A high-mileage 1941 model.

For twenty or so years in the Bay Area, most days my mornings and my evenings didn't look like they belonged to the same person.

An evening could find me in a tuxedo at a black-tie gala in San Francisco or down on the Peninsula, running a charity auction for a hospital foundation or a private school.

The same week I'd spend mornings in a San Jose tow yard, auctioning impounded vehicles off the back of my van to small-time operators. I made up names for half the regulars — it was easier than learning the real ones, and they didn't volunteer them. One of them seldom paid with anything larger than a five. I asked him once if he was a waiter. He told me he ran a string of dancers. I was glad my clerk was counting the money. Another regular walked up one morning and said, matter-of-fact, "Big Daddy — he got shot last night." I don't doubt that I laundered a lot of money on that route. I didn't ask, and they didn't tell.

Two worlds. Same auctioneer. Same trade.

That kind of range doesn't come from a textbook. It comes from doing the work year after year, in every kind of room. Here's how I got there.

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Where I come from

My grandfather came over from Italy in the 1880s. He kept the name Vendetti — no Anglicizing — and went to work in the coal mines of southern Colorado. He settled in Rockvale, a Fremont County company town owned by Colorado Fuel and Iron. He was a coal miner, a farmer, and by every account I've ever heard, an ornery son of a gun. During Prohibition he occasionally ran bootleg wine from his truck farm in Brewster, just outside Florence — and when he figured he'd get caught making the delivery himself, he sent my father and my uncle, both still children, with the horse and wagon to the next coal town over. The kids got away with it. He probably wouldn't have.

He got my grandmother the way a lot of Italian miners in Fremont County got their wives. He and another miner had made a deal with another Italian immigrant — her father — to bring her and her sister over from Italy to Florence to be married. The two daughters came across, the two miners married them, and that was that. My grandmother turned out to be a much better businessperson than my grandfather. I've always suspected she had more to do with how the family ended up with the Brewster truck farm than the family lore lets on.

The southern Colorado coal towns were rough places. Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, all underground. The 1913–14 strike that led to the Ludlow Massacre wasn't far from where my grandfather worked. Family lore says he was arrested for shooting a scab during one of the labor flare-ups. I can't prove it, but I believe it.

My father was one of seven kids. Only he and his sister Angie went past the eighth grade — which in their family, in that town, in that era, was its own kind of achievement. My father could build an oil refinery, and he did. During World War II he was Assistant Superintendent at Frontier Refining in Cheyenne, Wyoming, manufacturing aviation gasoline for the war effort. He spent fifty years in oil and gas and was deeply respected in the industry.

My Aunt Angie served as an Army nurse in the Pacific during the war. After it ended, she went to UC Berkeley on the GI Bill — an Italian immigrant's daughter from a Colorado coal camp earning a degree at Berkeley in the 1940s. She married another WWII veteran, Sid Frantz, a Seabee. They bought a modest house on Menlo Oaks Drive — an unincorporated pocket next to Atherton — back when it was still rural country road, oak groves and scattered homes between the wealthy estates. That same lot today is worth $3–5 million as a teardown. They raised three children there, all of whom went on to successful lives of their own. Aunt Angie spent her career at the VA in Palo Alto, caring for veterans until she retired.

That's my father's side. Coal miners and bootleggers, refinery builders and Pacific nurses, people who showed up in the right place before anyone knew it was the right place, and made something of it.

My mother's side

My mother, Helen, traced her family back to Richard Hill, a Revolutionary War veteran. The Hills were West Virginia farmers for generations. At some point in my branch, a widow loaded up her family and moved them west to Jamesport, Missouri, and that's where my mother's people put down roots. Jamesport was small enough that my mother used to say there were really only three families you could marry into without marrying a cousin — and one of those families was her own. My grandparents on her side were themselves cousins.

My mother inherited an 80-acre section of farmland in Stanhope, Iowa from one of her uncles, and she owned it for many years before we ever sold it. A local farmer worked the land on shares with her — corn one year, soybeans the next, the way Iowa ground has been farmed forever. For years on end, corn paid around twenty-four cents a bushel. By the end, I was making more money in a single week of San Jose tow auctions than that farm paid her in a year.

When the time came to sell, I didn't call the auction myself. I hired an auctioneer I knew who specialized in Iowa farmland in that area — a man who lived the local market every day, knew the neighboring operators, and understood ground prices the way I understood tow-yard inventory. Knowing your limitations is part of the trade. If I'd tried to call that auction myself, on land I didn't farm in a county I didn't live in, it would have been a disaster. It sold absolute, no reserve, for around $250,000.

Selling it hurt my heart. That ground had been in the Hill family for well over a hundred years.

That's the family I come from on both sides. Italian immigrants in Colorado coal camps and Revolutionary-era farmers in West Virginia and Missouri — two long American lines that met in my generation.

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My service

I served as an Infantry platoon leader with the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. A tripwired antipersonnel device cost me my right leg below the knee. I spent eighteen months at Walter Reed putting myself back together. When I was able, I returned to active duty in a non-combat role and served another year and a half before retiring as a Captain on disability.

I've carried Vietnam with me every day for sixty years. It doesn't define me, but it's part of everything that came after.

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Silicon Valley, and the day I quit

After the Army, I landed in Silicon Valley's printed circuit board industry. I managed circuit shops and sold boards, specializing in prototypes and short runs — the small, fast, fussy jobs the big fabricators didn't want. It was a good run.

One day in the late 1970s a sales rep walked into my shop and told me there was this little startup called Apple. He said, "If you make a few boards for them for free, you might get bigger orders later." I'd never heard of Apple. Most of the world hadn't. My response was, "We don't do anything for free."

I laugh about it now. I tell that story on myself often enough that it's earned the right to be on this page.

The printed circuit industry started moving offshore in the late 1980s, and the writing was on the wall. I'd already been to auction school by then — a hedge against the day the circuit work ran out. When that day came, I quit my sales job on October 17, 1989. I remember the date precisely because I was at an auction that afternoon when the ground started shaking. The Loma Prieta earthquake hit during the World Series. The decision was already made; the earthquake just happened to be the same day.

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Becoming an auctioneer

Auction school doesn't make you an auctioneer. It teaches you the chant and the basics. The nuances — reading a room, working a bidder, building rhythm, knowing when to push and when to back off — only come from doing the work. And nobody wants to hand the microphone to someone who hasn't done the work yet.

When I went through, the working estimate I heard was that only about 5% of graduates ever became full-time auctioneers. Most stayed weekend callers, family-business helpers, side-income guys. Going full-time meant scratching for years.

I started my own auction business in 1990, because it was the only way to get into the work. Nobody was going to hire me. So I hired myself.

I started with one San Jose tow company that paid me $100 to auction off their impounded vehicles. Over the next few years I built a route — six tow companies across the city, weekly visits, running each auction out of my van, collecting cash on the spot, paying the tow companies, keeping a 10% buyer's premium for myself. By the time I sold the auction company, that route alone was bringing in roughly $5,000 a week.

For the first five years I struggled. The Army disability pension kept the lights on. The progress was gradual — one tow yard, then two, then a charity that liked my work and recommended me to another. Along the way I came to understand that I was a better auctioneer than the man I worked alongside when I started out, an auctioneer I'd first watched on television selling Fred Astaire's shoes after his estate sale. That understanding didn't come in a single moment. It came from doing the work year after year and seeing what other auctioneers were doing, and what they weren't.

Fundraising auctions came into the practice the same way. One event led to another, and over time I built a reputation as a fundraising auctioneer on the Peninsula and in San Francisco. By the time I called the auction I still tell people about — a charity event hosted by one of the founders of Atari (not Nolan Bushnell, but one of the others) — the work was already there. He had bid-called the event himself every year since its beginning, back when it was a small fundraiser among friends. The event had grown well past that, but the bid sheets were still the dollar-increment templates most volunteers print off the internet, and the man at the microphone was still the host. My first year as their professional auctioneer — with proper bid sheets and trained technique — the event roughly tripled its gross. That number is my best recollection, not an audited figure.

I've told that story for years as an example of what a professional auctioneer with the right materials can do for an event that's been run by well-meaning amateurs. The bid sheet itself mattered. Pacing mattered. Knowing the room mattered. None of it was magic — it was years of trade, brought into one evening.

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2004 — the belt buckle

I'd competed for years. In 2004 I finally won the California State Bid Calling Championship from the California State Auctioneers Association.

The prize was a belt buckle, the same way the rodeo guys win a belt buckle. It wasn't really that big a deal. It meant I'd shown up year after year, kept working, and finally drew the right room and the right judges on the right afternoon. Anybody who tells you a bid-calling championship changes a career is selling something.

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Coming home

I spent twenty or so years running every kind of auction the Bay Area could put in front of me. Impounded vehicles in the morning. Estate sales in the afternoon. Black-tie galas at night. I built a thriving auction business and eventually sold it in the lower six figures when I inherited my parents' home in Cañon City, Colorado.

Auctioneering doesn't travel well. The trade is built on local relationships — the tow companies, the estate attorneys, the gala committees, the donor networks. Moving to Colorado would have meant starting almost from scratch in my seventies. So I let the California work stay in California, where it belonged.

I came home to Florence — about four miles from Rockvale, where my grandfather mined coal and my father was born. Four generations of Vendettis in Fremont County. The first one walked off a boat from Italy. The fourth one walked back home.

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Finding the booth

I never met a microphone I didn't love. I had my own microphones from the auction years, and once I'd settled in Colorado I started looking for something to do with them.

I found LibriVox. For anyone unfamiliar with it: LibriVox is a volunteer project that records public-domain books — the great old novels, histories, poetry, and short stories whose copyrights have lapsed — and gives the recordings away free, forever. No money changes hands. Anyone can listen. Anyone can download. It was a good place to learn the trade. I read whatever needed reading, made plenty of mistakes, learned what a finished audiobook actually sounds like, and built up the studio habits that don't come from auctioneering — long-form pacing, breath control over hours, sustained character work, the patience to do a clean take.

That experience opened the door to a contract with Audible, back when audiobooks were still in their infancy and the platform was hungry for narrators who could deliver. For the first time in my life I was being paid to use my voice for hours at a stretch instead of minutes. I haven't stopped since.

There is one twist worth being honest about. The LibriVox recordings are in the public domain by design, which means anyone is free to copy them, repackage them, and sell them — and people do. Some of my LibriVox work has shown up on commercial platforms under other people's labels. More recently, my voice along with the voices of thousands of other LibriVox volunteers has been used as training data for the AI voices you now hear reading articles, narrating ads, and answering phones. I gave that voice freely to LibriVox knowing where it might end up, and I don't regret it. But it's part of the story.

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In the booth

The auctioneering is one of my past lives now. The company I built stayed in California, where it belonged.

These days I narrate audiobooks — classic literature, military history, mystery, fantasy, horror, survival fiction. The voice is the same one that called auctions for two decades; the room is just a lot quieter. The rest of this site is where you'll find the work.

Off the mic, I serve on the board of the Florence Senior Community Center and call bingo on Saturdays at the American Legion.

Four generations in Fremont County. I'm in no hurry to be anywhere else.

— Mike Vendetti Florence, Colorado