Going once, going twice, SOLD..... to the other guy.

No two auctions are ever the same. When I think about the hundreds, if not thousands of auctions I have attended over the past 50 years, I can only recall two that had any appreciable quantity of insulator. Both of these auctions took place around the same time in the mid 1990's. It would be years before I had a computer and longer before I was even aware there were hordes of other people seeking out these useless discarded electrical things. It was the time before eBay and before computers had become household items, certainly before they became the tool they are today.

Make no mistake, I have bought insulators at many auctions, one here, half a dozen there. At every auction I was prepared and hopeful, ready to score, land the big haul, but the mother load always seemed to elude me.

The first auction I attended that had a large quantity of insulators, I found in one of those advertising newspapers the antique malls distribute. The advertisement for this auction was three full pages, with not just one but several insulator pictures, it had great potential. The drawback was the 6 hour drive to get there. OK, a three day outdoor auction it was bound to have more stuff of interest, but was it worth going for all three days. I telephoned and confirmed with the auctioneer which day the insulators would be sold, explaining I had a 6 hour drive to get there. I decided to go for just the one day. I left around 3 AM and arrived shortly after it had started. I found the insulators- nothing outstanding but enough common pieces to make the day worthwhile. I waited all day as the auctioneer, pile by pile, table by table, wagon by wagon, came closer and closer. By mid-afternoon he was right there but skipped over all the boxes with insulators. Sometimes auctioneers do that, it's not unusual -I've seen that happen a hundred times before. Maybe he has a couple hot bidders and is trying to keep their interest by choosing related items. Whatever his reason, it was no great concern to me. It was just past four o'clock, I figured he would likely call it quits around five. I would have to wait a few minutes longer before he came back to those boxes. As each minute passed, more people were calling it a day and heading out. I took this as a good omen - it would be less potential competition when he came back for the insulators. A short time later he suddenly announces he is done for the day. The boxes of insulators still sitting, now, by themselves on an otherwise empty wagon.

WTH ? It was a two minutes, no more, before I had the chance to speak to him. All he said was, " You should have spoke up sooner, it's too late now, everybody has left".

In all my auction experiences, I can not recall any other time when an auctioneer would just stop with only an item or two left.

My choice is stay the night and spend another day there, or cut my losses and return home. In reality the insulators were not worth any more than the gas and the purchase price, even if I got all of them dirt cheap, certainly not another $100 and a day of my life.

Another auction that took place a couple years later was much closer to home. It consisted of the remains of a local telephone company that had been out of business for God only knows how long -and since God has better things to do than answer my questions that I ask from time to time, usually in the heat of the moment, I remain clueless. The 1950's would be only a guess, but certainly way before my time.

The owner had moved on and the property was being sold. There were several 80 pound rolls of solid copper wire, crates and baskets of other telephone stuff, a box of 350 new wood pins and 13 boxes of glass insulators - no mud. Quite an assortment of ponies and tolls and of note, a lacking of the bigger CD's - 145's, 152's, 154's and 155's. I had arrived early to check out all the boxes. One stood out, it had some purple ponies in various shades and a big aqua one marked ' Two Piece Transposition', which stuck me as an odd name since it appeared to be one piece. (I was unaware that any insulator came in two pieces. If I had looked close I would have seen a broken pin inside and just maybe clued in that it was holding two pieces tightly together.) I decided I wanted that box. The remaining boxes too if they went cheap. I took the nearest available seat beside the boxes. and settled in for a long wait. The auction had been underway for about 20 minutes when one box of insulators came up. An orphan that had been misplaced several tables away from the other boxes. I had not noticed that box before the bidding started, and sort of wondered how I had missed it. Since it was not the chosen one I was interested in, I let a couple other bidders fight it out. Being sold separate as a single box maybe they thought it contained something extra special. Get it out of their system, let them have the first box and the rest will go for nothing or next to nothing - something I had seen happen many times before. It would be at least another hour or two before the auctioneer got anywhere close to the remaining boxes. That first box went cheap, selling for $11. Quickly the winner who just happened to be standing right in front of the auctioneer, took a couple steps forward and talked briefly with him. The auctioneer nodded, and then announced 'all the boxes had sold for $11 each to that buyer.....'

WTH ? That wasn't on the menu, that option hadn't been announced. That should not have happened. He continued on, "..... a lot of stuff to sell, let's keep moving".

In the many years since, I have come to believe that it was a planned move by the winning bidder. I am only guessing he did not want wait for the hours it would take for the boxes, which would be sold near the end of the sale. He simply moved one box up to the first table, bought it and then asked if he could have the rest of them at that price. That would explain how he came to be standing right there in front. It would also explain why the auctioneer did not make the announcement, ' on choice, buy one or as many as you want', as there was only a single box in front of him. I want to believe that there was no deliberate dishonesty involved. Even so, it still sucks.

end of part one.

the story continues many years later,

part two.....

The new owners of the old telephone company's property, discover a cache of insulators that had been buried on the site. Robin Plewes, 150 miles away, was contacted by email and spent many hours examining photographs of the hundreds of insulators to determine a value. With that task finally completed, Robin expected that he would be the first to know if / when they went up for sale. Since they were located just minutes from my home, and 3 hours from his, I was asked if I would do the fetch and carry - if he bought them. Almost before I could reply, Robin received an email that they had been sold.

The seller apparently had little concern for the way she handled the whole affair or treated people. She had Robin do all the work, at the same time she had also exchanged emails with another collector, Chris, who she knew was keen on buying them, but chooses to ignore them both. She then lists the lot for sale online, and sells it to the first person to respond - Lee. We are all local collectors who know each other well. For the most part, each of us was in the dark about the others being involved until a few days after the sale.

I still feel sad for Robin. He got the exceedingly short end of that stick. Somehow, in a much, much smaller way, I feel a bit gypped as well, having lost out on the first batch that sold at auction, now to miss out on the following sale if for no other reason than I am the nearest collector to her location. It all just seems wrong somehow, like the powers to be didn't want me to win. The truth will always be one of those questions I did not receive an answer to . And I don't expect any answers later when it becomes long distance.

I have no issues with being outbid, it happens to everybody equally - a lot. At an auction that is the name of the game. If there are five people bidding, there can only be one winner with four times as many losers - if that's the way you want to look at it. Sometimes there are four winners and one loser, if you follow my drifting.

I go and I do everything right, yet somehow a Fail will just materialize unexpectedly out of nowhere that has my name on it.

{trivial tidbit} I can recall in 1967 of seeing an ad, handwritten in pencil, posted on the wall in the farm machinery dealership my father patronized, located just down the road from where the telephone company building was. The ad read 'Wanted Insulators. will pay 5 cents each for small and 10 cents for large . then a name, address and local phone number'. I am not aware of any connection to the auction story, but as it happened, this buyer, thirty years later - several years before the auction I've just mentioned - held a yard sale where I bought a few 'new to me' pieces. I am a bit embarrassed now to admit it, but I actually paid good money for a black plastic 154 for the simple reason I had not seen one before. In talking with him he told me a bit about the old telephone company previously located across the road and that he had been through all the boxes of insulators there many times. He was certain there wasn't much left with any value. I commented on the large number of insulators he was selling - at least a hundred. (Twice the number of my entire collection.) He said these were the last few of a much larger collection he had advertised for sale a couple years before and that the buyer had travelled over a thousand miles from somewhere in the mid west, Nebraska he thought, to pick them up. After numerous yard sales, these were just the dregs of the remains of the discards of what the buyer did not feel worth enough to haul across the country.

This was my introduction to the fact that there might just be serious competition for these things and that maybe there were a few different ones out there that I hadn't seen yet. At that time I had seventeen different types in my collection and it had been some time since I had acquired anything new. If you had asked me, I would have said that I was quite confident I had a fairly complete collection. [id=582618077;next episode]