Pat Hall's collection is 'an auctioneer's dream'
By Matt Russell
Agri News
Date Modified: 06/03/2010 9:23 AM
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ORONOCO — After 30 years in the auction business, Dick Houghton says he's never seen anything quite like it.
"It's an auctioneer's dream," he said as he looked over the property of Pat Hall of Oronoco, which looked like a parking lot last week filled with antique tractors, trucks and military vehicles from the 1950s and 1960s.
What was visible from the street was just a fraction of what was up for auction May 22 and May 23. Items on sale included antique farm equipment and toys; dozens of lawnmowers; several guns; older motorcycles, snowmobiles and scooters; and an offbeat collection of smaller recreational vehicles.
"I thought about this for years and years, 'Will I ever see this in my lifetime?'" Houghton said. "Now I did."
Hall, 79, a former mechanic who is living in an assisted-care facility, was a collector who gathered "anything that had a motor or that he could fix," said his sister, 90-year-old Lucille Hassler of Pine Island.
"One wasn't ever enough," she said. "He had to have more."
Other items on sale at the auction included items owned by Hall's family such as dishes, furniture, jewelry, antique radios, and World War I items — including a canteen, mess kit, sewing kit, first aid kit and pocket-sized Bible — that belonged to Hall's father, Earl.
The auction will help pay for Hall's medical expenses and property taxes on the family farm where he lived, Hassler said.
"He has diabetes very bad, and he's lost his arm," she said.
Hassler said she worked six weeks gathering things for the sale before she got people to help her. Red Wing-based Houghton's Auction Service has worked over the past two weeks to get all the vehicles and other items out and ready for sale, Houghton said.
"The vehicles that Pat has here are very collectible vehicles," Houghton said. "I wish more of them ran, but they will run (if the right people buy them and fix them up)."