Auctions can be a bummer or a blast! Please follow me as I go through a progression of three auctions that my wife, Barb and I attended. Our oldest son, Greg, was the star of the third one.
As a young married couple, we decided to spend a couple of days in Atlantic City (don’t worry, this was pre-casinos). Walking along the boardwalk on a hot day, we saw a man very strategically located behind a table on wheels that was in front of an air conditioned room. As he talked with passersby, he slowly rolled the table in to the coolness of the room. Once in the room, he provided a seat inside if you paid him a quarter for a cheap plastic rain hat. This was the entrance fee to his auction.
He auctioned a few items that did not interest us in the slightest. We sat up near the front of the room so we could see all that was going on. For some reason, we both had our arms crossed in front of our chests. All we wanted to do is witness the auction.
The next item was a nice carving set along with steak knives, of which he had many. He asked how many people would buy the set for only $5. Many hands went up. You need to understand that we were newly married and I was still in college, so most of our dinners were hot dogs and 39 cent frozen ham dinners. We never even thought of raising our hands. We had nothing to carve!
He interrupted the auction for a moment, escorted us to the back of the room, gave us the quarter we had given him and told us we could keep the rain bonnet as long as we just left! What a bummer.
The next auction, held by the Lions Club of our small town, went much better. We bought a brand new lacrosse stick for $10. I never played lacrosse put did have catches with a lacrosse ball and stick with my siblings and I also thought it would look neat mounted on the wall of our TV room.
However, nobody bid on a later item which was a dress shirt. The auctioneer pointed to me and loudly said: “Hey Reds, what size shirt do you wear?” I admitted I wore the same size shirt as the one being auctioned and was embarrassed into buying the shirt. At least I did better than the earlier auction.
Just as there were many years between the first and second auction, much time passed between the second and the final auction. However, this third auction was one to remember for a lifetime.
The school that our boys graduated from holds an auction every other year to raise funds to help families with their tuition. Shortly before the auction, within a 24 hour period, the older car we let our oldest son, Greg, use for transportation to college was involved in two accidents. First it was rear-ended, the next day our car rear-ended another car, thus totaling the car. There was a several year old Volvo that was going to be auctioned at the school. We checked the NADA book to get an approximate value of the car and inspected it. You should know that neither of us had any mechanical abilities so we could have skipped the second step.
Next, we decided Greg would pay for half of the car and my wife and I would pay the other half. We set the maximum amount we would bid for the car, got our numbered paddle for bidding and waited patiently for the car to be auctioned. Greg sat on the end of an aisle and I was to his right with the paddle. The bidding opened and I bid about a third of our maximum limit.
For a short while there was dead silence and I thought we were going to get a real bargain. All of a sudden there were three of us bidding. After a while one of the bidders dropped out and it was us versus a lady who had several winning bids so we figured it was hopeless. We stayed in the bidding as each bid was increased by $100. Finally, the bidding hit our maximum when the lady apparently made the last bid. The auctioneer looked at me and I shook my head no.
At this point, Greg, who somehow always seemed to be a winner in life, grabbed the bidding paddle from me, stood up, increased our bid by $100 and said, “Stop the bidding! I am a poor college student and need transportation to school!!” Silence followed and Greg drove his new car home. Victory!
Jeff Hall, of Honey Brook, contributes columns and book reviews to Tri County Record.
