HAMPDEN COUNTY, Mass. - Antiques age like fine wine. That’s what folks in Brimfield will tell you.

On Tuesday, the town celebrated this year’s opening day of America’s oldest outdoor flea market, the Brimfield Flea Market.

North Carolina native Dan Hauser will tell you professional sports in the 1930s is where it’s at. He wrote his graduate school thesis on the history of football equipment.

Hauser came to Brimfield to sell his collection of sports antiques and share his knowledge.

“There’s just unique equipment. You have helmets without face masks. You have unique baseball gloves. The earliest baseball gloves are called fingerless gloves,” said Hauser. “And they’re almost like a handball glove or a weightlifting glove, but they actually just have the tips cut off of them.”

This flea market brings people in from all over the country, but Mario Decarney didn’t have to travel too far. He took the day off work to enjoy a shared family passion with his parents and girlfriend.

“The passion for antiques started when I was young but I just got into heavy advertising the last like five or 10 years stuff like that but I’ve always had an appreciation for older things,” said Decarney. “I work in construction so I appreciate the way things were built back then, as opposed to the stuff you just press together today and it falls apart in a couple years.”

Jill Creevy knows how valuable antiques can be. Her grandmother owned an antique shop and on Tuesday, she shopped with her two girlfriends for creative fixtures and decorative items for her house.

“I bought a whole bunch of these old fishing buoys and I’m going to put them all together and make a light fixture for our house down by the water,” said Creevy. “And then I got some pictures for our house and then I got some glassware too.”

It’s known as an antique flea market but it’s not stopping artist Serge Graff from displaying his more modern work.

It includes an abstract piece he made with money from all over the world.

 ​“It’s an unusual work, it’s piece collect many, many, maybe different coins,” said Moskalenko. “Maybe Russian, maybe American, everywhere my collectible, and successful name right there.”

The flea market runs through Sunday and then returns for another week in both July and in September.