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Prince George, B.C. – Looking for a cell phone? A really, really old version? Well you may want to take in the South Bowl Community Association Antique and Collectibles event at the Roll-a-dome.

The show kicked off to a very large crowd on Saturday and will wrap up today, running from 10 am to 4 pm. Organizer Margi Hoffman says the association takes in Peden Hill Elementary, Pinewood, Westwood and Van Bien schools and all of the money raised goes back into those schools in the form of scholarships, bursaries, playgrounds and those sorts of things.

This is the 24^th annual edition of the Antique show and Hoffman says “there’s two of us here that were from the very beginning. Our kids went to Peden Hill school and the principal said that this would be a good fundraiser. We rolled our eyes and thought, okay, but we did it and we’ve never looked back because it is such a good fundraiser. It’s huge, huge.”

Hoffman says “it actually started at Peden Hill school on its own. We did it there for about ten years and then we amalgamated with the other areas because there’s no volunteers out there, right? There was just a few, so then we amalgamated with other schools, that way we got more volunteers.”

Asked whether the fundraiser was started because of a shortage of funding to those schools she says “it’s for the extra things. I mean back that many years ago how many computers were in a school? Three, right? So that’s where we started and it was just one of those fundraisers where, instead of selling tickets or chocolate bars we did this and it became a big fundraiser and it’s just hard to let go because we make great money at this.”

How much? Well, she didn’t have a yearly breakdown but figures over the past 23 years the show has generated “probably a hundred and fifty, two-hundred-thousand-dollars. And Prince George has been just wonderful in supporting us with this one.”   Money is raised in a couple of ways. “The vendors pay for their tables and we do charge an admission.”

The South Bowl Community Association’s Antique and Collectibles event runs the first weekend of October each and every year, and Hoffman says what’s so “neat” about it is that many of the people who help to put it on are parents who had kids who went through these schools way back when and got involved. Now their kids are long out of school but they’re still around helping out, many of them now grandparents.

There is such a wide variety of items at the Roll-a-dome that you might want to stop in and have a look, again from 10 am to 4 pm today.