Card-Holders Get Auction Action

You learn something when you go to an estate/antiques auction.

It’s this. Those sitcom scenarios in which Dick Van Dyke or somebody unwittingly bids huge sums on some hideous vase by rubbing his nose or scratching his head can’t happen in real life. At least not at an auction run by Spokane’s Owens & Company.

That’s because they require that bidders register in advance. Prospective buyers then receive a white card with a number boldly written on it in black. The auctioneers look for those cards.

“So what’s our number?” a woman asked her husband Sunday at the Red Lion in the Spokane Valley.

“Thirty-five,” he answered.

“Oh, good,” she said, pleased for reasons known only to her.

The hundreds of items to be sold were on display at the front and along the sides of the conference hall.

Furniture, rugs, lamps, jewelry, vintage toys, clocks, knives, stuffed bears, an old putter…the list went on and on.

To accomodate the crowd, 300 chairs were lined up. And people started saving seats up front soon after the doors opened for the auction’s hour-long preview session. Some left their keys on chairs. Others used jackets or pieces of paper on which they had written “Saved.”

The smell of popcorn filled the place. It was being made at a small concession stand in the back of the room.

Just about everyone was dressed in weekend casual clothes. That made it fun to try to guess who had serious money and who didn’t.

Several people talked on cellular phones as they examined bed frames and tables.

A man with gray hair and a worried look tried to dampen his wife’s enthusiasm for a mahogany chest of drawers. “Yeah, sure, it looks nice but….”

“It’s perfect,” his beaming wife cooed, oblivious to his mumbled reservations.

By the time the auction started shortly after noon, almost all the seats were full. Other people continued to wander about, inspecting the merchandise.

The first few items sold quickly. The auctioneer, employing that trademark spiel, kept things moving.

Maybe some of the bidders were serious shoppers. But clearly many in attendance viewed the auction as recreation.

A woman in a pink sweater looked on as, twice in a row, her husband dropped out of the bidding just before the winning offer.

She shook her head. Then she looked at a friend seated next to her and shrugged. “He who has the card, has the power,” she said.

, DataTimes MEMO: Being There is a weekly feature that looks at gatherings in the Inland Northwest.