As the young son of a lumberman, occasionally the opportunity would arise for me to accompany my father to a not too distant sawmill auction. I suspect the intent was as much to give my mother a well deserved break from her rambunctious son as much as it was to provide me any insight into my father’s craft, a suspicion she has yet to confirm, but I digress.
This was in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and these affairs were about as plainly masculine and joyfully gritty as any paradise the mind of this then-young Pennsylvania foothill boy could conceive. Plaid and denim clad lumbermen and loggers of all shapes, ages and sizes filled the mill and its attendant muddy yard. There was smoking, spitting, taking of knees on massive electric motors and the uneven ends of lumber piles to share the gossip of the trade, frequently peppered with the wonderfully crafted swearing only a lifetime of practice can achieve. Beards, broad shoulders and mustaches, leather boots and woolen vests along with the straw hat and suspenders of an occasional Amishman garnished the crowd. I was enchanted by the Amish, who, though they seemed to have little patience for the stares of a stranger’s kid, brought forth the fanciful charm of a bygone era and completed it with the mystic aroma of horses and pipe tobacco trailing along behind them.
Through my boyhood eyes these were the type of men every boy would naturally want to someday be. Men who fearlessly worked among the shrieking circular saws and their associated mass of motors, belts and whirling iron wheels to cleave enormous logs, commanding them all with his bare-knuckled will. They drove the massive trucks, dozers and giant forklifts not, to my young thinking, in pursuit of anything as drearily boring as a bottom line or paycheck, but obviously for the glory of the roaring machines themselves. These were the kind of men a boy, or at least this boy, would be proud to one day be.
When the auction started and any might-be watchful eyes turned their attention to the selling, the unattended landscape invited exploration. Ramshackle outbuildings housing ancient machines of unfathomable function, sawdust and bark piles rising like mountains above adjacent metal roofs and glorious ponds alive with polliwogs and salamanders beneath the rippling rainbows of floating motor oil and shadowy banks of cattails. All were awaiting, and seemingly begging for, the attention of a young unsupervised lad, and I was happy to oblige. Sometimes there would be other boys, and we would join together in a loose compact for a gleeful expedition to survey the premises for the adventures it was sure to hold, and we were rarely disappointed. This was my introduction to the auction in the Pennsylvania foothills we called home, and has become a fond memory of occasional childhood days spent with my father, now departed so many years ago. I did become one of those men one day, but that is fodder for another story. This is about the auction itself. Not the industrial auctions of my boyhood, but the auction for the everyday things, the house auction, an old and slowly vanishing social staple of the northern Appalachians.
A house auction is just as the name implies, an indoor auction - usually sheltered by a warehouse type structure, a sleepy volunteer fire hall, barn or tired storefront, and the selling generally takes place weekly during the months when weather permits unhindered travel. Consignors bring in items to be sold, and for a twenty, sometimes thirty percent commission the house wrings what cash it can from them by way of the attending bidders.
Like airline seating, most auction houses have two sections, separated by economy. Typically they host a main auction, and this is the “draw” - where the better items reside, and where the featured rarities and must-haves will be found. Anything assumed to be of any collectibility or significant worth, whether antique or contemporary, will appear in the main auction. These are the items displayed in print ads, posters, or highlighted in AuctionZip photo galleries. Seating for the bidders is usually a given, the auctioneer stands on a platform and all but the largest items are paraded before the bidders by house hands as each is described and sold. If any antique connoisseurs, coin collectors or interior decorators appear in the crowd, this is the auction they come for.
Then there is the other auction. The back room auction. Everything not making the cut for the main event ends up here. Some houses call it the walk-about, because those arriving early for the main auction can pass the time wandering among the lesser offerings. Others call it the table or box lots, or the smalls auction, often mentioned in pint-sized type at the bottom of an ad, “to be held one hour before the main auction,” and where a five dollar bill can still frequently purchase an SUV load of low-end whatnots.
Many of the lots are leftovers from garage sales. Spaghetti stained Tupperware, battered toys, weary air conditioners, Christmas lights and electric kitchen contraptions of dubious utility, sometimes bearing a not entirely reassuring claim of “Works!” written in marker on a piece of masking tape. Occasionally printed price stickers from the shelves of thrift stores decorate the items, attesting to their appearance at a previous offering as colorful dots contrasting with the faded objects they adorn: $10 in hot pink, $5 dayglo orange, $1 lemon yellow. As treasure hunters dig through plastic tubs and battered boxes an occasional comment finds its way over the din, “ Ten dollars?! For that?” If you’d seen it first, you knew instantly which lot (and what item) they were viewing, having felt the same sentiment on observing the folly of the seller’s optimism.
Here also are the things we once found charming and trendy but now seem a bit stale, and of which we really might rather not be reminded. Boxes of hair band cassettes, a seemingly endless variety of objects bearing the Hello Kitty logo and cheaply framed stereograms still tempting passing viewers to strain their eyes to reveal the second image - as though a time machine were depositing the browser, with complete disregard for chronological order, through a collection of random moments in the past few decades of consumer fad and function.
While most lots are composed of modern castoffs, many sundries of more distant decades and even centuries find their way here. Wavy wire-bail canning jars of rusty nails and carriage bolts; patent medicine bottles dug from a dump partially filled with conjugated clods of dirt and roots; boxes of fifty-something year old girly magazines with the top thoughtfully marked, “Adults only! - please KEEP CLOSED!”
Since the main auction relies on the knowledge and competence of the sorter, it naturally follows an error or oversight can lead to the possibility of amplified reward in the picked-over contents of the lesser sale. The chances might be low, but not quite so low the prospect of discovering an overlooked prize doesn’t create some speculative fervor. Jealousy among the searchers is common, and those who intrude on another’s digging can quickly draw a dirty look or worse. Of the possible finds, there are two types: Those only specific knowledge can reveal, such as the 18th century Holland saucer among the piles of Corell and Yorktowne, or the glass telegraph insulator meeting a certain color or shape criteria only known only to the insider. Then there are the finds concealed: Paper money hidden in the lining of a purse, the bag of weed and rolling papers inside the breast pocket of a suit jacket or the inexplicable stack of gold five dollar Liberty half-eagles jammed a few inches into the end of a garden hose. These become the lore of the auction house regulars, whispered to one another at rest room urinals or in assemblies around the ubiquitous bucket of sand serving as community ashtray/summer doorstop just outside the rear exit, “Hey, did’ja hear about...”
A primal stimulus arises here, presumably wrought from countless millennia of human trade and competition resident in our genes. It is naked capitalism in or near its most infantile and basic form, with the essence of the scene as easy to imagine taking place on the banks of the Bronze Age Euphrates as on those of the antebellum Mississippi or at nearly any intersection of human want and congregation between the two. From this ancient root sprang the vine of human conquest and invention, spreading unbridled, often brutally, across the face of the planet to leave few stones or lives unturned by its ever-seeking, ever-demanding will to grow and prosper. For the bidders, especially those seeking to resell and profit later via flea market or eBay listing - perhaps to secretly supplement a meager Social Security check or make a court ordered monthly payment to the probation department - this instinct runs strong and the novice quickly learns the humble offerings belie the dogged tenor of the actual event.
When the selling begins the bidders make their way up and down the rows following the auctioneer, a mass of bodies moving in chaotic synchronicity reminiscent of honeybees tending their queen. Here stepping on toes, there elbowing ribs, bidding on and hauling off miscellanea in rapid succession, the task of transporting often relegated to a bidder’s juvenile kin who gleefully zigzag through the sea of adult legs, booty in tow. To be in the midst of this conglomeration is a chaotic and earthy affair accompanied by indelicate scents of french fries, cigarettes, slept-in clothes and the occasional whiff of what was apparently someone’s parking lot tipple. In January it is unpleasant, in July nearly unbearable. With a few brave exceptions only those inured by frequent exposure or the deepest lust for enterprise can attend the breathy mass from start to finish.
Despite their excitement the bidders are a tight-fisted lot, and the bids rarely move beyond the lower double digits, more often remaining in the single. Calling the sales frequently falls to an apprentice auctioneer, whose jaded tone betrays his familiarity with his duty, “Twenty, twenty, do I hear twenty? Let’s get’r started! Ten, ten, good stuff in there, folks! Five, five, five, who’ll give five? Two? Do I hear two dollars?” If the opening descent is quick, the call itself is even quicker, like the disclaimer at the end of an investment ad on the radio. There is little time to linger for such modest figures, and all too often a sorry lot ends with a plaintive sigh - “No sale.”
For the past four years my wife and I attended these sales, both main and lesser, seeking objects of my fancy, guitars and saxophones. Every house seemed to know the value of a Gibson, C. F. Martin or vintage King, and these would be placed front and center in the main auction. In the excitement, one of these could often bring more than the current retail value and many a novice bidder, caught up in the instinctive lust of competition, surely went home with the heavy heart of buyer’s remorse. The real deals were in the back - the cracked Harmony arch top or the battered Buescher in the stinky mildewed case, gotten for a few loose dollars and change, sometimes along with a whole carload of unwanted dross. I became acquainted with many houses and the distinct personality and neighborhood of each as we expanded our range out of Pennsylvania and into rural New York, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland, crossing paths with other searchers of prior vague acquaintance, “Weren’t you at the one where...” But despite the frequent pleasantries there was a nagging feeling about the auctions it took me a while to define.
It was a lot of fun, mostly, but I came away with something more than guitars and saxophones and the occasional random whatever that had caught our eye, and over time it made it harder to attend the fray. Not due to the competition, the jostling crowds or any lack of drive, but a sad unspoken consistency among the houses. I think it was the first hand observation of the final steps of hasty obsolescence planned into so many of the things we buy, the result of which was there so terribly apparent. An unpleasant reminder of the way our love of economic growth and the very sanctity of our experience itself is built, ever-increasingly, on a foundation of fleeting whim and cyclic profit. This certainly isn’t a revelation, its reality is known far and wide. Yet somehow seeing it up close can be kind of depressing. It’s the same at every house, New York, Ohio, West Virginia - location makes little difference. We all bought the same crap at the same time, got bored with it as its contrived novelty or colors faded, finally referring it to a landfill or sending it to a place like one of these, hoping, often in vain, to recover some token of its cost.
At a particular house we frequented I once won far more than could be squeezed into my vehicle, so I arranged to pick up the remainder the next day. When I arrived the staff of half a dozen were sweeping, unpacking and sorting through the next mass of consignments for the following week. In one corner was a heap of no-sales, things which failed to draw a bid the previous evening; a small mountain of boxes, newspapers and tubs. A skinny teenager loaded as much as he could in an old shopping cart, hauling the giant mass by the cart load to a boy, presumably one of the owner’s young, busy on a loading dock overlooking a gigantic commercial dumpster. The boy was about eight or nine years old, full of piss and vinegar, probably much like the boy I had been so long ago at the time of the sawmill auctions. With the energy only a pre-teen can muster, he was gleefully throwing all he was brought into the dumpster, carefully selecting and hurling any breakables into the metal interior so as to create the loudest explosion of broken glass or porcelain possible, which clearly brought him a great deal of youthful delight. Thin lines of unwound cassette tapes billowed in the wind from the top of the dumpster like slender grasping tentacles as he threw the items into its maw as though he were feeding a insatiable monster. Princess Di commemorative plate, “Crash!” Depression era chalkware won at a long-ago county fair ring toss, “Crash!” Delicate porcelain figurine of a Russian girl playing the balalaika... Well, you get the picture. I couldn’t blame him for finding joy in the destructive process as most any kid probably would, and I’m not casting any aspersions now. The fate of these objects was sealed anyway, but somehow it was just a little much for me, and I lost my taste forever for the back room auction.
My father, not long before the end of his unexpectedly truncated life, made an unusually philosophical comment in casual conversation, the subject of which I’ve long since forgotten, “Life is dynamic, not static.” It was so unlike his typically brusque and solidly grounded line of thinking I can still remember where we were and the strange sound of sentimental resignation in his voice. I thought he must have heard it somewhere; abstractions were so foreign to his usual nature. Perhaps he had, but the truth of it was clear. Of course life is dynamic. It must be if we are to progress, to feed and house an ever burgeoning population and to provide the sometimes iffy benefits our love of all things new and better delivers. The auctions opened up another view to me, and made it seem a little tragic for our present to become so quickly a useless recent past, so easily dismissed or even scorned for daring to exist beyond its day. Maybe this is what one begins to feel with age, yet another primal phantom awakening within our genes to make the departures a bit easier; to see with clearer vision the fleeting nature of our visit here and of the objects for which we so desperately and continually dream and strive. Life really is, for better or worse, dynamic. At the time I wasn’t sure what my father’s point was, but maybe - and I hope I have it right - I think I finally understand.