BRIMFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS - The Music Man was 30 minutes into his hunt for antique instruments when he sounded his first note of despair. <br>
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``I'm starting to think I'm not going to find anything but junk,'' he said as he sprinted through the Brimfield Antique Show, barely stopping to glance at an occasional cracked guitar or ruined banjo. <br>
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Given his lyrical nickname by a few of the thousand dealers turning a 2-mile stretch of Route 20 into a giant flea market this week, C.L. McMahan soon changed his tune after paying $200 for a violin in an alligator case. <br>
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``I'm just looking for a cheap one I could sell for $10,000,'' he said. ``That's what everyone here is looking for.'' <br>
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McMahan figures the case alone could fetch $800 back home in Atlanta. The violin, a few more Franklins. Maybe not $10,000, but good enough. <br>
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The musician in him wanted to take a break and appreciate the purchase. But it was already 9:45 a.m., almost an hour after the gates opened at May's Antique Market, one of the 23 fields making up the outdoor exhibition that bills itself as the country's largest antique show. <br>
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McMahan planned to hit each of the 600 dealers crammed onto May's 12-acre site before it was too late. <br>
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``You've got to get the stuff when the dealers are pulling it out of their trucks,'' he said. ``People buy the good stuff right away. Then all that's left is crap on the table.'' <br>
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So it goes at the Brimfield show, where dealers try to convince browsers they can't pass on that polar bear skin rug or a sign advertising Turkish baths, and collectors ask time after time, ``What's the best you can do?'' <br>
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``He wants $800 for the posters. He came down from $1,200,'' Geri Cimmino shouted into her cell phone. ``What do you mean it's up to me to buy it? I don't know what to do.'' <br>
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Cimmino's husband wasn't helping her on the other end of the line, and she didn't know enough about the collection of Monaco racing posters to know if she was being taken. So she went for a walk to clear her head. <br>
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``I love old stuff,'' said Cimmino, of Hampden. ``But it's frustrating. And now that I walked away from the posters, I don't know if I just lost out on something.'' <br>
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What started in the 1950s as an auction on a farm has blossomed into one of the country's major antique shows, attracting 6,000 dealers and an estimated 130,000 shoppers from around the world. <br>
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Glenn and Diane Miller were pacing Route 20 by 5:30 Thursday morning, waiting for some of the dealers to open at sunrise. The glass and pottery collectors drove from Simpsonville, S.C., for the show's first day on Tuesday, and plan to leave when it closes on Sunday. <br>
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``We've read about this show for years, but we never made it up here until now,'' Glenn Miller said. ``But nothing we read really prepared us for it. It's just massive.'' <br>
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The show runs for six days in May, July and September, tying up traffic on the narrow main road running through this central Massachusetts town of 3,000 people. <br>
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``Brimfield is a social event, a carnival, a flea market and a junk market,'' said Frank Sykes, owner of Dragonflies Antiques of Wolfeboro, N.H. He and his wife, Cathy, have been selling furniture at the Brimfield show for 15 years. ``It's unlike any other show in the country. It's just got its own magic that can't be replicated.'' <br>
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But it's not really magic that most are after. <br>
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``This is a huge moneymaker for us,'' said Dan Gerber, a partner in Red Barn Antiques of New Egypt, N.J. Gerber has been setting up at Brimfield for 11 years, and expects to take in as much as $40,000 this week. ``We'll get people here with balls of cash, and we have to work pretty hard to take it as fast as they hand it out.''
