199. Martin Willis, My Life with Antiques

He's a fantastic, wonderful guest in my opinion. So I wouldn't mind hearing from you letting me know that you still listen, and you can reach me at Auction Podcast at m that's Auction podcast at.

done in an instant from what I understand. When it was running steady, I did watch others come along and start to do some antiques and art related podcasts, but this particular show was rated number one in the category of arts for many years, and then I just basically got very busy and time slips away, as it always does. But I never have lost my passion what I'm actually lucky enough to do, and that's being involved in the wonderful world of antiques, collecting, auctions and so much more.

In a lot has to do with history, I believe, and therefore I've had a number of gooes related to history, and I do believe I'm going to have a pretty interesting one coming up, so stay tuned for that. I don't have one hundred percent of a commitment, so I do not want to announce that yet, but so I will be trying to put some of these shows out there, you know, more often than I have in the last number of years. So I've never really done a monologue before.

I've never really spoke much about how I got into antiques, but I thought I would talk a little bit about that and some of the unique things that happened along the way now, back in the nineteen sixties and seventies, I have to say, well, at least where I lived and the people that I knew, it was really cool to like anteaks and interesting and started with me. Actually, when I started bottle digging, I think I might have been I don't know, eight or nine years old.

Then I got my friends involved, and we got quickly rather sick of that dump and we started looking around at early you know, homes and started finding some fantastic things, you know, as a kid, when you're little like that, I was more intrigued by the color of the glass, even the shards and the embossed you know, bottles that would say these strange things, and a lot of them, of course, in the lighten eighteen hundreds, you know, contained

alcohol and sometimes drugs, you know, cocaine and all kinds of things, you know, things to keep the baby quiet. So but anyway, it's it was really interesting I had.

I'm going to find out. You're going to find out how old I am when I say this, But I'm going to say it was nineteen sixty four or five something like that. And so we had this yard sale and not even advertised and just a sign, and it stood out there. I sold a lot of old bottles and things, and between I think we did it for two or three days, and between the three of us back in that time, we made forty dollars and that was absolutely huge. I'd never seen money like that, that is,

back then at that time. And so my father got wind of it, and he thought that was really He wasn't upset or anything to demon asked for part of the money. I don't think. I don't remember he did, but anyway, he had an interest in antiques, but you know, just like a passing interest, I want to say, at the time. But he couldn't believe that we made that kind of money. So I think we might have set up a few other times and never really had that

success that we did that day. And I don't know if that planted the seed in any type of way for my dad. Or not along the way. So years went by and I was fifteen years old, and my father was very involved in the Lions Club, and he was also involved in our town as the chairman of the Board of Selectments. So they basically called him, maybe jokingly, they called him the mayor of the town. He was also involved in the Lion's Club, and they would have

a yearly junk auction. I guess that's what you call it, but they didn't particularly call it that. But anyway, so that was at a little grange hall and that was an Elliot, Maine in nineteen seventy. The auctioneer that was to auction everything. He drove up and he staggered in and he was actually drunk, very drunk, so at the time a silly thing to do, but they did it at the time. They put him back in the car and told him to go home. Hopefully he made it there.

my barn, you know, down on River Road. So we went down there and there was all kinds of actually nice antiques that this person inherited. So the next thing, you know, he ran an auction at the same grange hall, but you know, of nice things and people came for it. Now I'm sure he advertised. I don't know any of the details, but I remember I was at every single one and I helped out. Ever since I was fifteen

years old. The auctions grew and grew, and he ended up actually renting a hall and he had an upholstery shop and he let someone else run that, which was my uncle. And then he went to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area where I am today, and he rented like the bottom of a mall that was there, and it was a lot of warehouse space. I remember the name of the gallery at the time. But he would run started to run regular auctions, and he used the lighthouse

for his logo, which he was a light keeper. And an amazing story I've, you know, told to some friends and a few people that when my dad was a lightkeeper at the and the Coast Guard, he was at what's called Whaleback Light, which is an old lighthouse and right off the coast of Kittery, Maine in Portsmouth Harbor. And he was there alone, you know, for days at a time, many days at a time, and he got

very lonely, so he would call at nighttime. He would call an operator just so he didn't feel so alone, and one day he asked if he could actually meet her, and he went head over heels, and that is my mother. They ended up getting married, having four children. I know I wandered a bit there, but my dad decided to use a lighthouse as his logo, which I actually still use today. So he started having lots of auctions, and he built a really good reputation. He just started getting

nicer and nicer things as he went along. He decided to build an auction hall, and at that time I had kind.

nineteen seventy six seven somewhere around there. Decided I wanted to go out there, and you know, my father, I don't believe he had told me at the time that he was going to be building the auction hall, but he did start to make plans for that. And that's back in the town where we grew up, Me and my sisters grew up in Elliot, Maine. I moved to Colorado and I worked out that was a lot of work. I learned how to refinish furniture that was really popular.

You know, there's mixed reviews about whether you should refinish something old or not, but basically mostly turned to the century oak and walnut and Victorian. That was what was brought out there and refinished, and actually it made a huge difference. That's what people wanted. So there was a lot of that. I learned how to do that and enjoyed that, and then I worked the auctions. The auctions were really big, really busy, and so I worked these auctions out there and decided that I wanted to go

to auction school. So back in nineteen seventy seven, in August, I was actually at auction school when elvistied, so that's when I know when that was. So I went to this auction school in Missouri, auction school in Kansas City, and I really had a fun time and learned a lot, but I didn't like the way they auctioned. It wasn't the way I was used to. It was fast, and it was you know, really the rolling off the tongue and things like that.

the area and started working with him again. Now I'm going to tell kind of a story that you know, is one of these things that there's many stories like this that I've heard and seen, but this, you know, happened personally. So he and I were in discussions about me actually taking over the auction business, actually buying the auction business from him, and he wanted to do some traveling himself, and he worked hard for many, many years and deserved it.

family in the Ipswich, Massachusetts area. And so we went down there and he had things like as Simon Willard banjo clock, and I can't remember a whole lot of things, but I remember that he was in a wheelchair and he said to me, hey, go over to the tall case clock, grandfather clock, and reach down inside and you're going to feel a velvet bag and grab that and

bring it to me. So I did, and it was very light, not really much in it, and so he took it out and he handed it to me and he said turn it over and read it, and so I did.

But anyway, so we're looking around in the garage and he says, could you please. You know, it's kind of like here's the deal. You know, you get the good stuff, but you're going to have to sell this stuff too. So we loaded up a bunch of box loots and he said it was basically things that he could not sell it as yard sale that he had and so things had prices on him. We took the prices off and all that and sold them just more or less as box lots.

there was no Internet or anything back then. The spoon came up to bid, and it's really nothing these days, but you know, back in nineteen eighty six, I believe it brought eleven hundred dollars for a single spoon, and that's you know, that was not a lot of things brought that kind of money, So it was it was exciting.

the exact one, had the same monogram on it. Somehow that got away from his family like a hundred years ago, and he had always known and his father before him, they always knew of five spoons, and the sixth poons, the sixth spoon came back to them. So he was just so happy, and he wanted to show that to us, and he wanted to make sure that we knew that

it came home, and so that was really exciting. My dad decided to leave and travel and he traveled on the Blue Highways, that's what he wanted to do, all around the country. And meanwhile I was buying the auction gallery from him, not the real estate, but just the business itself. Was really excited running my own auctions, and right away things did very well. I had a very

successful start. I was really happy about that. So I'm going to say that was in I believe it was nineteen eighty six going toward nineteen eighty seven when I actually bought the auction hall and he bought the auction business, and he left for the road. So one day I got a phone call, and this phone call was from a reporter, and the reporter said they were doing a freelance writer and I could have swe They said Time magazine, but I'm not really sure. It was some mainstream magazine.

I just can't remember the name of it. And they said that we sold in a box slot, something really rare, and did we have any idea, And they said it originated at our auction, and they rattled off the name of the dealer that bought the box slot at my auction and what he sold the item for, and they talked about the chain of.

His name was Stan Hedinger, and he was also, you know, quite involved in the antique business way back in the seventies and eighties until he passed away in the nineties. So Stan bought this box loot for seventy five dollars and inside of it was a fragment of a rug and I do not recall it at all, but it was in, you know, in one of the box lots, So it was a fragment of an old rug, and he actually thought it was pretty cool and unique looking.

He brought it to an antique show in New Hampshire and he sold it, I believe, for I think I heard around five hundred dollars, but you know, I can't remember clearly exactly what the amount was. So it ended up eventually, it sold many times and ended up eventually selling in brust at a rare rug and textile auction.

So this person on the phone said that they are writing the story about this fragment that originated at my auction and has recently sold for three hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in Brussels, and so that would be like a million dollars today. That was in nineteen eighty six, and so at the time I was just absolutely flabbergasted, and I said, well, what exactly was it? And they said it was an extremely rare, unknown twelfth century fragment

of a rug. And you know, as as it stands, you know, textiles are biodegradable, so for this thing to have lasted this many years was just unheard of. And so just a frag been of a rug at that time sold for that kind of money, and that was just like a number I never heard, you know, anything so for at auction, unless it's down in New York or in Europe and it's something really special.

All you know, I would give you permission to say in New England, but not even in the state of Maine. And I never saw the article. I never had real proof, you know. At that time. There was just no way to look things up again. There was no Internet or anything like that. That was one that got away over the years. There's been many that got away, but that one, you know, right off the start, was something you know, who would have known. You had to have such a

specialty of knowledge to understand what that actually was. And so now that's it supposedly went to a museum, and it's somewhere in some museum on a wall, I'm sure, encased and well preserved. But so that was interesting. Things have slipped away, you know, slipped through my hands many times, I should say, over the years, but this one in particular, that was that was a tough one to hear right off the bat when when I was starting. But I had lots and lots of great luck over the years.

Things that I've talked about before being able to sell the signer of the Declarations his whole homestead back in nineteen nine, that was really the feather in the cap even now all these years to be able to say that that was, you know, really my top auction of anything, all the history involved in everything, and that auction was absolutely incredible. And what made that auction get publicity is at the time the State of New Hampshire secretly appropriated

one million dollars to bid at that auction. Someone busted it wide open. They secretly hid it in some bill and when it was found out, it made the news all over the world. Associated press got ahold of it. It was the best advertising and certainly you know, there was well over a thousand people in attendance and from all over.

number of things. We got a call from New York City, Manhattan, and a gentleman said that him and his mother own a huge estate in Margate on.

something like that, So we headed down to New York. Now, from where the auction house was in southern Maine to New York City was about five and a half hours something like that. So, you know, we left I think real early in the morning, and we got there somewhere I think before noon. It was a really hot, hot

summer day. And this was on the ninth floor in a building, and we went inside and the elevators were broken, so we had to walk up the ninth floors, knocked on the door, and I noticed there was a good like six or seven locks maybe more on the door, and they all were snapping unlocked. And the store opens and it was a very pleasant gentlemen and fast talking and The first thing I noticed is when we opened the door that you couldn't really see anything because everything

was stacked to the sky. And these were I think there were like eight foot ceilings furniture and paintings and things. Where this was a big probably a three bedroom apartment and a big one, you know, in an old building. I remember seeing, you know, period Chippendale furniture and early portraits and high boys and all the juicy, great stuff, the stuff that you just never see. And of course in places in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire are you see some but not a lot, but you just didn't get

the exposure to this type of quality and quantity. So every room was stacked all the way up to the sky, and I remember there was like you could barely walk through. And I saw like an aquarium with a big, huge turtle in it, and it was it's just really in an odd situation. I couldn't understand. So my dad and I both were talking to him and said, well, how do you have all this stuff?

talking about, like, boy, this seems really weird. There's something not right here, and you know how, you know, how can we protect ourselves?

was the same person. That's when I said, this is the long before missus doubtfire. It was him dressed up and pretending to be his mother. So I'm kind of looking at my father. We're kind of making eyes at each other, and you could see that definitely. The you know, when he leaned over the wig came up you could see his hair underneath, and and it was a gray haired wig, and he had dark hair, and and it was like, you know, get me out of here. And my dad was really like, well, you know, maybe we

can make this thing work. You know O. You know, you get tempted when you see such a promise in you know, merchandise. I mean, you want to have an auction with these type of things in it. I mean who wouldn't. But you know, you have to ask you a question, the question of that time, like why would this person call I don't want to say a country bumpkin, but someone all the way up in Maine, even though it's an established auction hall and all that, But why, uh?

You know, New York City is the hub for all those type of antiques everything that he had, So why was he you know, calling us up there? And why was he pretending to be his own mother? There was something else that happened, But I do believe that once I said that we need some type of affidavit or some type of proof that you own all these things, that he kind of made it kind of uh quick that he she, I should say, who was pretending to be the mother At that time, there was some thing

going on and we basically had to leave. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. We kind of laughed, and you know, we were talking on the way home, you know, trying to figure out what the heck, what the heck were we just experiencing. This business, I have to say, is absolutely full of stories. You know, There's been so many things that have happened over the years, and some of them are really funny, some of them are actually terrible unfortunately, and some of them are really exciting.

we had. And you think of how these things went through the workshops and you know, they just had windows for a light, and then you know they wouldn't really work by candlelight of oil lantern too often they would just work when there's you know, daylight mostly and think of all that they had to do, you know, all the hand cutting, starting with the tree, starting with the rip sawing the lumber, starting and letting it dry for years the right way, and finding the right types of

grains in the wood to make a nice you know design, and say the mahogany. A lot of the mahogany, of course, came from the islands, and mostly the port towns would be the cabinet makers that you'd see, you know, making these beautiful mahogany pieces. You know, oftentimes you know, when you go into the country pieces they're using the wood that's available there. When you see things like tiger maple,

those are really rare tree. They had to cut a lot of maple trees before they found a one that had the tiger that type of grain in it.

these days. You know, that's something that's changed too. I talk a lot of times about how the market has changed, which it really has, and it really has to do with a baby boomer effect. But you know, doing an insurance appraisal is fine, it's easy to do. But when you're doing a fair market appraisal and you really want to put what something's worth out there, a lot of

time it's not what people are expecting. However, there are certain things if it's rare enough, it'll sell for just as much or more than it used to that for the type of thing it is. But I still love what I do. I love this, love this business. There's so much adventure. I just say that if you're young and you happen to be listening to the show, thank you. I hope you get an interest.