The day began with strawberry tarts, fresh orange juice and a Dixieland band. Fine priming for the nearly 1,200 people, most of whom had paid $250 (applicable to any later purchase) to attend a three-day auction billed as "the greatest collection of architectural antiques ever offered for sale by anyone—anywhere—at any time." Assembled under six tents and a former Two Guys store in a remote corner of Los Angeles were, roughly counting, 4,000 windows, doors, ceilings, entryways and greenhouses of stained, beveled and etched glass, 200 paneled rooms, bars, pubs and shop interiors, and more than 100 mantels, inglenooksand "other miscellany."
It was the ninth auction put on by John P. Wilson, 40, a former precision-instruments salesman who switched to the nostalgia industry nine years ago, when he turned an unexpectedly tidy profit on a surplus lot of 1,000 old pull-chain toilets —a $100,000 windfall now memorialized in the name of his company: Golden Movement Emporium.
The crowd around the breakfast bar —cleverly constructed in the semi-antique mode from old railroad baggage carts—admiringly described Wilson as "the P.T. Barnum of the auction business." Barnum, it will be remembered, held it true that "there is a sucker born every minute." To encourage five-figure bids, Wilson provided shuttle buses, disposable toothbrushes in rest rooms, free phones, simultaneous translation for a group of 25 Japanese, and $300,000 worth of frankly fabulous food catered by Los Angeles Restaurateur Robert J. Morris. The wine flowed like water, and so did the Perrier. "I think it's a goddam hoot," grinned a Texan, as a forklift truck rolled past bearing 1,200 live Maine lobsters.
It was part circus, part revival meeting, part convention. Most of the paying guests, according to Wilson, were hotel and shopping-center people and "the Who's Who of the theme-restaurant business." Theme restaurants have nothing to do with Ye Olde Tea Shoppes. These days quaint is a growth industry. Houlihan's Old Place, for example, has grown in the past seven years from one place in Kansas City to a national chain of 18 restaurants, featuring stained glass, antique kitsch and rock music. Recently bought by W.R. Grace, Houlihan's will open ten new restaurants this year at a cost of $1 million each. Part of Houlihan's decorating inventory, two warehouses full, came from Wilson's earlier auctions.