made from old milk cans and tractor seats out the front gate toward the parking lot.

He returned in 2026 for Hot Rod. A Hilborn mechanical fuel-injection setup for a small-block Chevy, velocity stacks included, was priced at $1,500. Holley jets and bleeds sold at $5 a package. A Holley 2140 carburetor, the “teapot,” also called the “firebox” for its habit of leaking fuel, carried a 1954 Mercury part number and a $200 tag. A 1971 VW van poster by the California artist Rick Ruhman went for $75. One seller had a wooden C-cab body set on a VW Beetle chassis, believed it was a kit, did not know whose, and asked $2,500. A 1959 Ford Skyliner with its power-folding hardtop wanted $6,500, and a Honda Trail 70 wanted $2,000. Some of the cars never come inside. A 1948 Chevy Sedan Delivery sat in the parking lot at $19,500, and in 2025 a Cosworth-nosed Vega Kammback wagon that was not for sale sat out there too.

A rooster call at Stacker Stables

The meet began as the Model T Club Swap Meet, held in the garages of Tacoma Model T Club members. The club’s own account says it outgrew them, and in 1965 it held its first swap meet at Stacker Stables in Spanaway, on Presidents weekend in February. Hans Sjoboen, a founding member, served as announcer, and he opened each announcement with a “Cockle Doodle Do.” A rooster’s call and the first swap meet of the year together gave the name Early Bird. The club adopted it several years later, when the hobby had widened to all makes and models. Model T parts, the club wrote, could still be found there among the classic, street rod, high-performance and antique goods.

In 1980 the membership moved the meet to the Puyallup Fairgrounds. By the club’s telling, attendance grew every year after, with vendors coming from all the western states and Canada. The club ran as a non-profit and spent its swap-meet profits on youth activities, charities, food banks, and scholarships, with emphasis on students headed for careers in the automotive field. It won the Eagle One award three years for being the most charitable car club in America.

Old Cars Weekly reported on the meet of February 13 and 14, 2010, through photographs from its reader Coy Thomas. The day was cloudy and damp, the crowd large, the sales brisk. One car on offer was a 1926–27 Model T roadster body channeled over 1932 Ford rails, built in Crocker, Nebraska, around 1953 by Doug DeVoe. He had not driven it long, and it had been stored since 1954. The price was $7,500.

The club steps back

At the 2023 meet, Hemmings reported, the line of buyers stretched far down South Meridian Street before the gates opened on Saturday morning. Hundreds of vendors sold everything from rusty license plates to a 1919 Maxwell, though the count was below its peak of a few years before. Some of those vendors had been coming for more than 40 years. The word among vendors and buyers was that this meet would likely be the last.

The trouble was the club. Its members had aged out of the hobby or died, and Charlie Ostlund, its chairman for 30 years, had died “last May,” the June 2023 report said. His wife, Gloria Ostlund, said the meet had grown beyond what the remaining members could manage. “We are working hard to find another group to take on the Early Bird, because it continues to mean so much for so many people, but the Tacoma Model T Club is retiring from it,” she said. “We’ve talked to a few people who are interested in taking it over.”

By the account Hot Rod gave in February 2026, the meet was acquired by another promoter, whom the magazine did not name. The fair’s listing for 2027 now directs questions to Silver Dollar. In the club’s last year the meet ran Saturday and Sunday, February 18 and 19, 2023. Under the new hands it runs Friday and Saturday.

Among the finds Hot Rod recorded in 2026 was a 1924 Model T Tudor, straight and clean, with a rebuilt “banger” under the hood, a hydraulic brake upgrade and a rebuilt Ruckstell two-speed rear axle. The asking price was $8,000.