For a brief second, a bug distracted Melody Vasquez from her job of raking in the cash.
The 6-year-old bent over the table set up by her mom, Rossanne Oroszco, during the city of Whiting’s Garage Mahal Saturday afternoon, inspecting the flying creature that landed between bottles of shampoo and shaving cream. It was an interesting diversion from working on padding the bank account she just opened a month ago.
“I’m selling my toys because I don’t use them anymore,” Melody said.
She wasn’t sure if she was going to use her windfall to save for something big or sock it away for a “rainy day,” but she knows her family has done well by participating in the annual event.
Her mom use the citywide garage sale to sell off her vast stash of personal hygiene products, which she accumulates over the course of the year. She’s a couponer, so she ends up with a lot of surplus, Rossanne Oroszco said.
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“I can’t hold all this in my house,” she said, laughing. “It’s how I circulate my stuff.”
Her dad, Fred Serrano, does the same thing with movies. The ones he doesn’t sell in a year, he brings back the following year.
At 25 cents a pop, the hundreds of DVDs he had were priced to sell. And Mallory Santucci, of Chicago’s Hegewisch neighborhood, came ready to buy; she walked out with at least 10 movies she’s never seen.
“Why not? I’d go buy them at Walmart for $3 or $5, and these are a quarter,” Santucci said. “All right, I have to get out of this town before I spend all my money.”
There was plenty of opportunity to lighten the wallet. With more than 150 houses cleaning out their trash/treasures, one would be hard-pressed to not find something. Serrano said he’d like to see to see the Whiting/Robertsdale Chamber of Commerce have two or three Garage Mahals over the course of the year.
Mary Hassen, meanwhile, plans to be a “one and done” seller during the giant sale. The only reason she opened her garage was because her son, Ryan Knazur, just bought his own house and was cleaning out his stuff.
“I told him I’d give him whatever money we made, so he can have all $23,” Hassen said. “I sold a table, proving to the guy it was waterproof as the rain beaded up on it.”
“And I told her, ‘I’m not going through your crap when you die,'” Knazur said, smiling.
One buyer took a box of old Atari and Nintendo cartridges off Hassen’s and Knazur’s hands, Hassen said. Had Jordan Roberts and Joe Pranaitis, both of Whiting, gotten there a bit earlier, they would’ve scooped them right up.
“I’m an aficionado, and the old stuff is worth a lot more,” Roberts said. “But I did get the first two ‘Jackass’ movies — unrated versions, even — but the ‘Jackass 3’ T-shirt was sold.
“Why does all the bad stuff happen to me?”
If it weren’t for a friend’s birthday Saturday, Pranaitis wouldn’t have been out at all.
“I avoid Garage Mahal day like the plague,” he said.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.