An Auctioneer is a unique combination of high speed salesman and country entertainer.  The guys and girls who do it best are unbelievably accomplished communicators who are willing to laugh at themselves while focusing on making the sale while leaving their buyers ecstatic with their sometimes impulsive decision.

Perhaps one of the all-time best at the craft of auctioneering was Col. Harold Kindred of McLean County, Illinois.  As a young man in the early years of his long career, while still single, Harold was a boarder in my Grandparents’ home.  That’s where I first met him, but soon after when I was barely in elementary school my Grandfather took me to the local Auction Barn to see the Colonel in action.  Located in a poorly lighted barn in the corner of the Stockyards, this place was certainly no Southeby’s.  On any given sale night they sold just about everything imaginable there.  We bought a fishing pole – with a spinning reel.

Auctions are a well founded tradition across America and truly a way-of-life for folks in agriculture.  Farmers, Tractor and Implement Dealers, Cattlemen and Mercantile Sellers, just about everyone have for decades relied and thrived upon the Auction form of selling to do business.

My family were farmers.  Many cold winter days were filled with opportunities to attend auctions throughout the countryside – and of course Wednesdays, year-around, were reserved for the big sale at Col. Kindred’s Bloomington Livestock Commission Company.  This was a local sale barn to rival all sale barns.  It was absolutely state-of-the-art with a heated auction arena and stadium seating, a perfect sound system, and a lunch counter that served the best Sloppy Joes on the planet.  I went there a lot as a teenager, usually as a seller of a calf or two.

Somewhere along the line Colonel Kindred’s chant got stuck in my head like an old Beatles tune that you can’t quit singing.  Never did I think that nearly forty years later I’d still be singing that song.

Right out of High School my best friend went off to auction school in Missouri, while I was on to college with much loftier goals.  It didn’t take long before my need to pay tuition led me to work for my friend in his new auction business, doing all sorts of mostly heavy labor.  Modeling himself somewhat on the style of the great Col. Kindred, my friend got real good at his chosen career.  Week after week we sold furniture and dishes – tools and equipment – and just plain junk – and all those “articles too numerous to mention” - but it was great fun, and we made a little money.

Once in a while my friend would let me try my untrained style of auctioneering on the crowd.  The results left much to be desired and it was clear that practice and personal commitment were needed.  Day after day, while feeding our family dairy herd, out there in the barn lot where only those bossy Holsteins could hear me, I sold the same old bull to the same cow, for ever increasing prices.  It seemed as though those cows expected me to start up my auction chant every time I walked down the feed bunk.  After weeks of entertaining the livestock, I was ready to try it on real people, but I got only a precious few opportunities before my Uncle Sam called me to be a U.S. Marine.

It was years later that I volunteered to auction cakes for charity.  The song was still lingering in my brain and when the first cookies went up for sale it all came back.  Oh my gosh – I’m an Auctioneer.

Hundreds of auctions later, now a licensed Florida Auctioneer and the Colonel of Good Earth Realty and Auction Company, its still great fun.  Hopefully I’m making Col. Kindred proud.