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Doug Clark: Every day is a treasure hunt for Spokane auctioneer Jeff Owens
A couple of years ago, for example, Owens auctioned items that the late Marvin Carr had amassed to fill his eccentric One of a Kind in the World Museum. The list included a Lincoln limo once used by comedian Jackie Gleason and another Lincoln built for Elvis himself.
Before that, Owens auctioned fabulous Thai statues, a gold crown and rare vases that filled three stories of an international collector’s Manito Place home.
And last weekend, Owens sold the red neon Levi’s sign that I had to store under a bed after I discovered my purchase was too bright to hang anywhere in my house.
“A guy bought it for his grandson whose name is Levi,” Owens explained with a chuckle.
Good to know.
I dropped by to see Owens on Tuesday afternoon. I wanted to check if anyone had bought the couple of dozen items my lovely wife, Sherry, and I had put up for our first auction.
Or maybe they were all still sitting unsold and unloved in the vast showroom.
That’d be embarrassing.
Owens Auction is located at 17th Avenue and Ray Street, the old Ranch Market site that still makes me nostalgic whenever I drive past it.
The grocery store fulfilled all my snack-buying needs back when I was a kid delivering the Daily Chronicle, Spokane’s long-defunct afternoon newspaper.
Owens, 63, saw the building’s 14,000 square feet as ideal when he moved his operation there five years ago from a Spokane Valley location.
It was reassuring to discover that, according to Owens, most of the Clark items did change hands. It’ll be a few days before I learn how much money we made, minus commissions and moving fees.
Owens is in the paperwork stage that always follows the controlled frenzy of an auction.
Each month Owens holds one weekend auction with a preview of the scads of items on the Friday before the event.
“Once that project is completed, we start building for a new project again,” he said, adding that his next preview and auction is set for Aug. 12-14.
Owens is a likable guy. He’s known for easing the tension of an auction by telling jokes and making personable remarks.
“Marvin was young at heart,” he said, pausing from his patter during the Carr museum auction. “It’s an honor to be selling his things.”
It wasn’t always so smooth. Being an auctioneer, in fact, never entered Owens’ mental radar as a possible career.
Raised in Prosser, Owens attended Washington State University where he studied horticulture and later managed a Pullman plant shop.
That changed when he began working with an antique dealer who dabbled in estate auctions.
Trouble was, Owens knew as much about antiques as the Mariners know about winning the World Series.
Even worse, his auctioneering skills were, well, nonexistent.
“It was like I was reading a book,” he said of his glacial speech.
The biggest obstacle, however, was fear. “I was frightened to get on stage. You couldn’t put a microphone in front of me.”
So Owens drove around in his truck, listening over and over to a cassette tape made by an experienced auctioneer.
Do I hear five dollah bladdy-bladdy. Now 10 dollah bladdy-bladdy …
Finally, he said, “I just had to get up and do it.”
After 35 years of repetition, Owens can now rattle off numbers and bids with the best of them. He’s also learned to keep track of conversations that bidders are engaging in all over the room.
But it’s also about entertainment, he added, making sure people “can have fun and spend money.”
Then there’s the question he’s asked all the time.
Where do you get all the stuff?
Mostly from sellers like me is the answer. (Check out www.owensauction.com for details.)
I called him up. Owens came to my home and looked at my stuff. He picked what he thought would sell including, I was glad to see, the red-haired sitting mannequin lady that I bought on a whim when The Crescent department store closed.
“Where do you plan on putting that?” asked Sherry.
“Um. Ummm …”
For the sake of modesty “I covered her with a flag,” noted Owens.
Thank God for decency.
In his continual quest for auction-worthy goods, Owens has pawed through million-dollar estates and lowly barns.
You never know what you’ll find or where you’ll find it, is the mantra of this business.
Before I met with him on Tuesday, Owens had already made forays to the Black Rock development in Rockford Bay, Hayden Lake and Spokane Valley.
He said he once found 17 valuable Winchester rifles hidden in the rafters of a home he was going through.
A valuable lampshade was found hidden under a woodpile at another place.
In yet another home, he discovered that every bedroom had a secret closet escape door leading to under the porch.
You can’t sell something like that, but it makes a helluva story.
It’s like being on a continual treasure hunt, he said. Going through homes “you find things you don’t find anywhere else.”
How many people get to say that they once devoted an entire eight-hour auction to selling one wealthy woman’s designer clothing?
In a recent two-hour auction of a deceased gun collector, Owens sold a firearm every 40 seconds.
My advice to would-be sellers?
Don’t fixate on what you paid for something. Retail prices are meaningless.
In the end, an auction boils down to a very simple equation, said the auctioneer. “Your item is worth whatever somebody’s willing to pay for it.”
Doug Clark can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or dougc@spokesman.com.