RACINE – In the months before Bob Hagemann and his wife were married their dates were somewhat unusual as Hagemann starting practicing his auctioneering skills.
“We would be driving, and all of a sudden he would be doing these long chants,” Sally Hagemann said. “Big black bear bit a big black bug. Big black bear bit a big black bug.”
He would say it over and over for five minutes straight.
“Five minutes is a long time to say the same thing over and over,” said Sally Hagemann, 51, who works for the Union Grove Area Special Education Consortium.
Now, 27 years later, Bob Hagemann of Rochester has his auctioneering down to a science and is long past the repetitive rhymes he had to practice in auctioneering school in 1983.
He has been doing auctioneering ever since and runs his own business, Bob Hagemann Auction and Realty Service LLC. He auctioneers at estate sales, and home sales, and charity events like pie sales, and school auctions where kids use play money to buy candy and school supplies. Today he will be the auctioneer at Downtown Racine Corporation’s “Clocks on the Auction Block.” There the public can bid on some of the clocks which were on display Downtown this summer, and Hagemann will start the bidding at $350.
The “shy” auctioneer
Normally, Bob Hagemann, 50, doesn’t like getting up in front of groups and talking to people.
“It’s not my cup of tea,” he said. He describes himself as somewhat “shy” and “not a chatter box.”
It’s different when he is auctioneering.
“I’m more relaxed. You’re just calling numbers,” he said.
When Hagemann was in elementary school, he used to go with his father to auctions for farm equipment. He doesn’t remember much about the auctions, but he still remembers some of the names of the auctioneers and their unique techniques.
“They were the stars of the moment,” he Hagemann said. “It was just kind of neat.”
At the time he thought he would end up being a farmer not an auctioneer. That changed when he went with his wife to Iowa in the 1980s to help her father clean out the house of a relative who moved to a nursing home. While they were there, the auctioneer at the estate sale told them he taught at an auctioneering school.
Soon after Bob Hagemann signed up, and the practice began.
Hagemann said he would run through amounts of money starting with one quarter and building all the way up to $100. Then he would run back down to a quarter. He would practice with intervals of $2.50, $5, and $10, he said. Throughout the chants, which establish a rhythm for his auctioneering, he added what he calls “filler words” like “bid um and buy um.”
The practice chants that Sally Hagemann remembers are the one about the big black bear and one about a Milwaukee engine.
“Engine, engine number nine running down the Milwaukee line if the engine leaves the track will you get your money back?”
It’s been years since Bob Hagemann practiced his chants in the car, but it’s something neither he nor his wife have forgotten.
“They were pretty much drilled into my head,” Sally Hagemann said. “He said them so often and for so long….It was kind of like it was kind of like hearing a song, and once you have the song (memorized) you don’t forget it.”
