EUGENE -- When Carol Jaeger first arrived for work in the University of Oregon's equipment room in 1990, she unknowingly found herself on the ground-floor of a budding phenomenon in the bowels of McArthur Court.
Since the mid- to late-1980s, a co-worker named Connie had spent months preparing for one spring weekend each year in the windowless lower level of McArthur Court, Oregon's ancient basketball arena, as a handful of customers picked at a garage-sale assortment of overstocked and underused inventory from the UO athletic department. Within a year, the one-person job of organizing what became known as the UO "surplus sale" fell to Jaeger.