THE 'HEARTVILLE' OF IT ALL
The Hartville Marketplace and Flea Market caters to heaps of customers hunting for the best bang for their buck all year round.

Story by Tim Magaw // Photography by Sara Liderbach

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Rocky Angiuli hurriedly arranges vegetables on his family’s stand at the Hartville Marketplace and Flea Market and yells to busy shoppers as they pass with their plastic bags and totes in hand.

“Perfect peppers here,” Angiuli, of Canfield, shouts while chomping on an unlit cigar. “Beautiful sweet corn — just picked this morning.”

Angiuli is just one of the vendors swamped under a sea of customers scurrying through the marketplace, poking their noses into the merchandise and looking for the best deal. Hundreds of vendors line the outside of the 100,000-square-foot complex located off of state Route 619 in Hartville.

Delores Porter, of Kent, sits at a picnic table off to the side of one of the pavilions with several plastic bags packed with produce. She’s been shopping at the marketplace since the ’70s — mostly for the low prices and fresh produce.

“It’s a very enjoyable place to go see and to shop around,” Porter says. “It’s also nice just to be around people.”

Half of one of the pavilions connected to the market’s complex appears to be an overblown garage sale, and the other half looks and smells like an old-time farmer’s market with vendors calling out prices and customers scooping up all the produce they can handle. Their voices are a constant roar and Johnny Cash’s weathered and thunderous voice can be heard bellowing out of a small stereo next to one vendor’s stand.

Angiuli says people flock to the marketplace because the food available is some of the freshest around.

“They look for the best bang for their buck,” he says, adding that the prices are some of the more reasonable ones around compared to larger grocery stores.

Rhonda Harris, a partner of G&R Produce in Ravenna and a resident of Niles, dashes to pack up boxes of locally grown peppers and talk with interested customers. She takes a break and rests against the table, saying sometimes the market can get hectic and loud, but she enjoys the atmosphere.

“There are a lot of different backgrounds that come to the market, and we like to offer them a quality product that is locally grown,” she says.

Violet Cummings, of Cambridge, sits quietly behind her small table covered with jars of homemade jams, ranging from grape to blueberry to onion-flavored, which is her top seller at 40 jars a week. Behind the rows of eclectic jams sits a change box plastered with a picture of 5-year-old Thomas Dean, her jam-making assistant and grandson.

“America eats a lot of jam,” she says while smiling and resting her hands on rows of jars. “America is jammin’.”

Cummings says she’s been to many markets around the area, but the Hartville market is one of the best, citing that markets are the “backbone of America.”

“When people are here, they just look happy,” she says. “It’s so much better than a department store.”

Outside the pavilions, vendors set up shop out of the back of their cars. A shaggy-brown dog leaps from the bed of one vendor’s truck and starts barking. Others unload boxes and start peddling goods.

“Ma’am, how much is the Bud clock?” calls out one customer to a vendor while pointing to a large Budweiser clock.

“The clock is $40,” she yells back while sitting on a fold-out lawn chair. The customer nods and proceeds to continue scouring the market.

Rich and Kathy Tebroski, of Louisville, walks back toward their to car to drop off bags of cantaloupe and strawberries. After they unload their bounty, the couple plans to head back into the crowds to peruse the rest of the market.

“It’s fun to walk around and see what junk you can see,” Rich Tebroski says. “Some stuff you see can bring you back to the good old day.”

Some of the items he says that bring him back to his younger years are antique radios, dusty LP records and old political buttons.

Kathy Tebroski says they had only been visiting the marketplace since last summer after hearing friends talk about it for quite some time.

“Now that we’re retired, it seems like we have more time we can goof off,” she says.

Customers like the Tebroskis continue to weave through the various stands at the market. Some ask the vendors questions while others inspect the goods for themselves.

One woman passes by Angiuli’s stand and asks, “You don’t got any potatoes?”

He answers, “Sorry, hon” as he continues to organize his table overflowing with plump peppers, fresh corn and fully ripened tomatoes.

Tim Magaw is a junior newspaper journalism major. This is his second story for The Burr.