In the blood: Auctioneer grew up in the business

MOSES LAKE — It all starts with a tongue twister.

“Betty Botter bought some butter but she said the butter’s bitter if I put it in my batter it will make my batter bitter so she bought a bit of better butter put it in her bitter batter made her bitter batter better so Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter.”

It’s one of several tongue twisters stuffed with B’s and T’s and Th’s that Jacob Barth says he repeated over and over as he learned to be an auctioneer.

And as he says it, you can feel the cadence, the rhythm, even the bounce with all the B’s, that he has honed over the years to keep an auction going.

“Go through that all day long if you can,” he said.

Each tongue twister has a different rhythm, a different speed, Barth said, because no two auctions are exactly the same. It takes a different touch, a different approach, to auction off a $1,000 welder than it does to sell a $50,000 tractor.

“Every scenario as you are selling will be different,” he explained. “An auto auction has a different cadence from a livestock auction, that’s rapid and fast paced. Hey, we’re here to get the job done and get out of here.”

However, an art auction, Barth said, is “very slow and reserved,” and doesn’t call for quite so many bouncing B’s.

Barth would know. His grandfather was Chuck Yarbro Sr., and his uncle is Chuck Yarbro Jr., Moses Lake auctioneers of note. Barth was two weeks old when he attended his first auction in 1993.

“It’s in the blood from the very beginning,” he said. “As a little kid and young man, I would spend time with my grandpa in the truck. We had a lot of road time.”

“He taught me numbers and the tongue twisters to develop that rhythm,” he said. And as he counts off “five, ten, fifteen, twenty,” you can hear him slip right into that auctioneer’s cadence.

“But you don’t really develop that chant until they let you on the block and you get that mic time,” Barth said.

He got that time early in life, helping his grandfather and uncle in the ring when he was five and doing his first auction — used “cultivating tools,” he said — when he was 9 years old.

“Not only would they tolerate me, they would bid to me, and treat me like I was the guy running the show,” he said.

But auctioneering isn’t just about fast talking. Barth said that for every hour of auction time, there’s roughly 100 hours of preparation and post-auction work to be done. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. And a skilled auctioneer is also an appraiser, an “expert witness” who knows the value of things and can help people in all kinds of situations, Barth said.

“Preparing for estates, refinancing business, divorces or the end of partnerships, and everything in between,” he said.

The gravel crunches underneath the heels of his boots as Barth walks between a row of farm equipment on one side and trucks and cars on the other — some of them seized by the Grant County Sheriff’s Office and the Moses Lake Police Department. All part of the 300 or so items they will be auctioning off this Saturday.

Normally, this large gravel lot along Road 4 in Hiawatha Valley would be full of people on an auction morning. But because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Barth said he and his uncle will conduct this auction entirely online.

“This is an online-only event,” he said. “We’ll set up under the hay barn and livestream. Folks can bid from the couch or from the cab of a tractor.”

It’s one of 13-15 “projects” Chuck Yarbro Auctioneers will stage over the course of a normal year. They are busier in spring and fall, Barth said, slowing down in summer “because farmers are busy planting and harvesting.”

“Gotta bob and weave. Life has to go on, especially in an area that’s dominated by ag. That doesn’t stop,” he said. “It can’t stop.”

Barth considers himself exceedingly fortunate. It wasn’t just his grandfather and his uncle who were patient and willing to teach him. It was also the company’s customers, who watched him grow and had faith in what he has become.

“We have phenomenal customers,” he said. “It’s been neat to see them go from ‘Hey, you’re the cute little kid,’ up to ‘I need this done, get the job done for me.’”

Barth said he loves the work, the people he works with, and the Columbia Basin.

“I love that every project is different. Different buyers, different seller, different equipment, but it’s all the same,” he said. “I love these people (in the Basin). In my opinion, this is God’s country. I just love it.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].