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It’s a little before 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The sun is creeping slowly below the horizon and it’s getting colder It’s a little before 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The sun is creeping slowly below the horizon and it’s getting colder with every inch it drops. Snow has drifted into the road that leads to Chesley’s Auction Gallery in Corinth and the parking lot is full – mostly big and empty SUVs and trucks, waiting for the evening’s haul. A small group sifts through cardboard boxes stacked in a truck by the entrance, but it’s too cold for most people to linger.
“Auction gallery” may sound fancy, but this is really just a big garage of a room crammed full of stuff on school-lunch tables. The walls are covered with shiny plywood and decorated with old signs. In the front of the room, where you come in, there’s a cashier’s area, where they take your name and give you a yellow index card with a number written on it. One half of the room is filled with rows of wooden folding chairs – most reserved – covered with cushions to make them more comfortable. The other half of the room is packed with furniture and knickknacks and jewelry and magazines and tins and fur-trimmed coats and bowls and glasses and silverware. There’s probably a kitchen sink in there, too.
Wandering among all this stuff are people. Many people. People picking chairs up and turning them over. People scooching down under tables to see if there’s a manufacturer’s name printed underneath. People picking up brightly colored dishes, hoping to see “Fiesta” stamped in the porcelain. It’s an hour before the auction is scheduled to begin – the crucial time. If you’re going to bid at an auction, you need to see what you’re bidding on up close and plan accordingly. What looks like fine mahogany from four rows back could end up being a laminate-covered particleboard. And you don’t want to bid $150 on a dime-store special. Trust me on this one.
It’s hot in the auction gallery and the air smells like popcorn and steamy red snappers (the hot dog, not the fish). Shelley’s Deli is in full swing, and a young woman in overalls is dishing out hot dogs and sodas and pieces of homemade pie with big scoops of ice cream like they’re going out of style.
In the front row, a few seats down from Shelley’s Deli, Dee Latella and Judy Livingstone have taken their seats. They’ve both come from Dover-Foxcroft for the auction, as they have most every Saturday night for the past five years. They started coming because they used to own the Odds ‘n Ends Shop in Dover-Foxcroft. The business stopped a few years ago, but they kept going to the auctions.
“Now we’re hooked,” Latella said.
Livingstone agreed.
“We got hooked by the bug – the antiques bug,” she said. “Once you go to one, you become addicted to them. … If you [ask] my husband, it’s the food, it wouldn’t be the antiques.”
When Roger Chesley got into the auction business 21 years ago, he had no idea what he was getting into or how popular it would become. At the time, he had three daughters in college and needed a way to support them.
“I had to get extra income,” Chesley said in a phone interview the day of the auction. “But it just boomeranged and here we are. I didn’t think it’d grow this big, but it has.”
In real life, Chesley talks much, much more slowly than he does on the podium. It takes a good 10 minutes for a first-timer to make out what he’s saying, which starts something like this: “OnTheEarnhardtMemorabiliaI’llTakeAHunnerdSev-fiveFiftyTwentyFiveTenComeOnTenDollarsOnTheEarnhardtMemorabiliaOKTenNowFifteenNowSevenAndAHalfNowTwenty.” He’s a fast talker, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, or what he’s saying, you could start the bidding at $100 on a Matchbox car and not even know it.
Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s a blast.
“It’s upbeat and we have a good time,” Chesley said.
Fun is just one of the things that draws people to a country auction. Some people come because they’re “addicted.” Some are there for business – they own antiques stores, sell on eBay, sell to other auction houses. Some are collectors, hoping that the item they’re looking for will be there among the heaps of other stuff. Some are young couples, looking for nice furniture at a reasonable cost. Some are looking for antique furniture for less than they’d find it at a store. Some just go for the thrill of the deal, the fun of the competition. There’s even a group of people who show up for the viewing, two hours before the auction starts, buy some hot dogs and a piece of pie, have a social hour and go home before the bidding begins.
Aside from the camaraderie (everyone does seem to know one another), and the food, there’s one key thing that a country auction has that you can’t get at a big-name auction house in Boston or New York. Here, there’s an element of surprise. You never know what you’re going to find. You could pick up an Eames chair for $15, find a few pieces of real silver in a $10 bin of flatware, or get a really ugly painting that’s worth a million dollars for five bucks. It goes beyond monetary worth, though. Here, you may just stumble across a table just like your grandmother’s or a baseball card that you’ve been trying to find since you were 10.
Of course, this works the other way, too.
“You can go to a yard sale and see an item for a dollar, but if you come here and it’s up to $35, and someone behind you is overbidding you, you’ll outbid them,” Livingstone said. “It’s the competition. … It’s already ours before we buy it, so we fight for it.”
Joyce Henckler and her husband, Don, have been to their share of auctions – two a week in the winter, more in the summer – and they’ve seen their share of overbidding.
“People get emotionally involved,” Joyce Henckler said. “You just truly want that item and keep going higher and higher and higher.”
During the week, he works in insurance and she works in higher education. The weekend auctions are part business, part pleasure for the Hencklers, who live in Bangor.
“We do resale through an auction house in Boston and Internet sales,” Joyce Henckler said. “We’re pretty selective. He collects Charles Schulz related pieces. We do some things for ourselves. We collect Oriental pieces for ourselves.”
During the auction, an old, metal Snoopy lunchbox came up for bid, but Don let it go because the price was higher than he wanted to pay. He also passed on an Oriental screen. They did get a few things to sell on the Internet, however, including some old military books and a giant tray full of mismatched flatware that held a few real silver pieces and a set of fish forks.
They almost bit on a pair of vinyl and rattan chairs that looked like yard-sale furniture to the untrained eye, but in reality were valuable because of their style (Bruce Willis collects similar furniture) and pristine condition. And stuck in a tray lot among a bunch of really ugly vases, Joyce Henckler spotted a piece of Frankoma pottery from afar and took it home for $10.
The Hencklers have an eye for these things. Throughout the auction, Joyce would lean over to tell me bits and pieces about items that came up for bid. A lamp that sold for $100 was worth about $300, but lamps are easier to resell in pairs, she said. Sports equipment is worth twice as much if it comes in its original box.
She started going to auctions as a teen-ager, when the quality of items in an auction was guaranteed. Now, it’s the buyer’s responsibility to look over the items before the auction to be sure what they’re buying.
“It’s a buyer-beware situation,” she said.
I made the mistake of bidding $12.50 on a table that looked cute from where I was sitting. When I went to take it home, it was broken, crooked and pretty much useless, so I left it there. Maybe next week, someone else will make the same mistake. Lucky for me, it was only $12.50.
As the night wears on, the crowd thins out. Chesley starts selling tray lots (many items thrown together on a tray because they probably won’t sell individually) and box lots (ditto, but in a box rather than on a tray). Around 10 p.m., he starts selling table lots, which are a whole table full of little things, which may or may not be worth anything. This is when things get exciting, because what may look like junk could be a gold mine. It happened at an auction that Livingstone and Latella went to in Corinna, where a man bought a painting that nobody wanted toward the end of the auction. It turned out to be very, very valuable. Like anything at a country auction, you never know.
“That’s pretty neat, when you find a treasure in trash,” Livingstone said.
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