Global Auction Blog

The Bid-Calling Competition was held at Grand Valley Auctions on King Street in Cambridge

The pinnacle of the weekend was the Ontario Championship Competition, declaring Gary Jantzi of Wellesley,Ontario, the Champion Bid-Caller this year.  Auctioneers in the competition are judged on their ability to sell items  in front of a live bidding audience.  A variety of auction chants and styles are displayed throughout the competition, along with judging based on the individual ability of the competitor on how they scan the crowd to pick up bids, clarity, overall presentation and the ultimate question, “Would I hire this auctioneer to work for me?”.

The Championship trophy was sponsored by the Ontario Farmer publication and the Gold Ring by the Woodbridge Advertiser. The runner up was Dan Coulthard of St. Pauls, Ontario.

In the Novice division, Greg Kuepfer of New Hamburg was declared the Champion  with John Lewis of Brampton as the runner up. The awards for this class were donated by the Canadian Auction College.

The Auctioneers also had seminars on topics of Online selling, HST and the Auction, Use of Bailiffs, a Ringman Seminar and MNR ‘s regulations on sales.

Next year’s Convention will be held at the Casa Blanca Winery Inn, Grimsby  on Feb.24-27, 2011 with President Ken Sheward’s  2KS Auction Services as the host for the Bid-Calling Championship.

The Auctioneers Association of Ontario was founded in 1984.  It is the voice of all Auction Professionals in the Province of Ontario. It pursues excellence in the Auction industry through a combination of legislative programs, uniform standards of professional practice, professional development and a Code of Ethics, designed to ensure the highest quality of service to the public.

Sometime in early March — the date has not yet been set — a number of items dating back to Galesburg’s early farm implement manufacturers will be auctioned at the Knox County Fairgrounds in Knoxville. The items belonged to the late Jim McGovern. Auctioneer Jim Folger of Folger’s Auction Service, Williamsfield, called McGovern “if not the No. 1 source on farm antiquities, he was in the top three.”

During a recent visit with Folger to the home of Sue McGovern in Elmwood, Jim McGovern’s widow, parts of Jim McGovern’s collection dating back to Galesburg’s Brown Corn Planter Works, as well as G.D. Colton Co., were highlighted.

Oh, that famous name? Sue McGovern said her late husband was related to Sen. George McGovern, the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.

While Brown Corn Planter Works, which occupied the entire block bounded by Simmons, Prairie, Tompkins and Kellogg streets, is still well known among local historians, Colton’s factory is not as well remembered.

According to “The History of Knox County, Illinois,” by Chas. Chapman & Co., G.D. Colton bought a lot at Cherry and Depot streets in the mid-1800s for a planing mill and sash factory. In 1864, another building was erected to manufacture hay presses.

Colton’s first factory burned to the ground in November 1864 but was rebuilt, with one new building ready by March 1865.

The collection

The gem of McGovern’s collection is a small prototype of a corn planter. The toy-sized “engineer’s design,” with the papers to authenticate it, is apparently for a piece of machinery Colton planned to build but never did.

“We can’t find any evidence of them producing a planter,” Folger said.

Sue McGovern said there is a connection between the prototype and the Brown Corn Planter Works.

“Supposedly, this plant was supposed to be built for George Brown,” she said.

Sue McGovern was asked how the likely one-of-a-kind collector’s item came into her husband’s possession. “It was a friend of his from Yates City whose grandfather actually worked in the engineering department at Colton’s and he called it an engineer’s design,” she said.

The friend, knowing of Jim McGovern’s vast collection, gave it to him.

Folger said the prototype is unusual because of evidence there were plans to manufacture an item that never came to be.

“Very seldom can you get it authenticated like that,” Folger said. “They were going to produce it. They had the trade card printed.”

Trade cards were printed for various farm implements and contained information about the equipment. Not surprisingly, Jim McGovern also had a huge collection of trade cards. Sue McGovern pointed to the shelves in various closets in her house.

“There’s just boxes and boxes of sales memorabilia,” she said, “from back in the day. There’s stuff upstairs in the attic. … I don’t have any room. There’s stuff under the beds, wherever he could find a place to stash it.”

She told Folger, as they both looked about the garage, “I may be able to get a car in here some day.”

Jim McGovern’s hobby may even have bordered on obsession, but it was something he loved and knew inside and out.

His wife, who was born and raised in Galesburg, said her husband often got calls from people wanting more information about antique machinery and parts.

“If he didn’t know the answer, he probably had literature to find it,” she said.

Many of the boxes are shoe boxes. Jim McGovern carefully labeled all of the boxes, which his wife said will make things much easier on Folger.

Brown planters

He said that McGovern, who was a friend of his, at one time also had a gigantic collection of farm machinery.

“Six or seven years ago, we had a sale in LaFayette,” Folger said. “Jim was in a nursing home. We took Jim’s machinery (to LaFayette). We had a lot of Brown’s planters and a lot of Brown’s parts.”

He said that auction generated a lot of interest and representatives of the Living History Farms in Urbandale, Iowa (Des Moines), were in attendance.

“How many Brown planters did we sell that day?” Folger asked Sue McGovern. “Half a dozen?”

“At least,” she said.

Jim McGovern was in a nursing home in Toulon beginning in March 2003. He died Sept. 2, 2006.

McGovern also had a large number of metal seats from antique tractors. Walking into the garage in Elmwood, there were seats on the wall, stacked on the floor and filling the top shelf of a large wooden cabinet. Folger estimated there are at least “a couple hundred” seats to be sold at the auction. While some seats have the name of the manufacturer on them, others can only be identified by comparing the design to pictures in the book, “Cast Iron Implement Seats III,” by Donald Sites.

Sue McGovern, early in the visit, called from the bedroom, “I found the book.”

Later, she explained she had searched for it for so long that she had about given up hope of ever finding it.

“I spent months looking for that,” she said. “I mean months and months.”

McGovern’s hobby included some very strange items. Folger pointed to a child’s seat, in which toddlers would jump up and down.

“I don’t know how many people had a cast iron jumping seat for kids,” Folger laughed.

So what kind of crowd will show up for the auction?

“I would imagine some of these avid collectors and some of them who knew Jim would come if the weather is good,” Sue McGovern said.

“We’ll have people coming from all over,” Folger said. “You’ve got (Interstate) 74 and you get off and it’s (the fairgrounds) right there.”

A hand-cranked, Brown corn sheller, signs for Avery tractors and threshers, made in Peoria, but apparently manufactured in Galesburg in the company’s early days, as well as one of only 12 doorknobs to the old Avery headquarters in Peoria are among the other items that will be for auction.

Avery was such a well-known name in Peoria at one time that the area along Northeast Adams Street, near the old WABCO plant, is known as Averyville.

by: Lee Pitts

You know you are an auction junkie…

* If you’ve ever missed one of your child’s soccer games, graduations, birthday parties or weddings because it was on the same day as a special feeder sale.

* You consider anyone who knows what six-weights were bringing at the sale last week an intellectual, and think a person is an an uppity social climber if they drop the names of an auctioneer, ring men or brand inspector into their casual conversation. You know for a fact that anyone who uses the “buy now” option on eBay without going through the auction process is a communist.

* If your favorite restaurant is the auction market cafe and you don’t even have to order and the waitress brings you your usual.

* At least one item of clothing you are currently wearing has the name of an auction business on it. Every pad of paper, calendar or pen in your house you picked up for free at the sale barn. The only thing you read in the paper is the market report.

* If you miss just one weekly sale the owner of the local auction market checks the obituaries to see if you died. You get a Christmas card from the sale barn and the highlight of your life so far was being listed in the Representative Sale column.

* You’ve ever taken a blind date to a horse sale. You stand when you hear the auctioneer’s song, had it played during at least one of your weddings and have asked your kids to make sure they play it at your funeral.

* Even though you haven’t owned any cattle in 20 years there’s at least one buyer’s card in your pocket, probably listing the stuff your wife wanted you to bring back from the grocery store after the sale. Once at the store, upon inspecting a bag of oranges or potatoes you ask the manager if you can “take one out.”

* You subscribed to DISH TV just so you can watch cattle auctions. While driving in your truck instead of listening to music or talk radio you listen to tapes of World Champion Auctioneers you got from the LMA. You’ve actually named a child Ralph, Skinner, Stout or Bowie.

* Your wife knows better than to make any doctor or dentist appointments for you on sale day. Instead of going to the eye doctor you check your own vision by trying to read the back tags on slaughter cows. The first inkling you had that you were slowly going blind was when you bought a set of Corriente roping steers instead of replacement heifers. And you consigned the steers!

* People have actually called the paramedics or the coroner because you can sit for hours without blinking, winking, twitching, moving any extremity or showing any visible sign of life. Your alarm is set to wake you up to the market report and you can’t take a nap unless you sit upright in a chair and hear the auctioneer’s voice.

* You go to an antique sale and are not buying or selling anything, or you sit through a six hour art auction and you don’t even like art all that much.

The only exotic locales you’ve ever taken your wife to for a vacation were Brush, Colo., Cottonwood, Calif., and Billings, Mont. And it just so happened that video sales were taking place there during your vacation. What a coincidence!

* As a young, single buck or a recent widower you view the monthly small animal sale as a target rich environment for finding a nurse or a purse. When you proposed to your last wife the final words of your proposal were, “Going once, twice….”

* You go to every bull sale within a 300 mile radius of your home and you are a stocker operator. You’ve taken a “donut” to sit on at a sale, everyone knows not to sit in your dog’s seat and you listed your lifetime collection of bull sale catalogs as an asset on your last loan application. And when you die you want them sold. . . at auction.

www.LeePittsbooks.com

More than 100 pieces of antique farm equipment, including tractors and two steam engines, were featured at a public auction Saturday outside Jackson.

The collection’s owner, Ted Elliott of Jackson, started collecting antique farm equipment during the 1950s when he was in junior high school.

“I was raised real poor. When I got something I kept it, because I never knew if I would get something again,” he said.

Elliott said he built his collection by buying items individually and by purchasing parts of larger collections.

As the owner and operator of two residential care facilities in Sikeston, Mo., Elliott said, he has been on call 24 hours a day for more than 30 years. He said he was selling the farm equipment because maintaining them was taking up too much of his time and because he wanted to start pursuing other interests.

“I am doing some other things. It was time,” Elliott said.

He said while it was the right time for him to sell his collection, it was still a little bit emotional for him.

“The Avery Steam Engine is possibly the only one left in the United States. There is a thresher made by the Cape Girardeau Manufacturing Co. We’ll miss them,” Elliott said.

The Avery Steam Engine was purchased for $74,000 via a telephone bid by a bidder from Sweden. A smaller steam engine was purchased for more than $22,000.

Auctioneer Lonnie Nixon from Wakefield, Neb., said the two steam engines were unusual pieces and predicted they could bring big prices.

He said the steam engines had drawn the most attention before the auction, even though keeping steam engines “requires a major investment and lots of time.”

Steam engines are trickier than gasoline or diesel engines, he said, because the boilers must be maintained constantly to prevent flaws that could cause them to rupture under pressure.

However, not all of the items featured at the auction were complicated, large or had a big price tag.

“I bought a barber chair for 10 bucks. It was a deal,” said John Langenbach of Marina on the St. Croix, Minn. “We have a museum and I am going to set it up in that.”

Langenbach was not the only out of town bidder at the auction. In addition to phone bidders from across the country and around the world, people came from Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota, Texas and Missouri to attend the auction in person.

Many attendees said they enjoyed antique auctions because it allowed them to see everyday items from the past.

“I like old equipment. I got a bunch of old antiques myself,” said Vernon Bruckerhoff of St. Mary’s, Mo.

He noted Elliott’s collection was “very old” and featured some quality items.

“I’m going to bid on some stuff. I like the Olivers,” he said.

The three Oliver tractors Bruckerhoff was interested in were among 18 tractors auctioned, dating primarily from the 1930s and 1940s, Nixon said.

Nixon said he has specialized in antique farm equipment auctions for about 35 years, he said.

Like people obsessed with cars, farm equipment fans love their hobby, he added.

“It is kind of like a game that whoever dies with the most toys wins,” he said.

DK  has made his Pubcon poker tournament the highlight of the event for many people, and the contacts I have met at those poker tables continue to help propel my business forward.

Due to some changes this year in the venue, DK has asked each entrant to choose their own charity and to blog about why they should be the recipient of the proceeds.

It is not a tough decision for us here at the Global Auction Guide Media Group to choose the St. Amant Foundation as our charity of choice.

The St. Amant Foundation is a registered charity that raises money to improve the lives of Manitobans with developmental disabilities and their families. Since its formation in 1989, the Foundation has contributed millions of dollars towards client services, research, renovations and programming.

At left, auctioneer Mark Sloat takes bids on a car. Above, an auction goer checks out the different items up for auction at Cameron Industrial Inc. Auctioneers and Appraisers in Maugerville. Below, Sloat gets the crowd going as he takes bids on various items, including a piano.

But unless you do your homework, know your limits and stick to them, you could get caught up in bidder fever, meaning you could get carried away and pay too much.

It’s just after 6 p.m. in Maugerville and a crowd is standing outside a large white building where auctioneer Mark Sloat is calling for bids on a variety of large items, including a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid with 65,000 kilometres.

Two people are in a bidding tug of war for the car. In the end, it sells for $3,400 and Dan (Woody) Woodfield is pleased with the purchase. He is an auto auctioneer and plans to resell this at another auction for more money. He estimates it will sell anywhere from $5,500 to $6,000.

Whenever he comes to an auction it’s all business for him, he says, but he knows the appeal of auctions for others.

“There’s always something new. There’s such a variety. It becomes a meeting place for people.”

Even if you do pay a little bit more than something is worth, he says, an auction is a few hours of entertainment and excitement, generated by the auctioneer.

Woodfield says there are great deals to be found at auctions. His best advice is to do your research before you bid.

“Yeah, you have to do your homework ahead of time and come prepared that when it goes to a certain amount then know your limit and stop bidding,” says Woodfield.

Inside the room is filled to capacity, as people wait to bid on some of the more than 400 items, which include everything from oil paintings to farm implements.

Jennifer Hacking goes to a couple auctions a month. For this woman it’s an evening’s entertainment and a chance to pick up some great deals on unusual things.

Recently she found a really great sofa for only $65. She was prepared to wait for that deal. She went to auctions for three months before she found it.

As she looks around the room she spots antique dealers and collectors who know the value of what’s here.

Tonight she has her eye on a marble-top commode. She checks out the crowd and guesses that the antique will sell for $85 but she isn’t willing to bid over $50. Before she bids she sets a price and she doesn’t waver from that amount.

“That’s the way to do it. Otherwise you will get excited and you will bid too much,” she says. “You have to look at what you want, and, if it’s exactly what you want, you have to pick a price in your mind and say, ‘Okay that’s it.’”

Ray Mulholland goes to auctions once a week. He is strategic in his bidding and says it is always a good idea to keep a level head, otherwise you can get caught up in the moment and pay three times what something is worth.

He would like to bid on a projector but he says it is one of the last things up for auction and he expects by the time it is up for bid he will be home and fast asleep.

“They usually do 100 items per hour so it won’t come up until 10 o’clock.”

Pam Campbell, the former principal of Leo Hayes High School and now the federal Liberal candidate for Fredericton, is here. She is in a bidding war with another person for an antique push sleigh. She thinks it would make a lovely winter ornamentation for greenery on her front porch.

The bid goes up to $65. She lets the other bidder have it for that price because anything more would have been too much to pay, she says.

Before placing a bid on anything, she advises looking the item over carefully to be sure it is what you really want and that it’s in good condition.

Usually she will arrive at the auction house the afternoon of the auction to take a look, then she decides whether there is anything she wants to bid on.

Campbell likes antiques and she collects certain things. When she knows those items are up for bid she will come to see if she can acquire them.

“I collect Depression glass and I know pretty much what to pay for it and if it goes for more, I won’t buy it.”

She has her eye on a piece and plans to bid for it but she says she won’t pay more than $25.