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.