We're at an auction of antique Americana.
We'd hopped a "Peanuts" flight from O'Hare to Cleveland, wherefriends picked us up and brought us here. Actually, we came to seethe friends, but who can pass up an interesting auction?
Auction-going is an all-weather, any-season,almost-anywhere-you-may-be sport in the U.S. of A.
The people-watching is superb and the admission is usually free.
The only expense at this auction, besides deciding to bid onsomething, is the catalogs if you choose to get them. They're $3 forSaturday's items and $4 for Sunday's.
And well worth the price: 1,130 items are listed for auction onSaturday, and 1,225 for Sunday. There's everything from heavyfurniture to Civil War clothes to teeny political buttons,
There are ancient laptop desks, surprisingly familiar-lookingsince they have the same basic configuration as a laptop computer.
There are photos of pioneer people, all somber-looking. Issomber easier to hold than a smile for 19th-century cameramen?
"We'll start with 20. Ten, 20, 20, 30 way in the back." He bidit up to 160. "Going to 398."
The sole auctioneer at the podium is Michael L. DeFina, a formerbarber who's highly regarded in the Ohio auction world and has hisown auction firm. It will take him less than five hours Saturdaybut more than nine hours Sunday to move all the catalog items.
DeFina has his own auction barn behind his residence. It's anew-looking, well-ventilated, well-lit facility. There are seats forall, and DeFina has plenty of helpers to hold up items and to movethings along. He himself is relaxed but speedy.
"If I have 150, I need 175."
DeFina is easy to understand, no tobacco-auctioneer-type garble,and seems to bend backwards when it comes to honesty..
"We're making no promises these prints are genuine," he says."In fact, I know they're not."
We talk with DeFina during a short break in the auction action.
"I have an auction every month, six weeks." he says. "We moverapidly, get right in with the bidding." And he has a video setup,with a TV screen for closeups of smaller antiques.
The audience wears lots of bluejeans - stylish and otherwise -and lots of cellular phones. One phone is on the belt of a guy wholooks like he farms ten acres of hard rock. Probably a millionaire.
There are gawkers, pickers, haulers, dealers, buyers.
DeFina doesn't explain each item as he auctions it. Why shouldhe? Most of his audience has inspected everything beforehand, atlength.
One man in the crowd tells us he flew here from Jackson Hole,Wyo., just for this auction.
A lady buys a rocker for $1,200, then sits in it from then on,rocking.
A man blurts "Oh, expletive deleted" after an oil painting of asailing ship is sold for $6,000. This man has come from the EastCoast, specifically to buy that picture, but at a lower price.
"In at 16, I need $17,000."
A big surprise at this auction, even to DeFina, is the $38,000paid for an ornate wooden dining room table, with 15 carved chairs.It came from an historic Cleveland-area "castle," and its high priceis later reported at length in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
"Ten, I need 20, bid at 40? 30! Sold."
Incidentally, if you get hungry or thirsty at an auction,there's usually some sort of counter in the back that offerslife-sustaining snacks at low prices.
On an earlier Ohio visit this summer we went to four auctionson two weekend days while visiting our same friends.
At the third of these auctions, I was sole bidder on a boxful offishing lures. It cost $3.
Our final auction of that weekend was in a big structure behindthe Pierpont volunteer fire department.
Auctioneer Don Elliot was knowledgeable, and entertaining enoughto deserve his own show opposite David Letterman and Jay Leno.
"Here's a stereopticon, the television and video of a bygoneera," he boomed. He started the stereopticon bidding at $250,dropped to $100 and then $75, and finally got up to $80 when it wasbought by No. 74.
Elliot held up a couple of brass pieces and said, "Talk aboutsocks on a rooster! Isn't that nice?"
He reminisced between sales about an oldtime auctioneer he triedto emulate when he was young. "He chewed tobacco during the auctionand he never spit. He swallowed it all. I tried and I got sick as adog."
Elliot was up-to-date, despite his folksy words. A young womanauctioneer spelled him at times.
And all of the aforewritten is why we go to auctions, though werarely buy anything big.
Years back, the normal noise in non-big-city America was "Moo,""Baa," "Oink" and "Bark-bark."
Now it's "Sold to the lady in the green hat."
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