Twenty-Sixth Annual All Sports Car
Swap Meet and Autojumble
DuPage County Fairgrounds, Wheaton, IL - March 25, 2023

Photos and notes on this page were copied with permission of the author
from the travel log of Barney Gaylord, MGAguru.com.

Good morning world! I was in house at 5:45-am to help Chicagoland MG Club open up shop for the "All Sports Car Swap Meet And Autojumble" at DuPage County Fairgrounds in Wheaton, Illinois. For decades this was billed as "All British", but more recently due to interest of other car clubs the scope has been expanded to welcome some other models. There is now some participation from VW, Alfa Romeo, Corvair, Harley Davidson (and I may have missed a few more).
For many years we have been expanded into two buildings, one quite large, and one a little less so. This year the smaller building was not available, being used for storage of voting equipment, so we had to squeeze the whole show into the one larger building. One sacrifice was having to give up the indoor car corral, but there was still plenty of free lance car activity in the parking lot, and we still had about the same number of vendors as the year before.
The vendors were packing in their wares beginning 6-am, and doors were open to visitors at 8-am. By 10-am the place was well packed with shoppers, and I had time for a break to walk around taking pictures. You will find some shopper and crowd pictures here, but I was mostly concentrating on the treasure for offer on the tables.

Near closing time someone handed me a prior award that was hanging around for more than a year. I knew nothing about it, and still have no idea what it was for. Apparently whoever was club president a couple of years ago thought I was worth something, or maybe they're just getting hard up for suggestions on who to give it to.
As the booty was going out the door I had to get a picture of one of the most treasured items available. It is an original cell core radiator for MGA. Most of these have long since been replaced with some more modern and usually less effective substitute. This one looks good enough to drop in a car and run. -- I bought a pair of carburetors to repair my MGA, low mileage, some parts missing, good for restoration (more about that later).
As I was heading for my car to leave, another MGA was parked next to mine. Say hello to Shane Rudd (and his son) from Rochester, Indiana who drove three hours to be here. Unfortunately they arrived late and missed most of the show, but I recon one reason they cam was to see me, making it worth the trip. After some chat it turns out they live not far from my brother, whom I will be visiting soon, so we made plans to visit the Rudds as well.

Always interesting to see what merchandise the vendors leave behind after the show. In years past we used to go dumpster diving to salvage all sorts of valuable stuff. Maybe the Fairgrounds Association got tired of hauling away the loaded dumpsters, as this year there were no dumpsters handy, but still some of this stuff was dropped at the side of the building.