Feeling lucky?
Lynchburg News and Advance
Thursday, March 8, 2007In his everyday life, you’d never know that Bill Billingsley is an auctioneer.
“When I get excited, I actually talk slower,” says the Mineral resident. “Day in and day out, I don’t run on like a magpie.”
Billingsley, who has been an auctioneer since 1994, specializes in selling industrial and commercial equipment, cattle, real estate and automobiles. He also works a number of benefit auctions into his packed schedule every year, including the Rotary Club of Lynchburg’s fourth annual St. Patrick’s Day Irish Festival, scheduled for 6 to 9 p.m. March 17. The festival will be the first public event to be held at the newly renovated Bluffwalk Center in downtown Lynchburg.
The event began four years ago, when the Rotary Club made a commitment to raise $100,000 over a period of five years for Amazement Square’s skate park.
It was so successful that they ended up raising the money in three years and decided to continue the festival as an annual event to benefit nonprofit organizations in downtown Lynchburg, says Shannon Bucklew, chairwoman of Rotary’s public relations committee.
This year, the proceeds from tickets and the auctions will benefit the Free Clinic of Central Virginia and Meals on Wheels, as well as the Rotary Foundation.
“They’re very, very worthwhile causes in the downtown Lynchburg area,” Billingsley says. “The work the Rotary Club does on the 17th is going to make a difference in the lives of the people who use those services.”
The event also includes entertainment by the Aquatones Barbershop Quartet, a raffle drawing for a trip for two to Ireland and a heavy buffet of Irish foods, including corned beef and cabbage, Shepherd’s pie, grilled Irish sausage, soda bread and Bailey’s Original Irish cream pie.
The items up for the live and silent auction, to be conducted by Billingsley, include a three-day, two-night vacation at a condo in Snowshoe, dinner with Lynchburg firemen at the firehouse, a stay at a vacation home on Smith Mountain Lake and a trip to Colonial Williamsburg.
Billingsley’s first time at the event was last year, when a close friend, who is a member of the Rotary Club, asked him to do the auction.
“He’s quite a character when he’s up there,” Bucklew says.
Before Billingsley got into the auctioneering business full-time, he served as a Green Beret in the U.S. Army Special Forces from 1966 to 1974 and later held senior managerial positions with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. General Services Administration. In the midst of all that, he managed to find time to graduate from the Mendenhall School of Auctioneering in 1994.
When Billingsley retired in 2002, he was director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Environmental Management and Safety. Afterward, he pursued auctioneering full-time and was recently named the Kentucky State Champion Auctioneer after a competition in February. He also holds the title of 1998-1999 Virginia State Champion.
Billingsley says auctioneering isn’t has hard as it sounds - “auction chant is numbers and words, and we just learn to scrunch them together,” he says.
After that, it takes commitment and practice to master the craft.
“Everybody thinks there’s some gimmick to it,” he says. “But there isn’t a gimmick. Nothing replaces practice. You develop your own style - each auctioneer has his or her own chant - and then you perfect that style.”
He says that every auctioneer’s chant is a little bit different, but the essence of a good chant is that it must be clear.
“I don’t care how fast you’re talking, if you’re not clear,” he says, “they will not bid.”
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