A Bad Day In The Auction Business, August 24,2013

Yesterday, August 24, 2013, I got a call from an individual I do not know asking me if I would come to Means, KY, in Menifee County to work a small consignment auction at his auction house. I generally always say yes to such requests for several reasons. First, it is the right thing to do to bail out a fellow member of a licensed profession when circumstances make it necessary for them to ask for help. Secondly, it is a good way to have my work as an auctioneer seen by people who don’t usually come to my own sales. Thirdly, it gives me a chance to see how some of my peers and competitors are operating their own businesses. Therefore, I always keep my name on the contract auctioneer page at Auction Zip. I agreed to do the sale and made arrangements to go there with my wife Candice. We arrived the building which I had seen about a year and a half ago when I was searching for a location in Eastern Kentucky to set up my own auction house. I had not been impressed when I saw it the first time and I was not impressed when I saw what had been done with it by the current operator. It was an old store located directly across US460 from the Means, KY, post office. The building is probably 50 to 75 years old and has little or no upkeep since it was last used as a grocery. The parking lot was nearly bereft of all its original paving. The only bathrooms were in a small concrete addition on the outside of the building. Grass and weeds were growing in every spot which was not heavily trafficked. The auction block was a cobbled wooden structure above the floor with three rickety steps staggering up to the tiny platform behind the auction block. The table for the auctioneer and cashier was built with a steep downward tilt so that a roll of duct tape had been place on it to hold the auctioneer’s water. The sound system was average or above with a hand held wireless microphone which quit once on me during the sale. There were two or three large steel uprights obstructing the view from the block to the back of the room. The merchandise which was waiting to be sold pitifully reminded of my first few solo sales when I was buying out yard sales, accepting box lots of junk, and taking anything of any hopeful value on consignment in order to have enough items to sell to entice a few people to come back the following week. It was heavily used in general with obvious flaws, defects, and shortcomings. The crowd, if it could be called such, dwindled in by ones and twos. Nearly all of them were dressed in clothes which appeared to have been bought in boxes at estate sales of the working class. Most were not very verbal before the sale started and talked only to those they knew. The two or three which the operator identified as sellers looked, at best, only a little better than their potential customers. In general, they seemed to be a low income, sultry, and sullen bunch. The operator started the sale about 15 minutes late which I always detest. It is my firm belief that a scheduled start time should be honored in concrete. As I like to say, “when the big hand hits the twelve I am going to make somebody happy.” The operator and one other man acted as ring men and merchandise movers. Their bid spotting was weak and they both liked to occasionally shout as if the noise might scare a bid out of someone.

An Auctioneer's Thoughts About Top Secret Documents In A Storage Unit

 In a story dated December 7, 2022, "Rolling Stone" discussed at length the fact that attorneys for TRAITOR Trump had turned over to the FBI at least two government documents with classification markings which had been found by those attorneys or their staff during a search of a storage unit rented by TRAITOR Trump near his Mar-A-Lago property.  This story also appeared in nearly every other national news paper and on all the major television news channels when it was released to the press.  As all of you know, after more than a year of unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with TRAITOR Trump for the return of all classified government documents in his possession, the Department of Justice finally had to obtain a search warrant for Mar-A-Lago and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of documents which belonged to the US government were retrieved by the FBI.  Many of those documents were classified at the highest security levels in use in the American intelligence communities meaning that they were supposed to never leave secure facilities and never to be viewed outside the most secure viewing rooms.  I am sure that many of you actually believed that was the end of that as far as his possession of illegally obtained and retained government documents was concerned.  I would suggest that this return by his attorneys of two more documents in a rented storage facility justifies the service of search warrants on every property TRAITOR Trump has owned, rented, or visited since at least January 20, 2017.  The possession of each of those individual documents justifies an additional separate felony charge for illegal possession of classified material.  The possession of these documents and the year long refusal to return them to the government after the National Archives learned of their existence most likely also justifies charges of espionage.  But, when Special Counsel Jack Smith does make the move to indict and charge TRAITOR Trump it is highly unlikely that the incredibly large number of possible felony charges will be levied against him.  What is most likely to happen is that Special Counsel Jack Smith will build a half dozen to a dozen rock solid cases on the most important charges with the possibility of a few lesser charges to leave room for plea bargains.  

 

But what I really want to discuss here is the existence of such documents in a rented storage facility which was an unbelievably danger location for them to have been illegally stored and shows the ultimate level of disrespect by TRAITOR Trump for the value of the classified information contained in those documents.  I want to discuss this location of the documents from the unique viewpoint of a licensed and experienced auctioneer.  I have held an auctioneer license for many years in Kentucky and was also licensed for a few years in the neighboring state of Indiana.  I have conducted several hundred auctions during those years and I have also conducted numerous auctions of the contents of unpaid storage facilities. For a period of several years, I also regularly bought and resold the contents of unpaid storage facilities in the eastern half of Kentucky, parts of Southern West Virginia and the Cincinnati area.  During that time I customarily bought the contents of three or four storage units a week and resold the individual items in my auction house. During that time, I admit that I never found classified documents in an auctioned storage unit.  But I did find nearly every other form of personal and confidential papers in those units. Examples would be marriage, birth, death, divorce, and military discharge papers; parole papers; and many other forms of highly personal documentations of nearly any imaginable life event. First and foremost for those of you who have seen even one episode of any of the popular cable television auction shows, let me tell you in no uncertain terms those shows do not represent the reality of either the broader auction business or the specific business of selling the contents of unpaid storage units at auction.  

So let's talk about the specifics of the sale at auction of the contents of unpaid storage units.  As we start this discussion, I am certain many, if not most, of my readers will say "but Donald Trump would never face the sale of his storage unit contents for non-payment".  You are dead wrong if you say that.  Even Fox News, which is usually the most clearly biased major reporting agency toward TRAITOR Trump, reported in a June 2016 article that "Dozens of Law Suits Accuse Donald Trump of Not Paying His Bills..."  One day before the Fox News story, USA Today also published a  nearly identical story about TRAITOR Trump not paying his debts to hundreds of contractors at his various businesses.  Four years later, as TRAITOR Trump was about to leave the White House for good, the website northjersey.com reported on a long standing problem of unpaid bills at his New Jersey casinos.  What these stories, which are just three of the dozens of such published stories, tell us is that TRAITOR Trump has a long standing history of not paying his just debts.  So, you say, "what does that have to do with classified documents in a storage facility near Mar-A-Lago"?  As a licensed and experienced auctioneer, I can tell you that this has everything to do with the level of risk to the US government and the US intelligence community and presented a vastly increased level of that risk because of what happens when ANY RENTER of a storage unit anywhere in the United States fails to pay that rent on time.  All storage unit owners single source of income is the rent of units and they do not tolerate nonpayment of the rent.  Also, in nearly every state, those storage facility owners are both regulated and protected by laws covering how they can and must conduct the sale of such contents.  But in many states those laws are incredibly vague and nowhere near airtight.  In most cases, the facility owner must have proof of the unpaid debt and proof of a reasonable attempt to contact the owner of the stored materials about the need to pay that debt.  In some specified amount of time, the property in the storage unit reverts to ownership by the storage facility and its owners.  Then, in the most ethical storage facilities, the owners contact a licensed auctioneer and contract to have the contents of any unpaid units sold at auction.  In some states, the renter is allowed to pay the debt up to the scheduled time of the sale.  In others, the time to pay the debt is much shorter.  The most ethical auctioneers will advertise the upcoming sale in a local medium such as the print newspaper and hold the auction on site at a specified date.  The most ethical practice to sell those contents involves keeping a lock on the doors of the units until the moment of the sale at which time the facility owner unlocks each unit, opens the door, and the auctioneer allows the potential buyers to briefly view the contents from outside the unit without ever going inside touching anything in the unit.  When the auctioneer accepts bids, pronounces the contents sold to the highest bidder, and the bidder pays for he unit, that bidder owns everything in the unit and the sale is irreversible.  What that bidder subsequently does with the contents is then nobody's business except theirs.  But there are also unethical facility owners who sometimes open the units on the sly and view and cream the contents for the most valuable items and removes them for their own collections or private sales.  Additionally, most of the buyers of unpaid storage units are regular sellers in venues such as flea markets, yard sales, auction houses, used furniture stores, or variety stores.  Almost none of those buyers have any personal interest in anything they buy and sell.  It's a matter of making a profit.  Any item in any storage unit anywhere in America, if that rent is unpaid, can be bought by any stranger who appears at the time and place of the auction with enough cash to buy a unit's contents.  And, if you think TRAITOR Trump would always keep the rent paid on a storage unit, you are an incredibly naive human.  

Simple non-payment of rent is not the only possible precipitating action or inaction which can result in the sale of storage unit contents.  Owners also often die suddenly and TRAITOR Trump is an elderly obese man who is also distrustful enough of everybody he knows that he may well never tell another soul about any or all of his properties, their locations, and any regular bills which must be paid to protect those assets including a rented storage unity in which he most likely new he had stored illegally obtained government secrets. It is not unusual at all for the heirs or executors of deceased storage unit renters to fail to learn about the existence of such storage before the unpaid rent prompts the sale of the contents.  The level of risk presented by those classified documents having been in a rented storage unit is incredibly high and far more than high enough to justify Special Counsel Jack Smith to obtain search warrants for every other facility which TRAITOR Trump has controlled, owned, rented, or stayed in since January 20, 2017.  And that is exactly what Jack Smith and the Justice Department should do. 

Livestock Market Memories!

Unknown Livestock Market--Photo by Getty Images, Bruce Forester

When I was a boy growing up in Knott County Kentucky, one of my favorite things to do with my father and one of his friends, whoever that friend might be on any given day, was to accompany them on a trip to one of the three livestock markets in the area to which my father, Ballard Hicks, often traveled since he regularly bought and sold both cattle and hogs as a means to supplement his income from operating our country store at Dema, Kentucky, and from his Social Security since he was already 64 when I was born.  I learned many things from my father and two of the things I learned which I have utilized throughout my entire life involved handling and dealing with livestock and attending, understanding, and benefiting from auctions.   My father never drove and owned only one car in his life, a 1955 Plymouth sedan which he took in lieu of a bad store debt.  When he wanted to travel to one of the stockyards we visited, he would make arrangements with one of his many friends who had a pickup truck and also traded in livestock or at least enjoyed going to the stockyards.  On those occasions, my mother would remain at home to run the store and my father, his friend, and I would all end up, in most cases, on the bench seat of an old pickup which would usually range in age from the early 1940's to the late 1950's.  I would be in the middle in most cases with my legs on each side of the manual shifter on the hump in the floorboard.  Just to the left of the gear shift would usually be the old fashioned floor starter button which a driver had to utilize with a foot.  There would never be any air conditioning and the heat might either be too hot or too cold in winter.  But I would not have missed these trips to the Isom, Paintsville, or Ivel Stockyards for anything in the world.  

Historic Livestock Sale, St. Paul, MN--Getty Images

I learned a lot about cattle, hogs, and horses, and maybe even a little about sheep and goats although neither Daddy or me ever wanted to trade sheep and goats, and there weren't many of them in Eastern Kentucky in those days.  I also came to love the art of auctioneering and and these stock yard trips had a lot to do with my desire to become an auctioneer some day and stand up in front of a crowd and induce them to do my bidding with a smooth, fast, professional chant.  We would spend the day at the sale until either Daddy or his friend bought or sold what they wanted to buy or sell, or sometimes we might stay for the entire sale and leave without either of them having spent or earned a dollar.  But it was always fun for all of us. 

I have learned a lot about several other things at livestock markets over the years.  Those educational experiences involved things like the difference between good auctioneers and bad ones just as much as they taught me the differences between bad cattle and good ones.  I learned about honesty and dishonesty.   One of the phrases I remember quite well from my father was that when he was selling livestock "if somebody asks the right questions, I give them the right answers".  That idea meant that you did not lie to a potential customer but you might not tell him the entire truth unless he asked the right questions.  I also remember another slightly different twist on this same concept when I walked once with my maternal grandfather Woots Hicks to a small farm a mile or two from our house to look at a milk cow the man was selling.  The man wasn't home and his wife sent one of their young sons to the barn with us to inspect the cow.  My grandfather asked the boy, a few years younger than me, "Does she give a lot of milk, son?"  The boy replied, "She sure does.  She gives a bucket full but you can't drink it.  It's bad milk."  It goes without saying that he did not buy the cow because the boy had volunteered more information about the cow than was necessary to give an incomplete but still honest answer to the question.  A simple answer of "yes" would probably have sold the cow and my grandfather would have taken his lumps on the deal without saying a word because he had not asked all the right questions in order to achieve the right answers.

Luling, TX Livestock Sale, Setup A Lot Like Paintsville--Getty Images

I also learned a lot about people in general, whom you could trust, whom you shouldn't.  I learned about how to associate with other males in the unique cultural world of Eastern Kentucky, Central Appalachia, the world of the livestock traders.  I learned concepts about people and dealing with them which I used years later both as a door to door salesman and as a mental health and substance abuse therapist.  I also learned things about people which I use today to create characters in Appalachian short stories and novels. I learned a little about trading everything from pocket knives and guns to other random items of value although I have never been a knife or gun trader.  I learned about what I like to call the "squat and spit" method of social interchange which was more common then than today.  Men would engage in conversation and squat on their heels to rest their legs and backs and, since most of them chewed tobacco, they would talk, spit tobacco juice occasionally, and just hang out together anywhere two or more of them encountered each other.  I learned a lot about the people, their family names, who lived in which county, who took better care of their livestock, who could afford what they needed, who might write a bad check, who always asked all the right questions, who might not know all the questions to ask, and who had the respect of the other livestock traders. 

The story below which I located in some old files from the Mountain Eagle, the local newspaper of Letcher County, demonstrates that I was not the only Appalachian child who learned valuable things at the stock yards. 

"The Isom Stockyard was a fascinating place for a child, mainly because of the cattle sale that took place every Saturday afternoon. It was also a social meeting place. You could learn everything that had happened in Isom during the past week. Women and children would attend, and while the men were interested in the cattle sale the women sat in the top bleachers to talk and gossip while the children played. I can remember going with Mother a few times. Dad usually went to see how cattle were selling as he bought and sold cattle now and then. Each year the cattle sale grew and vendors with all kinds of wares began to set up on each side of the highway until you could buy almost any thing you needed. Large numbers of people from all parts of the county visited Isom on those Saturday afternoons. On Saturdays, both the Ison and Holcomb restaurants served lunch to the cattlemen and buyers attending the sale. The Isom School served many purposes. In addition to teaching the children it was used to hold funerals. When a funeral was held while school was in session, the children were not dismissed but had to attend the funeral. If the burial was to be across the road in the Isom Cemetery, school children had to attend those. These funerals caused me to have many nightmares." The Way We Were Remembering Isom in the 1940's by Mountain Eagle Staff, & by Elva Pridemore Marshall, September 11, 2013, available on February 27, 2020, at 5:21pm at https://www.themountaineagle.com/articles/the-way-we-were-316/

Sadly, I have not been able to locate any online records of a similar nature about the Ivel and Paintsville Stock Yards or any photos of either of the three I have mentioned.  But I know quite a bit about the Ivel Stock Yards because the owner, Chester Layne was also a Tom's Candy and Peanut distributor in Floyd, Knott, Pike, and Johnson counties and was in our country store every week whether or not we had been to the sale at his facility at Ivel.  He was a wonderful salesman and I have written about him in other places in this blog.  Chester and my father often traded livestock outside the stock yards and he sometimes either delivered a registered bull to Daddy or bought and transported livestock from our property to his stock yard. He always kept Daddy up to date on what prices livestock were bringing and gave him tips on when to sell out or when to buy and hold.

I have a vague memory of the first time I went to the Paintsville stock yards with Daddy.  I remember walking into the somewhat larger than usual sales area which still exists today although it has deteriorated badly and only has one sale a month for goats only.  We entered it from a walkway which was elevated above the holding pens and came in at the back and top of the semicircular seating area.  The auctioneer and clerk were in an auction block at the bottom and front of the arena which was slightly elevated above and behind the sales ring.  Livestock were driven into the ring through a gate operated by a chute man on the left side and, after being sold, left the ring on the right side through another gate operated by another chute man.  Usually one ring man was in the ring and they sometimes allowed the commercial livestock buyers to get inside the ring.  I don't even remember the name of the auctioneer who was working Paintsville in those days but I will always remember that I wanted to be an auctioneer some day when I looked the situation over and realized that one person was in charge of that whole setup.  I learned something there, and at other auctions that I attended in my youth, which I used in every auction I have ever conducted since getting my license in 1980.  Someone at every auction is in charge, either the auctioneer or the crowd, and if it is the crowd that means that the auctioneer and the sellers are having a bad day.  I also learned a lot about good and bad ring men and when I was in the auction business I was lucky enough to find the best ring man alive, Dewey Rogers, who has since passed on and I think of Dewey nearly every day.  No good auctioneer ever fully reaches his potential without at least one really good ring man or ring woman which are more common today than then.

One of the most lasting memories I have of going to auctions at the stock yards came about sometime in either the late 1950's or early 1960's.  Daddy and a friend of his, Johnny Banks, took me and two of Johnny's nieces about my age to the Isom sale and we were all wandering around in the walkways over the livestock pens and the two girls and I decided to have an adventure.  We climbed out on the big joist beams over a pen which held a bull which probably weighed close to a ton.  The bull was in one of those small, one animal pens which were usually used for bulls or other animals which needed to be kept alone.  He was not enjoying what was probably his last trip to the stockyards since he was most likely headed to the meat packers in Chicago that afternoon.  The bull was actually trying to turn around in the pen which was not more than three feet wide and eight feet long a lot like a rodeo chute in which cowboys mount bulls before a ride.  The two girls and I were actually sitting on the joist beam directly over the bull pen as the bull tried to turn and he had nails and lumber squealing, popping, and complaining when suddenly Daddy and Johnny Banks saw us and realized where we were.  They didn't actually give us a whipping when they yelled at us and got us down and back under control.  But you can bet your butt that before the talking was over we knew better than to ever crawl out over a bull in a pen again.

I also remember one occasion at Paintsville when I saw an incident which nearly cleared the arena for a while.  The gate man on the entry side yelled out, "Watch this one boys.  He's a little wild."  and a young bull, probably not over one thousand pounds shot out of the chute into the ring.  The auctioneer started his chant and the ring man jumped up on a little concrete wall which circled the ring about two feet high and held steel posts strung with steel cables to allow buyers to see livestock but keep the animals inside the ring.  The bull shot around the ring one time, saw that the exit gate was still closed and whirled back to the steel cables in front of where some of the commercial buyers and bigger farmers sat in the front row.  He hit the cables at full speed and his head and shoulders shot through the cables nearly into the laps of these regulars.  Most of the crowd thought the bull was going to actually make it through the cables into the seating area and a mad dash to the back started.  But two of the commercial buyers started kicking the bull in the face and actually managed to drive him back into the ring where the gate man on the exit side already had the gate open.  It was a very brief but exciting flurry for about a minute and has stuck in my memory for more than forty years.

Most of the small, local stock yards are gone now including Ivel and Isom.  Paintsville is primarily a dying flea market with one goat sale a month. Ivel and Isom are long gone. Lee City in Wolfe County has been rebuilt with steel and just isn't the same kind of place the old auctions were.  I miss the old Eastern Kentucky livestock yards and I am betting that some of my readers do also.   I apologize for not being able to locate historical photos of Paintsville, Ivel, and Isom.  If you have any you are willing to let me use on this blog post, send me an e-mail at rchicks@mrtc.com.  I will be sure to give you photographer credit on the blog.