Years ago my parents went to an auction. They didn't know the auctioneer, they just wanted to look at some piece of furniture. For them that could have been a date night. We were all old enough that they could have stayed out late if they wanted to. They didn't.
My mother didn't say the auctioneer was bad and my father didn't say he was good so that implies that he was just average. At the end of the auction the auctioneer asked the crowd if anyone wanted to sell a piece. One person put his hand in the air, my father. For those of you that don't know, he was an auctioneer and he was a better than average one.
He goes up to the front and he starts slow, ten dollars here fifteen dollars here. He does that for less than five minutes and then he goes into his "rattle". From what I was told the crowd kind of jumped, he went from slow and halting to machine gun fast in a few seconds. He sold a few items for fun and they left.
Being an auctioneer was fun for my father, it even supported his family of seven. My earliest fun memories are doing the auctions when I was young. And yes, I do often think about learning how to do the rattle.
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