usb stick as swap partition

[W. Guy Thomas]

I have researched this but it seems no one wants to do this.
Is it a bad idea?
I think it would be better than my little hard drive churning on this
old laptop.
A full 128MB stick. 
Fedora sees the stick, I create a partition in fdisk of type 82.
I use 
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024 count=131000

then /sbin/mkswap /dev/sda1

this takes a while, then it's done.

but if I try to "swapon" /dev/sda1:

"resource busy".

any tips?

I just want to cut down on the thrashing of my hard drive and if this is
slower, then fine, at least I can do other things since my hard drive
won't be churning away.

Thanks for any further info!

=G