BROKEN BOW — Delores Treffer will quietly celebrate her 91st birthday Friday. On Saturday, she and her family will begin setting up old treasures she’ll sell at next weekend’s 21st annual Junk Jaunt, Sept. 27-29.
To the Treffer family, the Junk Jaunt is as much a part of autumn as Husker football.
The Junk Jaunt is a three day, 300-mile yard sale stretching from Grand Island 150 miles west to Dunning and back. It’s always held, rain or shine, the last full weekend in September.
Living on a farm on Highway 2 east of Broken Bow, Treffer has been a vendor in every Junk Jaunt since the event began in 2004.
“I guess it all started with a neighbor lady,” Treffer recalled this week. “We were good friends and she had stuff to sell, so we set up tables and set it all out. We had so much fun.”
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She’s still at it 20 years later. Saturday, she and her family — including daughter Jan Thompson, a senior lecturer at the English Department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney — will begin hauling out relics, pricing them and setting them up in the barn to sell.
In the past, she has sold 78 rpm records, old flannel shirts, old books and old farm machinery. Even a claw-foot bathtub. A few years ago, Treffer set out a 75-year-old rusted refrigerator that a friend had dropped off around noon that day.
“This thing was sitting on Evan June’s property, so he brought it over,” Treffer’s daughter, Dawn Wheeler of North Platte, said. “He asked $50. One man said he could put hot coals in a cast iron kettle and set the kettle in there and smoke meat.”
What doesn’t sell after three days is boxed up and taken to Goodwill.
A new face
This year, the Junk Jaunt has a new general coordinator. Stacie Roblyer is just the third general coordinator in the event’s history. Roblyer has assisted in previous years. Now she’s at the helm.
Roblyer previously worked for 13 years for the Burwell Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau.
“Tourism is my jam,’” she said. “I love to see great events that draw lots of extra people into the communities across central Nebraska. Nebraska’s Junk Jaunt is a great way to showcase all of the great things about this area of Nebraska, like the welcoming people, the beautiful landscapes and the community excitement.”
Hidden treasures
The Junk Jaunt was launched in 2004 by the Loup River Scenic Byway Committee as a way to promote central Nebraska. That first year, 1,000 shoppers visited 75 sale sites in 35 towns. The next year, the committee produced its first professionally printed Shopper’s Guide.
Ten years later, in 2014, the Junk Jaunt had 700 registered vendors. That figure crept up to 720 vendors by 2017. In 2020, due to COVID-19, just 438 vendors registered, but numbers are rebounding. In 2021 there were 515 vendors; in 2022, there were 594. This year, there will be 600.
Those 600 vendors will be selling clothing, toys, furniture, farm equipment, pictures, paintings, records, Christmas trees, Christmas stockings and tools, and rarities like old pulpits, old church pews, rusty license plates and a small box that once held harmonicas.
Three years ago, Mary Pernicek of Ravenna sold an antique doctor’s buggy. A Ravenna man sold his model airplanes.
Supporters of the Homeward Trail Bible Camp in Mason City will again set up a conglomeration of stuff inside a vast hog shed on the Zoerb farm near Litchfield to raise money for the camp. They always sell Thursday through Saturday so they can go to church on Sunday.
Some vendors and churches along the route will offer hot soup, hot dogs, hot chocolate, chili, cookies, desserts, lemonade and coffee.
Shopper’s Guide
Registered vendors pay a small fee to get their names, addresses and a brief description of their goods published in the 122-page Shoppers Guide, which sells for $10 per issue online and in hard-copy format on a few spots throughout the route.
Vendors who signed up too late to be part of the guide are listed online at junkjaunt.com
The guide lists vendors as it follows the route through 35 towns in nine counties: Blaine, Loup, Garfield, Wheeler, Greeley, Valley, Custer, Sherman and Howard.
Its southern route heads west on Highways 2 and 92 out of Grand Island, circles around to Highway 91 west of Dunning, and comes back east on Highway 11.
Tiny pieces of Hall and Buffalo counties are on the Junk Jaunt, too, including Ravenna, located on Highway 2 on Buffalo County’s northern edge; and Grand Island, Alda and Wood River, which sit in the part of Hall County north of I-80.
Towns along the routes include Grand Island, Cairo, Ravenna, Hazard, Mason City, Ansley, Berwyn and Broken Bow on Highway 2, and Taylor, Burwell, Elyria, Ord, North Loup, Scotia, Cotesfield and Elba on Highway 11.
Inside the Shoppers Guide is a passport. Jaunt-goers can get passports stamped at each town they visit and be eligible to win cash in October. More details are in the Shopper’s Guide.
Even foreign countries
In the past, Junk Jaunt enthusiasts — an estimated 25,000 of them — have come from nearly all 50 states, three or four Canadian provinces and several foreign countries. Stories are told about out-of-staters who bought so much they had to come back to pick up what wouldn’t fit in their cars, or about the friends from Colorado who make it an annual three-day vacation.
For the Treffers, it will again be a family affair involving her five adult children, including son Michael, who brings goods to sell all the way from his home in Gering. His daughters often help, too.
“He loves it, just visiting with people. The same people come back year after year. We’ve made new friends,” Treffer said.
For more information, visit junkjaunt.com. To purchase a digital Shopper’s Guide, visit junkjaunt.com or call 308-346-5151 from 9 a.m. to noon weekdays. For questions, email answers@junkjaunt.com
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