By Jean Caspers-Simmet
From a great farm paper in Minnesota and Iowa
FORT ATKINSON, Iowa —Shock is how Bob Humpal describes his feelings when he learned that he was to be inducted into the Iowa Auctioneers Association Hall of Fame earlier this year.
They announce the award winners so that they know to sit up in front during the banquet.
As he was digesting that, the announcer called his name and his whole family appeared on the scene.
“Then the tears were coming down,” Humpal said. “It was an honor to receive the award.”
Humpal was surprised that his wife, Joan, knew about it all along and was able to keep it a secret. The couple spends part of the winter in Arizona, and when Joan asked if he wanted to go to the convention, he said he’d go if they could get a reasonably priced flight.
“She told me she found some good tickets,” he said.
“I had to be sneaky,” Joan said with a smile.
Humpal, 69, grew up on a farm near Ridgeway and loved going to auctions with his father, Robert. At that time, most were held on Saturdays during the winter.
“We’d try really hard to get our work done so that we could go along,” Humpal said. “I always admired how the auctioneers sounded, how they did their work, and I wanted to be one.”
He attended a two-week course at Reisch School of Auctioneering in Mason City. To fine-tune his chant, he’d practice out in a field on the farm.
“One time my mother came out to the field to see what was wrong because she heard me yelling,” Humpal said. “I told her I was just practicing auctioneering.”
After he and Joan married they farmed for four years and then moved to Fort Atkinson. Humpal sold feed, worked at White Farm in Charles City and on a road construction crew. In between he and his brother, Reggie, ran an auctioneering business.
In the mid-1980s, he added a hay auction, Fort Atkinson Hay, and started auctioneering full time.
“A hay auction was a new kind of thing in the area,” Humpal said. “I saw a need for an auction where farmers could buy and sell hay and straw. The first four years we didn’t make a dime, but then there was a drought in the late 1980s, and we started getting a lot of hay in and prices were high.”
When it started, the hay auction was on Saturdays at the Fort Atkinson Community Center. After several years, it moved to what was then Schmitt Implement and is now Fort Atkinson Tractor Parts.
When Humpal bought the vacant Fort Atkinson lumberyard building, he moved the business there. As the auction grew, Humpal started buying and selling hay for customers as well.
“We did business all over the United States and in Canada,” Humpal said. “It just kept growing.”
Three years ago, he sold the hay auction to Carl Shirk.
Humpal, Reggie, and now his grandson, Heath Humpal, continue to operate as Humpal Auction Company. They call farm, household, antique and real estate auctions.
Humpal couldn’t have been more proud when Heath, now 22, told him he wanted to join the business.
“He was helping set up auctions, and he said he wanted to be an auctioneer,” Humpal said. “I told him he had to be a ring man for a year and if he still wanted to do it, I’d pay for his school. Well, Grandpa had to pay for the schooling. He does a good job.”
One of the biggest auctions he ever did was a farm auction by New Hampton. He sold a lot of big farm machinery.
“We’ve done some nice antique auctions, too,” Humpal said.
The Internet has made it easier for collectors to find out about sales. He’s had buyers contact him from all over the country looking for unique items.
Humpal and Joan have four grown children, Diana, Lisa and twins Donald and David. They have eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Diana clerks auctions, and Joan is the cashier. The Humpals’ grandchildren run clerking sheets. Friend Larry Desloover, also an auctioneer, is ring man.
Hard work, honesty, having the ability to get along with people and knowing the price of the item being sold are the qualities that make a good auctioneer, Humpal said.
“And a lot of patience helps,” he said.
For an auctioneer, the voice is an important tool of the trade.
“You have to watch it,” Humpal said. “I only drink warm water, and if my throat gets dry, I put in a little sugar for energy. During the winter, I drink warm or hot coffee.”
He describes an auctioneer’s chant as singing but with numbers instead of words.
“I love it,” he said. “You have the ring man yelling ‘yes, yes, yes.’ The emotion is there. It gets you all pumped up to sell another item.”
Humpal said he tries to do the best he can with every sale.
“A couple lives 40 to 50 years in a home and then one of them passes away or maybe they have to go to the nursing home, and they give you the job of selling all the times they worked hard for. That’s how much trust they’ve got in you.”
Humpal has served on the board of directors and as president of the Iowa Auctioneers Association. He was also president of the National Hay Association. He has been auctioneering for 48 years and plans to put in 50 before he retires completely.
He and Joan love to fish, spending several weeks at a time in northern Minnesota during the summer.
Humpal collects fishing rods, reels and lures which he displays in his basement and a garage he calls, “the boat house,” because it’s where he stores his two fishing boats. His collection includes many Humpal reels and lures, same name but no relation.
Also on display in the “boat house” are other auctioneering honors. His company was the first to include pictures on sale bills. Trophies and photos from his days racing John Deere snowmobiles in the 1970s also line the walls.
