Columnist Susan Snyder: Finding age matters on sales hunt

Friday, Jan. 18, 2002 | 4:33 a.m.

But I would have bought it, if I hadn't been on my bicycle.

We hit the road on our two-wheelers last Sunday morning with four friends who love garage sales as much as pedaling around town.

Never mind that it took us about five hours to cover 10 miles because of the stops.

Never mind that two of the couples are hosting a garage sale this weekend, yet spent half of last weekend acquiring more stuff. We pedaled and bartered.

"Everything that doesn't fit in there, goes," an older lady said as we poked through stuff laid out on card tables.

She was referring to a long, white fifth-wheel trailer parked in front the house she shared with her husband. The trailer would be their new home.

(She wanted $8 for a food processor complete with attachments and instructions. My friend got it for $6 and would pick it up later.)

"We're going everywhere -- wherever we want," she said, turning our attention to the drip coffee-maker at the end of one table. "We had to use the small one out of the trailer this morning."

It was a recurring theme that Sunday morning. Older people -- the people studies say are moving to Las Vegas in droves -- unloading as many of life's trappings as they could before packing off to somewhere else.

"That's $25," a man at another home said, as one of our friends picked up an old classroom-type pencil sharpener. You remember those egg-shaped contraptions the color of lead with the cranks on the back.

For those who don't remember (a population including a frightening number of people who can't name all of the Beatles) a "pencil" is a slender, wood writing instrument that erased spelling errors before the advent of the "delete" key.

"That's 58 years old," the salesman said. "My wife's had it since her first job."

By the time we hit the third neighborhood dotted with garage-sale signs, I was sure everyone over 50 was leaving Las Vegas. But they're not. Older people still tend to "age in place," says John Haaga, an analyst at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C.

However, he added, some college towns are luring Baby Boomers with new housing developments where they can enroll in classes and enjoy the less-harried atmosphere of a university town.

"I would bet that what older people hate about both city and suburban neighborhoods is that they are hard to get around without driving, or being run over or encountering threatening-looking people," Haaga said.

"I like the arguments of the 'New Urbanists.' If we had mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, we'd also have less age segregation. People would be able to live where they want to -- which is usually where they are -- much longer."

The man hawking the $25 pencil-sharpener also had a $30 stapler.

At least, I think it was a stapler. It was in a box among the items strewn on his driveway -- leftovers from the previous day's sale. The"good stuff" was the first morning, of course. But the rest of it had to go eventually.

"Everything's got to fit in the U-Haul," he said. "We're going back to Texas."