Word: auctioneers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...began with strawberry tarts, fresh orange juice and a Dixieland band. Fine priming for the nearly 1,200 people, most of whom had paid $250 (applicable to any later purchase) to attend a three-day auction billed as "the greatest collection of architectural antiques ever offered for sale by anyone-anywhere-at any time." Assembled under six tents and a former Two Guys store in a remote corner of Los Angeles were, roughly counting, 4,000 windows, doors, ceilings, entryways and greenhouses of stained, beveled and etched glass, 200 paneled rooms, bars, pubs and shop interiors, and more than...
...ninth auction put on by John P. Wilson, 40, a former precision-instruments salesman who switched to the nostalgia industry nine years ago, when he turned an unexpectedly tidy profit on a surplus lot of 1,000 old pull-chain toilets -a $100,000 windfall now memorialized in the name of his company: Golden Movement Emporium...
...crowd around the breakfast bar -cleverly constructed in the semi-antique mode from old railroad baggage carts-admiringly described Wilson as "the P.T. Barnum of the auction business." Barnum, it will be remembered, held it true that "there is a sucker born every minute." To encourage five-figure bids, Wilson provided shuttle buses, disposable toothbrushes in rest rooms, free phones, simultaneous translation for a group of 25 Japanese, and $300,000 worth of frankly fabulous food catered by Los Angeles Restaurateur Robert J. Morris. The wine flowed like water, and so did the Perrier. "I think...
...Seattle. "The only reason I'm paying $40,000 for a paneled room is because it wil help raise my take from $1 million to $2 million." Says Bob Snow, owner of the Rosie O'Grady entertainment-cum-preservation complexes in Orlando and Pensacola: "At the first auction I paid $4,500 for a real historic bar from Chicago. This year ordinary bars are bringing $45,000. 1 don't know whether it's the total devaluation of the dollar or total inflation, or a general dissatisfaction with shoddy material. Some of this is good, beautifully...
Actually you can. The crafts required live on. People in Europe and the U.S. still build paneled rooms and beveled-glass entryways. They have, in fact, built a good many of the lots in this auction. At the back of the hall Marty Duffy of Ely, Iowa, and Roger Wandrey of Portland, Ore., watch in bemused silence as the intricate glass clusters and stained-glass domes that they made are sold. So do not weep for the little old lady whose oak-paneled inglenook - so cozy with a gin and bitters- is now going to be part of a restaurant...