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By
Gerri Berendzen
Movies, books, wine and a healthy amount
of friendly competition.
Judging from the offerings and atmosphere at the annual
ACES silent auction Friday night, those are a few of the
things copy editors enjoy.
Add to that list helping the ACES Education Fund, which
is the real winner after all the bids are totaled.
The record $5,648 raised at the auction -- one of the
highlights of the 11th American Copy Editors Society national
conference -- goes to the Education Fund, ultimately benefiting
the next generation of copy editors through ACES scholarships.
| Shoppers
kept tabs on bids on hundreds of donated items. (Photo
by Christine Steele) |
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Part of the fun of the event comes from bidding rivalries,
rooted in the knowledge that bidding up a friend leads
to more money raised.
“I’m just going around trying to bid people up,” said
Jennifer Lash of Roll Call.
Lash got into the spirit of the event with several bids
and was celebrating when she made the last bid on an item
she wanted.
Yet that friendly competition wasn’t always welcome.
“Psychological warfare was going on here tonight,” said
Merrill Perlman, director of copy desks at The New York
Times and an annual ACES auction supporter.
Perlman was referring to an unorganized effort by several
people to bid up a water pitcher she wanted. During the
day, many conference attendees heard about the effort Perlman
undertook to get the water pitcher on a bidding table.
The pitchers were
part of the water station in every meeting room, and Perlman
persuaded Deirdre Edgar, ACES vice president/conferences, to ask the
Marriott for a donation of one for the auction.
With word out that Perlman wanted the pitcher, a lot of
people started bidding on it. By the end of the evening,
Perlman had plotted with other ACES members to employ some
strong-arm tactics to assure her’s was the winning bid.
“One particular Executive Committee member suggested those
particular strong-arm tactics,” Perlman said.
That kind of good-natured fun helps the auction raise
thousands each year. The auction raised more than $4,900
in 2006 and ACES auctionmeister Scott Toole of the Easton (Pa.)
Express-Times was hoping for an even bigger take in 2007.
“I’ll be really surprised if it didn’t completely blow
away the previous auction record,” Toole said as bidding
heated up around 6:30 p.m.
Items were available for viewing starting at 10 a.m. Friday,
and the countdown for final bids started 5 seconds before
7 p.m.
“There’s just a lot of neat stuff here,” volunteer David
Money, of the Dayton Beach News Journal, said as he watched
over the items and bidders in the afternoon.
me of the items included tuition to two Poynter News U.
headline writing courses, an American Press Institute training
package and two pairs of airline tickets on AirTran.
One of the API seminars went for $500, a bargain at twice
that price, and a set of airline tickets went for $400.
But bids of $10, $25, $60 and more on items as varied
as photo prints, a DVD of the movie “The Paper,” and bottles
of Sass wine (a sideline for University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor
Jerry Sass) also helped fill the Education Fund coffers.
“We love Jerry, and I want to taste his wine,” said Kay
Jarvis, deputy managing editor of The Denver Post, as she
wrote down a bid.
And then there was that final bid on a certain glass pitcher,
which had snuck up to $60 through the efforts of many.
Just as the bidding wound down, Perlman rounded up her
minions to ensure she would be using the bubble wrap she’d
picked up to get the pitcher home. Hope it survives the
plane trip.
Gerri Berendzen is copy desk chief at the Quincy (Ill.)
Herald-Whig.
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| Ron Smith (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) admires a photo
of "The Dog Bride." (Photo by Christine Steele) |
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