Nipomo Swapmeet & Fleamarket

The gates on North Frontage Road open at six on Sunday morning. A Tribune reporter who arrived around noon on Sunday, Aug. 10, 2025, found a line of cars waiting to get in. She paid an attendant $4 in cash to park in the lot next to the market and hunted for a space in a lot that was nearly full. Beyond the lot are the aisles of the Nipomo Swapmeet & Fleamarket in southern San Luis Obispo County. The market advertises itself as the largest outdoor swapmeet on the Central Coast and counts more than 300 vendors.

The stalls that day held keychains, beauty products, cowboy hats, stuffed animals, Pokémon cards, baseball caps, a Costco membership and an acoustic guitar. Further along were holiday decorations, cleaning products, glassware, power tools and a framed Big Mouth Billy Bass. A bandana cost $1, earrings $5, a bicycle $45. Face painting for children cost $2. Most stands take cash, and some take cards. A shirtless, tattooed seller asked $5 for a deck of vintage Universal Studios playing cards. Offered $4, he said “For sure.”

Eighty-one flavors of agua fresca

Produce tables carry wrinkled yellow mangoes, dried chilis and wart-covered gourds. Food trucks serve full menus beside covered outdoor seating. The market’s own list of food runs to tacos, tortas, bacon-wrapped hot dogs, birria tacos, quesadillas, al pastor, tamales, nachos, churros, funnel cakes and shaved ice. The elote is grilled corn on the cob slathered in spicy, creamy chili with fresh lime juice, then sprinkled with cotija cheese and cilantro. To drink there are horchata, diablitos and aguas frescas. At Aguas Frescas Lupita’s, tables are lined with jugs running from dragon fruit to soursop and watermelon, and an employee counted 81 flavors in 2025. A mango and passion fruit cup cost $7 and came about twice as large as the buyer expected. The market lists live music on Sundays. Dogs are not allowed.

The schedule has changed over the years, and the sources disagree about it. The market’s website gives Sunday only, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. A Highway 1 Tourism Alliance listing has vendors converging Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 6 a.m. In 2010 Jessica DeSimas, who worked at the swap meet, gave the hours as Saturday 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Sunday 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. In 2004 New Times counted more than 450 vendors.

Storage units with roll-up doors

The market stands on the west side of Highway 101. New Times described it in 2004 as sitting in the Nipomo Mini Storage lot, with its own signage, its own parking kiosk, and permanent “stores” in corrugated-metal storage units with roll-up doors. Many of its vendors were regulars who set up every weekend for weeks, months or years. DeSimas described the same arrangement in 2010: permanent spaces for sellers, and mini storage units that anyone could rent. She said the maintenance crew told the office “that if they need any tool or accessory that they can find it here from a vendor.”

That 2004 Sunday, Rockin’ Robin and Peggy Penny played for shoppers with a synthesizer drum machine. Toddlers in frilly white dresses carried plastic bags of chicharrones. Virgin of Guadalupe images appeared on jackets, bedspreads and car seat covers. One plot held about 30 banana boxes of Fabuloso cleaning supplies in neat rows. One booth had become a barbershop, and two sold parakeets and finches with $10 cages and a 72-hour guarantee. An upholstery shop in one of the units offered a lime-green ottoman whose top cushion lifted off to reveal a trampoline about five feet across, tagged “Great for kids.” A man selling incense “smoking bottles,” empty beer bottles with holes drilled in the side, held up a thick green one priced at $8.95. “The drilling’s tough to do,” he said. Most sellers that day would not bargain. New Times wrote that the air “smelled like a thousand garage doors all opened at once.”

By 2014 a safari-inspired train ran along the perimeter, past a garden and brightly painted buildings. In earlier years DeSimas had mentioned pony rides, sketch artists and a small train for children. M&A Nursery, a Nipomo family business, had sold succulents, ferns, lemon trees and flowers near the entrance for about four years. Bill Moldt, a retiree, had kept a shop there for about as long. “Normally I have over 800 metal nostalgia signs,” he said. The signs were made in Ohio and sold for $10 each or three for $25. Of the other shopkeepers he said, “I get to know them, and we become friends.”

Marion and George Patterson had been selling there for 13 years. Marion was a retired special education teacher from the Lompoc Unified School District. Their unit, Ma’s Toys, was packed with vintage lamps, ceramic cookie jars and toys, all given by local donors. The profits went to the American Association of University Women for scholarships for women at Allan Hancock College, about 32 of them by 2014. “Everyone who comes into our shop brings us joy,” Marion Patterson said, as a child came toward her holding a Buzz Lightyear figure.

Shelli Palma ran a furniture showroom in one of the units. She had closed her Arroyo Grande store when the recession forced her to downsize, and she opened Palma Home Design in 2008. The showroom was about the size of a two-car garage. She said the small space let her sell at 35 to 40 percent below retail. In 2010 it was open to the public during the Sunday swap meet, and her top seller was a $500 sectional in microfiber and vinyl, offered in six colors.

Six thousand dollars and a Musicmaster bass

Some businesses began at the swap meet and moved on. Jim Bear Jewell, a retired leasing-company vice president and a descendant of the Blackfeet, came to Nipomo to visit his son. At the swap meet he met Donna Martin, owner of Martin Indian Jewelry, who wanted to retire, and he bought her business. “I had never made much of my Native American heritage, but the Navajo bracelets and other pieces were intriguing,” he said. He worked from home for a time, then rented a store in Grover Beach in 1996.

Joe Daoust tells a longer story on his store’s website. In the summer of 1983 he drove down to look at an old Fender Jazz bass that he had heard some man had at a swap meet in Nipomo. He found a double-garage building stacked to the ceiling with junk: brass and woodwinds, drum kits, violins and guitars, many of them thrown about and in need of repair. Joe had been playing for nearly 20 years, and he asked the proprietor whether he would hire him to clean some of them up. The proprietor was “a big man trapped in a wheelchair.” He answered, “I’m getting too old for this and I would like to get out.” He offered the musical stock for $12,000. Joe and his wife, Marelene, had $6,000 from selling their mobile home in San Luis Obispo. The man took the $6,000, on condition that they move his belongings into a smaller garage nearby. The Jazz bass, Joe wrote, “was just a myth.” It turned out to be an old, beat-up three-quarter-size Musicmaster.

According to the Tribune, the Daousts began bringing secondhand instruments to the swap meet every weekend starting Aug. 2, 1983, under the name Lightning Joe’s Music Mania. The two accounts of what followed differ. A Tribune photo caption says that after five years at the swap meet the business moved, in 1988, into the former Bank of Arroyo Grande building. The store’s own history says it opened a second location in the Village of Arroyo Grande that year, about nine miles north, and kept both until 1992. That year the Daousts closed the Nipomo location. Joe told the Tribune the swap meet had become “no longer fun.” The profits from the first season at the swap meet in 1983 hang on the wall of the Arroyo Grande store.

The owner on the road to the bank

Three years before the Daousts arrived, the swap meet’s owner and operator, Robert T. Folkerts, was killed. His granddaughter, Katherin Pignatelli, says he met Edward Joseph Prokop while Prokop was traveling through the county and gave him a job and a place to stay. “He was a kind and generous person. He helped out whoever needed it. He let the guy stay there for free just for work,” she said. In her account, Prokop learned when and where Folkerts deposited the swap meet’s money each week and attacked him on the way to the bank.

KSBY gives the date as October 5, 1980. The vehicle of Folkerts was found along Camino Caballo Road, with him shot multiple times inside. District Attorney Dan Dow said Prokop was already wanted in Arizona for an armed robbery in which he had been shot, and that Folkerts did not know of that history. Prokop left California and was arrested a year later. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 27 years to life.

A parole panel recommended Prokop’s release on May 22, 2020. Dow wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking him to overrule it, and the family opposed it as well. Newsom referred the grant to the full parole board, which found no cause to rescind it at a hearing in January 2021. Prokop was not released. Arizona had placed a detainer on him for past burglary and theft, and he was transferred to that state’s prison system. In 2021, records showed him held at the Lewis Prison-Complex in Buckeye, Arizona, with a projected release date of April 26, 2029.