No, Rae Jean Sielen and Ken St. Louis aren’t moving away.
They aren’t getting a divorce.
And the last time they looked in on each other, laughed Sielen, the owner of Populore Publishing in Morgantown, both were very much alive.
Endings aren’t the motivator for the auction carrying both their names.
Americana, including vintage advertising, primitives and antiques. Military themed items. High collectibles and gloriously low-down kitsch.
Row after row, lot after lot.
You can call it an estate sale in reverse, if you like, since the principal owners of all this stuff haven’t gone to their reward.
Seilen settled on “project declutter.”
“It really hit me when I saw all those boxes going up to the ceiling in the garage,” she said.
That was when the people from Joe R. Pyle Complete Auction & Realty Service came to help them get ready.
Nearly 400 items, in all.
Online bidding is happening right now. You can visit https://bid.joerpyleauctions.com/ui/auctions/105290 to make yours.
And all that fast-talking auctioneering commences at 6 p.m. Thursday for the live event at the Joe R. Pyle headquarters in Jane Lew, Harrison County.
Going once …
The headquarters where Sielen plies her professional trade is Populore, the publishing house she and her husband founded in 1995 to help families and communities tell the story of how they got to be families and communities.
And she and her husband are both the sum of their auction items, as it were.
She grew up in Southern California with six brothers and sisters (hand-me-downs, you know) and came to Morgantown by way of Seattle, where she previously worked in a variety of start-up businesses.
He was a ranch kid from rural Colorado – where one didn’t throw anything away, either – and went on to be an internationally known speech pathologist. His research and methods on how to conquer stuttering are still being used in classrooms and clinics today.
Auctions got them into their own auction, Seilen said.
All about the bid (and other things)
Meandering up and down the highways of West Virginia and Pennsylvania made for enjoyable weekends, when they would go on their sojourns. You know: Just to see.
“If we liked something, we usually came home with it,” she said. “The best part was getting the know the people. It’s a community.”
The latter might be the second biggest draw for the auction set, says Dr. Shirley Mueller, a neuroscientist who studies collectors and auction-goers, as she’s both.
She recently wrote about the social spinoff of it all in her blog for Psychology Today.
“ … Somewhere along the line, they realize there are people like themselves. Friendships forged through these vehicles no doubt expand social lives.”
The biggest draw, however, the neuroscientist observes (and this is right in Seilen’s wheelhouse) comes in the fact that anytime we acquire a vintage item, whatever it may be, we become both caretakers and advancers of the tale.
Storytellers, ourselves.
In the moment, and out of the landfill
Mueller calls it “reverse history” – the act passing on a legacy to future generations.
Besides, Sielen said, harkening back to their practical upbringing, a lot of what they’re putting on the auction block is still usable.
That rototiller. That 16-foot, 1955-vintage canoe, which she loves.
The vintage wrenches, antique printing presses and other tools.
Of course, a lot of their lots, Sielen said, are purely for the collector appeal.
Those Soviet uniform hats and other then-USSR bric-a-brac she brought back home, for example. She was a high school exchange student in Finland and got venture into Russia a couple of times on field trips.
The teapots and ornate rugs her husband gathered as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey.
A tabletop Victrola, a collection of Edison Recording wax discs and a box of sales receipts from the 1800s.
Toys, crafted from wood and pressed steel.
Fenton and Fostoria glassware, from the Mountain State.
Their 1977 moped with 3,000 original miles that’s up for bid can’t help but be charming.
What will be chilling to many – just because we knew what happened next, Sielen said – is that handheld mirror from 1936 Germany, featuring an inset photograph of Hitler, striking a paternal pose with a handful of blonde children in lederhosen.
History, through our possessions, Sielen said, is history.
History, with a heartbeat. Ephemera that was the essence of who we were, at the time.
To pare that down, she said, auctions also have a proud purpose of simply keeping things out of the landfill.
No comment
Which begs a time-honored question for anyone who has ever put a set of something he owns on the block.
When it came time to do that for this particular auction, how many things did Sielen grapple with, as she was thinning the herd?
How many items did she put in the pile, and then take back from the pile?
“Uh, yeah,” she said, laughing. “I’m not gonna answer that.”
