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We sold a horse. We sold Yeti coolers. We sold wireless meat thermometers, Craftsman shop vacs, trailer tires, and vintage saddles. When stomachs were growling, we sold popcorn snacks. A rum cake, made by one woman’s ninety-year-old Hawaiian grandmother, sold for hundreds of dollars.
A three-speed 1921 Emerson fan and a football signed by former Oklahoma Sooners coach Bob Stoops each went for much less. In desperate times, we sold whatever we saw nearby: eyeglass frames, an American flag, a Texas flag, folding tables, a lectern—even the very microphone we held.
We were six days into an eight-day course at America’s Auction Academy, practice-selling everything in sight. Sixteen of us sat on gray banquet chairs in a fluorescent-lit conference room in a Radisson Hotel in Addison, a Dallas suburb. Our instructor, a wildly successful auctioneer named Mike “McGavel” Jones, paced in front of the class.
Jones, a bald man dressed in a suit and tie, moved with the posture and efficiency of a drill sergeant who had been drinking strong coffee since dawn, but he spoke with a preacher’s flair. Though many of us had arrived at the Addison Radisson as amateurs, Jones assured us we had come a long way.