Sold, American

There’s an iconic picture of a auctioneer moving along the piles of tobacco leaves in a warehouse in downtown Durham, trailed by the buyers for the various cigarette manufacturers.  He’s pounding out his patter, soliciting bids.  The outcry when a deal is struck: sold American! meaning the American Tobacco company has stepped up to buy a lot.

Those auctions are gone now and so are the warehouses. In Durham, the last one standing, the Liberty Warehouse on Rigsbee Avenue (home to the legendary auctioneer, Lee “Speed” Riggs), came down in 2014 to make way for a warehouse-themed apartment development.

The memories linger, though.  Around the summer of 1972 my father found me a summer job in the tobacco factory where he worked as plant manager.  I started out helping to unload those same leaves of tobacco when they hit the factory floor. They arrived on the back of 18-wheelers, and in boxcars on the rail siding that ran along the building, bundled in burlap sheets, weighing anywhere from about a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds. (I weighed about 140 that year.)

Inside the box cars it was well over 120 degrees. The sheets were piled to the roof and had to be muscled loose and tossed onto pallets for the forklift drivers to pick up.  I didn’t mind the work but I was undersized for the job and mostly in the way.  When my Dad found out what was I doing he had me moved to other side of the building, to a weighing station, where the finished product was shipped out, packed into hogsheads.

My assignment was to take the gross weight of these as they rolled across the scales, subtract the “tare” – the weight of the hogshead – and record both in a ledger. Much safer; no heavy lifting required. Keeping the wheels of commerce moving.

This is a long way of saying that we sold our house last month, and there was an auction of sorts there, too. Two bidders, but no patter. Just a kind of sub rosa paper shuffling and emails from the lawyer. We’ve sold two properties in our lives, a condo in New York in 1988 and now our house, not enough to get much of a handle on the process.  The bidding war turned out to be more of a skirmish in the dark.  We could have benefited from doing a little more research, but we’re happy with the result.

The closing is scheduled for just after the start of the new year.  Sold, American, so to speak, and one more tie to the old world falls away.

Photo: weighing a decision.