12 episodes · 4h 49m
Going Once
One farm sale, and what the family was really selling. The hayrack, the chant, and the one item the whole day turned on.
Read the back cover
Garth called farm sales in eastern South Dakota for forty-four years, from nineteen fifty-two to nineteen ninety-six. Colonel, they called him, the old way, and it went on the sale bill that way.
Each episode is one sale. The lines of machinery in the stubble, the church women's lunch wagon, four hundred neighbors standing in a yard in the cold, and the auctioneer up on a hayrack with a chant and a hammer. And in every sale there is one thing — a rocking chair, a box lot, a team of horses, a piano nobody will bid on — that turns out to be what the day was actually about.
He is past eighty-five now and his son calls the sales. He is warm even when the sale is sad, because the neighbors are the story.