Oh, the hours I spent in auction houses with George Rhine! At night I often wake with a start even yet, the auctioneer's nasal rapid pitch fading in my ears: " Now what em Ah bid? Who'll open the bid there, podners? (A nod from George to me to go first ...). Carton-and-Contents - right out of the old Jones Mansion. Now what em Ah bid?.... Sold! To Mr. Rhine in the Fifth Row. Next... Lot No. four, hand-painted scenes of ...."      

    He bought continually, steadily, without surcease or break. Chuck and I were always out behind the auction rooms the next morning, loading new spoils into the truck. He bought hardware, houseware, and cookware - furniture, antiques, garden tools and equipment, shop tools, distressed merchandise, industrial tools, medical supplies and equipment, barber chairs, lamps, books, curiosities and stuffed heads, office supplies - George had the market cornered in everything! Stuff was jammed and crammed and piled high at the office, in the apartment at Iturbi Towers, over at Haverstraw, later up at Ridgefield, everywhere. Much overflow - a sort of largesse - went direct to Chuck's impoverished hands (the orange sofa, say) and to me.

    This penchant had shown up in earlier years, I guess. Perhaps back around the time George's running mate was the "Nickel Man". The Nickel Man was just that: he would buy anything you had for a nickel. A lifetime of this perversion had given this unusual person a stash beyond comprehension. That's when George strode upon the scene - with a solution to the Nickel Man's - and his own (!) - problems.

    First - he and the "Nickel Man" became partners. (The Nickel Man was some years his senior). George then managed him like a prizefighter's handler. It was down in Buck's County, Pennsylvania where this magic union took place. The first thing they did was strike up a deal with the Buck's County Schools Commission or somesuch board which had jurisdiction over all the (then) abandoned country schools roundabout. These boarded-up, one-room schoolhouses occurred geometrically across the Pennsylvania landscape, just at the intersection of every County Road. There were dozens and dozens of them thus strategically placed. George and the Nickel Man had soon talked the board into letting them open up these structures weekends for the purpose of conducting auctions from them. Naturally, "part of the deal" included a fee for the board...

    Next, George and the Nickel Man moved all of the Nickel Man's plunder into these various schoolhouses. George, even then, could rattle off the list of items - and it was fierce. I remember one in particular: 100 (!) washtubs full of ....buttons! When all this booty had been secured in its new distribution centers, then George and the Nickel Man began to hold weekly auctions of their own - visiting a different one of their schoolhouses each week, in rotation as it were.

    This Mother-and-Father of all auctioneering ventures sucked in many other smaller operations around and as usual, George rode the crest up front. Many professional auctioneers got their start under him and the old Nickel Man, and I guess the lost tales of that time would make a book of their own.

    I know it was grand indeed, to hear about it all and how the farmers, and the Amish, and the tourists and uppercrust Bucks County snobs and all jammed the one-room facilities night after night and the undeclared (!) earnings - in cash money! - piled up on the table, duly recorded by Ruthie as bookkeeper...

    I had been raised on the caveat that "money doesn't grow on trees, you know". And "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without". Life with the Rhines opened my eyes to how cheap real goods actually were - and how plentiful they actually were for the "industrious" in the America of yore. With a truly remarkable disdain, these capitalists en rampant and freebooters extraordinaire', spilled more daily than most people use. Dishes were thrown away rather than be washed, clothes (granted, someone else's first) were worn once - and tossed. The old man paneled rooms in his houses with solid cherry and walnut plank table leaves when others could barely afford fake veneer panels from the Home Improvement Centers. His source? The endless supply coming in from the Drinkwater Auction Rooms...

    Not for him particle board and cheap Jap tools. No Sir! The Rhines went firstclass all the way - and auctions were the key to it all. It was a lesson learned early in life - and I have cherished it ever since.