One day in 1984, the man who single-handedly cornered the Spokane World's Fair souvenir market faced a reporter and made a bold prediction.

"Twenty years from now,'' he said of his 280,000 plates, posters, pennants, programs and other doo-dads bearing the official Expo '74 stamp, "this stuff will really be worth something.''
How fast those decades flew. Today, John Conley, 76, concedes he may have been a tad optimistic. The mint Expo paraphernalia he still peddles at his landmark White Elephant surplus stores has never blasted off like a Dow Jones stock rocket.

"Haven't had to raise my prices,'' says Conley, ending the comment with a wry chuckle. Perhaps this will be the year. Perhaps Expo's 30th anniversary in May will trigger that long-awaited consumer stampede.

Either way, Conley isn't worried. Why should he be?

Six months after the fair closed Conley recouped the $28,000 he ponied up to buy all those gimcracks. Like most of his deals, he's made plenty of profit on it since then.

The public has always been interested in Expobilia. "Just not passionately,'' he adds.

On Friday, I dropped in on the Conley homestead in north Spokane, the place where John and his wife, Mary, raised their 11 children. The gracious couple invited me to wander up to their white barn, which is still partly filled with unopened cartons of Expo treasures.

On a living-room chair and coffee table, Conley's granddaughter, Shelley, laid out a sizable array of keepsakes still available to the Expo shopper.

Why, it's like going to the fair all over again:

Bumperstickers. Headbands. Maps. Line drawings suitable for framing. An apron depicting the Expo site. Tea cups. Saucers. Flags. Pins. Spoons. A foot-shaped tea bag holder. Plastic coasters. Stamps showing Expo points of interest. A cow-shaped burger plate for the kiddies.

Step right up and get a car air-freshener. Sure, it doesn't smell much after 30 years. But it's still stamped with that unmistakable five-sided green, white and blue logo.

How about a green plastic pocketbook? Or a pink plastic purse (photos of movie stars Rock Hudson and Kim Novak included)?

And the ashtrays. For a so-called "environmental fair,'' that Expo trademark found its way onto a lot of ashtrays. Conley still must have 25,000 of these babies in his trove.

But what made him do it? What made this man think investing in Expo trinkets would eventually pay off?

"It was the Chamber of Commerce. Maybe even the mayor's office,'' he says. "They said, 'You've got to buy it. We don't want to see it destroyed.''' Wellll, that's probably partly true.

But Conley is one of those self-made business guys. He's blessed with a supernatural knack for finding a deal and smelling a buck.

It started when he came back to Spokane from a World War II hitch in the Navy. Just 19, Conley had a few hundred bucks in his wallet and a philosophy given him by his dad. "Don't borrow or loan money, and stay honest,'' James Richard Conley told his son.

Conley took that and what little he had and began buying war surplus - "white elephant'' items the government was unloading for pennies on the dollar.

He sold them at a modest profit. He bought more and repeated the process. As the years passed, Conley applied the same formula to non-government merchandise, buying up the inventory from store closeouts and liquidations.

Customers still flock to White Elephant stores for bargains on sporting goods, toys and clothes.

So why not Conley? He was the obvious capitalist to scoop up an entire warehouse filled with Expo's leavings. And by the way, that 280,000 figure is misleading.

Many of the items that counted as ``one piece'' were actually single boxes containing thousands of smaller items. Programs, for example: each box held 5,000 of them.

The biggest worry for Conley wasn't getting his money back, but finding storage space to hold it all. Every White Elephant employee with a garage, he says, got a share of the booty.

The lion's share has been sold, but there's still an amazing amount left. He recently, for example, discovered a couple of hundred volumes of the bound Expo coffee table book.

Ask any longtime Spokane resident and they'll tell you that Expo '74 was this city's finest hour, the event that put us on the map. But let's give some credit to this soft-spoken businessman for helping preserve the memory.

Conley made money on the deal to be sure. But money isn't everything, even to an entrepreneur.

Section: REGION
Page: B1
Author: Doug Clark The Spokesman-Review
Publication Date: February 22, 2004

Infobox: Doug Clark can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by e-mail at dougc@spokesman.com.

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