Back in the mid-to-late 1990’s we spent almost every summer Sunday going to antique shows and flea markets. I’d been poking around in a book store one day and found a guide to flea markets…cool! I bought it and it guided us to a few flea markets that we’d never been to before.

I took the book with us when we went on vacation, to Las Vegas. We went to a show in Las Vegas…either the bottle show, or the western memorabilia show. We found a few ashtrays, which were our main focus at that point in our collecting. I think we found a few other things too, but I don’t remember what.

After a few days in Las Vegas we headed for California. The book said there was a flea market in Victorville, which wasn’t too far off of our planned route, so we went. It was pretty early and some vendors were still setting up their booths. I was walking past a table that was pretty sparse, but an Aladdin ashtray caught my eye! It was clear glass, with the dancing girl, in blue. I thought it was pretty, and I knew we didn’t have it. My husband asked the vendor if he had any other ashtrays, and he said yes…a whole tote of them! He said we could dig through it to our hearts’ content, but we had to repack anything we didn’t buy. How much? $2 each!!

It was early in our collecting careers, and we didn’t know much about what ashtrays were “good” or what ashtrays were common. We both just picked out what we liked…one of them was the Frank Sinatra Cal Neva ashtray, which we later saw selling on eBay for about $250. Another was a thin glass ashtray from the Stardust that we later saw selling for about $60. The Aladdin tray that caught my eye first is the only other one I distinctly remember from that day…it’s a common one that probably never sold for more than about $5…but it led us to the treasure trove! We ended up buying about 55-60 ashtrays, for $100. We also bought a lot of playing cards on that trip, and it’s a tribute to Samsonite that our luggage still had handles on it when we got home!! lol!

Every now and then I wonder what we left behind in that plastic tote….