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Sold to Riley |
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There was something about a
country auction that my father was unable to resist
and he went to as many of them as he could. I often
went along with him and got an early taste of the excite- ment — bidding
for articles rather than purchasing them at a
fixed price. My father sometimes bought a piece of furniture or
an implement for the farm, but most of all he preferred to buy
boxes of miscellaneous oddments that could be classified as junk and
which, when he got home, he could examine carefully,
hoping to find something useful hidden away in them. Time and again you
would hear the auctioneer knock down a box of
trashy-looking hardware with the words, "Sold to Riley for ten cents."
At auctions he always used the pseudonym Riley. I am uncertain as to the
origin of the name, but his friend, Mr. John Paine (later my
father-in-law) always called him Riley and I assume that
this may have had something to do with it. |
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