The sky is dark, the freeways are empty, and the birds are still yawning in their nests.
But for a swap-meet aficionado such as Janeen Marrin, it is an hour to be as alert as a general preparing for combat.
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Treasured Hunting : Collecting: In 24 years, Jim and Janeen Marrin amassed a fortune in Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative objects by scouring swap meets and junk shops.
From the entrance of the Rose Bowl, where 1,500 vendors gather to sell their wares one Sunday a month, Marrin surveys her field of action. A snaking cavalcade of vans, headlights still glowing, is pulling into the vast parking lots; merchants are setting up rows of stalls, snapping open tables, rolling out display mats.
At the stroke of 6 a.m., Marrin, along with other early birds, will march into the hubbub. For the next five hours, she and her two daughters will ply the rows of merchandise with a military determination. There is no warming cup of coffee to send her off. She will not stop for food or rest.
For this bohemian-looking woman, wearing a bright smock and a large Indian cross, is a connoisseur of swap meets, a nationally celebrated queen of "junking."
In 24 years of marriage, she and her husband, Jim, have amassed one of the country's premiere collections of Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative objects. Their vintage bungalow near Los Angeles is a curator's dream setting of works for the functional early 20-Century designs which are the American outgrowth of the earlier English movement. Works of the period's most illustrious designers furnish the house: Gustav Stickley tables and settles, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, Greene & Greene windows and Dirk van Erp lamps.
More than two dozen major pieces and thousands of lesser items were all ferreted out of piles of dusty, broken discards found at Southern California swap meets and thrift shops, with few costing more than $100. Rummaging on the $12,000 a year Jim Marrin earned as a graphic artist, the couple put together the bulk of their collection during the decade after their 1966 marriage.
"At that time, most antique dealers really looked down on this stuff," says Janeen Marrin. "It was like, 'Uhhhhh, I won't even handle it.' "
In picking up the castoffs, the pair inadvertently achieved the sort of serious status in the art world that intensely upwardly mobile collectors crave. Today, their collection is worth millions of dollars and luminaries from Steven Spielberg to Domino's Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan vie for equivalent pieces at auction.
"It's one of the seminal collections of Arts and Crafts in the United States," says Nancy McClelland, director of 19th- and 20th-Century decorative arts at Christie's in New York, who has organized semiannual period auctions since 1982. "They've put it together brilliantly. They understand what it is they've collected. They both have great eyes."
For the past year and a half, however, each of the Marrins has been searching out great designs alone. With their reputations established, their home bulging with treasures, their two daughters raised, they have separated--Janeen staying in the house and Jim teaching in Switzerland for the summer.
The collection, which has been held together by their devotion, could now be splintered and sold. And the thrill of collecting could be replaced by bickering over the realities of hard cash and conditions of sale.
For this Sunday morning, however, Marrin and her daughters, Erica, 20, and Emily, 23--both junking buffs--work the swap meet just as they always have, happily, expertly and on a shoestring budget.
"There's no better person to go to a swap meet with," affirms Randy Makinson, director of the Gamble House in Pasadena, considered one of Greene & Greene's finest examples of architecture. "To watch her move through the thing is to see this keen sense of design. She doesn't have to look to see if a piece has a signature or not."
Marrin puts it more simply. "Basically, we just buy what we like," she says, adding, "We don't \o7 need \f7 anything. But when did that ever come into play? You buy because it's beautiful."
Toting a small, unassuming cloth bag, she sets off to find "something surprising." Though a tougher job than it used to be, right off she spies enticing collectibles and remarkable bargains. For accenting an old kitchen, there are $40 rolls of 1950s linoleum, with pressed-in color squares, not the painted vinyl that is sold today, Marrin cautions.
Nearby is an early 20th-Century set of prized fireplace tiles and wood mantle by Pasadena tile maker Ernest Batchelder, original to many Craftsman houses and a deal at $700. Just the one large decorated tile in the ensemble normally would cost $200 to $300, Marrin says.
At the booth of the day's only serious Arts and Crafts furniture dealer, Marrin points out a signed Stickley secretary that is reasonably priced for $2,200--although she got hers at Goodwill for $18. A standing van Erp copper lamp is marked at a pricey $25,000.
Meanwhile, the Marrin daughters are beating Melrose vintage-clothes shops to the punch, grabbing up plastic 1950s sunglasses at $5 a pair, 1960s bathing suits and colorful broad-brimmed straw hats.
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