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| Brian Throckmorton (Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader) and Courtney Semple (Contra
Costa, Calif., Times) check on books at end of the bidding. Throckmorton won ''Kill
Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times'' with a bid of $30. |
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By Andrea Zimmermann
The
trap was set.
More than 100 bidders and their pocketbooks are corralled in the ACES silent auction
room with thirty minutes on the clock.
Multiple tables of steals from newspapers and large corporations across the nation
beckon. A cash bar is stationed strategically outside the auction doors. And the
most irresistible temptation of them all: a deadline.
With accomplices such as Kay Jarvis and Merrill Perlman driving up the prices, the
bidding in the auction escalated to a nine-year high of $5,485.88, about $985 more
than last year.
This year’s auction included books, apparel, photographs, sports tickets and other
merchandise. Auction coordinator Scott Toole said there aren’t any items that don’t
receive some kind of bid. Newspapers and other corporations across the country donate
the auction items each year. The bidding began early Friday morning and ended at
7:15 p.m.
Strategy and competition
At 5:30 p.m., conference participants make their way to the auction room to browse
the items. As they look, some gasp when they see how high prices have soared, such
as an authentic Beatles photograph from the Los Angeles Times that by midday was
$100.
Throughout the day, ACES board members and others would wander into the room and
add their names to the items to hike the prices.
Competition runs high every year at the auction. Someone is always pegged as the
one to outbid.
“I’ve been told you are the one to take down in this auction,” ACES board member
Teresa Schmedding said to fellow bidder Kay Jarvis of The Denver Post.
But Schmedding was not Jarvis’ only competition; she also engaged in a rivalry with
ACES President John McIntyre throughout the day.
“If she wants that, she is going to have to pay for it,” McIntyre said, as he upped
the price of one of the hand-drawn cartoons about copy editing.
Jarvis kept the fight alive by continuing to add her name.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to go in again,” Jarvis said with a shrug. “It’s not so
much the price you are paying for what you are buying, but that it is going to a
good cause.”
This year, the money from the auction goes toward ACES’ new nonprofit educational
foundation.
As the auction began to pick up steam and prices rose into three digits, some bidders
fell back and watched the others. Some, like Yvonne Ngai of The St. Petersburg Times,
lingered near their items of choice and monitored the price.
“I’m going to get that football,” Ngai said of the University of Southern California
football autographed by head football coach Pete Carroll.
Ngai graduated from USC in 2003 and attended the 2005 Orange Bowl game, when USC
won the national championship. She casually leaned back against the wall and scouted
out the competition.
“I can smell their fear,” she said. “I’m hoping not to go to $100, but I’m willing.”
Other bidders, including Steven Petranik of The Honolulu Advertiser, continued to
bid on smaller items such as a pair of sandals from the Wall Street Journal, hoping
they would come out on top.
The sandals, or slippers as they are called in Hawaii, would make a good conversation
piece, Petranik said, because it is custom in Hawaii to put all shoes by the front
door.
“We’ll see how aggressive I have to be,” he said.
The time had dwindled, and only 10 minutes remained. Gerri Berendzen of The Quincy
(Ill.) Herald-Whig was frantically signing her name and a price to five items at
a time.
“I’m going to be the last one standing on all of these, and that is going to be bad,
bad news,” Berendzen said as she continued to add her name to a cartoon piece.
Having the best position at the table was advantageous, but sometimes that spot was
not directly in front of the item. Merrill Perlman of The New York Times settled
into her position on the other side of the table where no one else stood. But this
also meant she had to reach across to sign her name.
“This is really difficult,” Perlman said as her signature became a childlike scrawl
while writing upside down.
Toole climbs onto a chair and yells, “Two minutes!”
Prices jump as more and more names are added. Some bidders begin to use the back
side of the page. Others resort to more physical tactics as Perlman throws her arms
over the cartoon. Laughter mixes with shrieks of delight.
Growing
At 9 years old, ACES is still young by many journalism organizations’ standards,
and many of its original members still attend every conference.
Petranik first came to the annual ACES conference seven years ago and said at that
time, the auction was relatively small.
“This is huge,” he said of this year’s auction. “It’s great to see how this organization
has grown.”
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| John McIntyre auctions off his bow tie, which fetched $125, at the banquet. (Photo
by Doris Truong) |
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During the closing session, Toole brought out two surprise
bidding items. They were the T-shirts from an earlier headline writing session that
read: “Pimp my headline.” The first shirt sold for $75 and the second for $110.
McIntyre thanked all of the bidders for their hard work. His speech was interrupted
by chants of bidders wanting his handkerchief. He stopped talking and peered out
into the crowd. Then, he reached over and yanked it out of his breast pocket and
dangled it in front of all 500 attendees.
Impromptu bidding followed, and Jarvis was the winner at $40. As she began to walk
back to her table victoriously, someone called out for McIntyre to put his bow tie
on the auction block.
He glared at the audience.
“We are not going to play strip auction,” McIntyre said.
But then he reached up to his neck and with rough motions began to untie the accessory
synonymous with his name.
Craig Lancaster of The San Jose Mercury-News took the coveted tie for $125.
Other big winners of the silent auction were:
-- Jill Reed of The Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., who paid $610 for a ride in
a Goodyear blimp.
-- Tim Lynch of The Los Angeles Times, who paid $300 for a drawing from Peter Zicari
of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and signed by Editing the Future panelists.
-- Barbara Tarshes of The Riverside, Calif., Press-Enterprise, who paid $245 for
the "First Copy Editor" cartoon by Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
-- Gerri Berendzen of the Quincy, Ill., Herald-Whig, who paid $201 for a cartoon
by Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Petranik won his slippers, but Ngai lost the football to another bidder at the last
minute.
Andrea Zimmermann is a sophomore majoring in journalism at Southern Illinois University
in Carbondale.
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