Auction has sold cars for 71 years

By Belton White
Edited by Melanie Byer
April 22, 2009

As the garage door rolls up, cold air rushes into Rawls Auto Auction and a pewter Chevrolet pickup leads a line of cars ready for sale.

The auctioneer and ringman move to their spots, owner Jimmy Rawls turns on the microphone. "Welcome," he says.

Next up is the auctioneer. He sounds as if he's heckling a player at bat or speaking in tongues, singing out bids in a frantic numerical chorus.

All the while, the engine roars inside the steel warehouse, and a pushy ringman, whose job is to accept bids, jumps up and down. As he motions to the highest bidder, the ringman scans the crowd, seeking eye contact with a car dealer who'll bid higher.

Bidding flips back and forth as dealers nod, flick their noses and gesture until their peak price is reached.

The auctioneer calls the last bid: the car is sold. A new one pulls up, and it starts all over again.

An average of 700 cars sell each Tuesday during the auction. Hundreds of Southeastern car dealers journey here weekly.

In 1938, J. Martin Rawls, Jimmy Rawls' father, combined his love for cattle auctions with his car-selling know how to create the nation's first auto auction in downtown Leesville. His long-time business partner, J.L. Montgomery, joined him.

"The thing just caught on pretty quick, really," Jimmy Rawls says. "They didn't have many cars to begin with, and you could sell anything back then" at the end of the Depression and before World War II.

"He found a niche," he says.

Before the auction, men from Batesburg and Leesville would buy older cars in Baltimore and New York, drive them through the mountains and double their money by selling cars to people back home.

Over time, it became more profitable to travel to buy the cars and then sell them to dealers who fix them up and sell them again.

In 1942, the auction closed because of wartime vehicle shortages. After the war, factories again made cars, and the auction moved to its second location outside Leesville on a 3½ acre lot that could store up to 300 cars.

Generally, the auctions are not open to the public. But when the federal government has enough cars to sell, the auction schedules a public sale, announcing it on its Web site, www.rawlsautoauction.com, and in The State newspaper.

Some people go to the auction simply for entertainment. Others come to find a deal. It's a social gathering of sorts, like a church social or a little league ball game.

"It's family-owned. Jimmy tries to know everyone there," says Ernie Taylor, an independent auctioneer who makes it to Leesville for the Tuesday auctions in addition to traveling around the Southeast on other days. "They care about people more than rules and policy. The people take care of the people there."

Taylor said the auction is different because of its nostalgia and compared it to the Grand Ole Opry, which is the oldest U.S. radio program.

The friends who show up at the auction vary as much as the makes and the models being sold: from young to old; to black, white and Hispanic; men and women.

Mary Warren, 77, has worked as a driver for a decade.

"We probably wouldn't do anything else if we weren't down there," she says. "We try to be there every Tuesday."

Car dealer Jeremy Pitts, 55, of Georgia has known Rawls his whole life, as Pitts' father began the family's dealership in 1946. Pitts said the friendly atmosphere at Rawls brings him three times a month to buy and sell cars.

"They have a hands-on touch with owners and sellers," Pitts says.

Today, the auction has 65 full-time employees and 160 part-timers on Tuesdays. Most of those are the drivers, like Warren, who pull the cars onto the auction floor and have retired from other careers.

Rawls said new insurers a few years ago prohibited anyone over age 80 from working as drivers. Rawls didn't know he had four octogenarians driving for him. "They were the four best drivers we had, and we had to let them go. It just broke their hearts," he said.

The auction has again changed insurers, and now, folks like Dick Dickert, a 78-year-old who recently celebrated his 15-year anniversary as a Tuesday worker, don't have to worry about losing their jobs when they're over age 80.

Dickert said he's known about Rawls since he was "a kid up" and found out about working as a driver from his brother and brother-in-law, who worked there.

"We all get together early in the morning to have cuttin'-up time before going to work," he says. "I love to run my mouth."

Rawls said that new car dealers rarely came to auctions in the early days. It was only after manufacturers, like Chrysler and American Motors, started auctioning off company-owned cars in the 1960s that new car dealers started attending, he said. That debunked the stigma that all auction cars were lemons or junk, Rawls said.

Today, it's a different story. New cars are being purchased less often in the recession, so fewer cars are being traded in. However, Rawls has kept steady with business from repossessions and as new car dealers look for used cars to sell.

Taylor, the independent auctioneer, said Rawls has a hold on what cars are selling. "He keeps up with market trend well," he says. "He seems to be ahead of the curve."