THE TOBACCO AUCTIONEER – AN ICONIC SYMBOL

INTRODUCTION

Tobacco farmers have many memories of the autumn tobacco market – the crowds, the pickup trucks loaded with tobacco, the aroma of the leaf, the enthusiasm when getting a check for a year’s hard work. But the image, more than any other, that calls to mind those glory days is the tobacco auctioneer working his sales magic on the warehouse floor with his unique uninterpretable chant. The auctioneer became the symbol of the industry.  This did not happen quickly.  It took 200 years.

AUCTION HISTORY

From colonial times, tobacco planters faced a challenge getting a decent price for their crop. In the early 1700s, Virginia appointed government inspectors to approve tobacco quality for export. They were forbidden to approve bad tobacco, engage in tobacco trade, or take rewards. Tobacco was packed into hogsheads (large wooden barrels), Once packed into the barrel, buyers couldn’t tell the quality of the leaf. The system was ripe for corruption and bribery. Nevertheless, Virginia towns began to grow around these inspection locations. By 1816, 90% of tobacco brought to market was inspected at the Richmond, Petersburg, or Lynchburg stations.

Buyers and sellers began to see that an auction with open bidding would be superior to government as a middleman - that buyers needed to compete. A new “auction” approach soon spread. While auctions had been around for some time, the first commercial auctioneers appeared in Danville, Virginia, in 1827. With the auction came the “loose-leaf” system. Tobacco was laid out in large “loose leaf” piles. Buyers could examine all the leaf to ensure its quality. By the late 1800s, North Carolina had become the heart of tobacco country and several towns had multiple sales warehouses.

AUCTIONEER AS SUPERSTAR

The auctioneer became indispensable - an American icon, giving rise to the “auctioneer’s chant” - distinctive and individual. It is unintelligible except to tobacco buyers. Chiswell Dabney Langhorne started the chant shortly after the Civil War, supposedly after he heard a Gregorian chant at a Catholic mass.

To a casual observer, the auction was an entertaining spectacle, but it was serious business to the participants. The success or failure of the farmer’s year depended on the price his tobacco brought. It was equally serious to tobacco companies that needed the bright leaf. Buyers apprenticed for years before they were deemed knowledgeable to bid on leaf. They represented giant firms -American, Imperial, Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, Lorillard, Universal Leaf, Dibrell Brothers, Brown & Williamson, and Philip Morris.

On sale day, rows of tobacco in baskets filled the warehouse, each basket holding about two hundred pounds of leaf. The warehouseman led a procession down a row of baskets, followed by the auctioneer who faced several buyers across the row. Quick sales were essential, and the auctioneer set a rapid pace. The buyers had to quickly judge the value per pound, and the auctioneer had to know within a few dollars what a pile of tobacco would bring. U.S. tobacco sales peaked in 1964 at 2.3 billion pounds, 11.5 million individual baskets of tobacco.

The auctioneer was a showman, skilled at reading the buyers and coaxing the highest price from them. As he chanted, the buyers bid silently; each signaled to the auctioneer with his personal style—a wink, a nod, or a raised eyebrow. The auctioneer registered these gestures, and the bidding took about eight seconds per basket.

The last man in the procession, the warehouse clerk, was a recorder and a human calculator. At each pile of tobacco, he noted the sale price and the weight of the basket’s contents and calculated in his head the dollar value of the sale. He wrote these on a ticket and dropped it on the pile. If the farmer didn’t like the price, he could “no sale” his pile of tobacco and take it to another market.

As decades passed, auctioneers developed trademark styles and reputations. The auctioneer and his chant symbolized the tobacco business to the American public, thanks to a single auctioneer, Lee Aubrey “Speed” Riggs. George Washington Hill, head of American Tobacco, heard Riggs at a warehouse in Durham. Hill had been looking for a new way to advertise his Lucky Strike cigarette. He immediately offered Riggs a job delivering his auction chant in a radio ad. In 1938, from a New York studio, “Speed” delivered his first commercial on the popular Saturday night program, Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade.[i] And “the rest was history.” He was the “voice” of the tobacco industry for thirty-three years, until media advertising was outlawed. A poor boy from Goldsboro, North Carolina, “Speed” Riggs honed a unique skill and became world famous.

It is hard to describe what an auctioneer did or how he sounded. This video, A Short Tribute to the Tobacco Auctioneer, shows the auctioneer at work in the warehouse among the rows of tobacco baskets.

The auction system has given way to annual contracts between large tobacco farmers and leaf buyers for a fixed number of pounds at a set price. And the giant warehouses have converted to other uses or are sitting empty, relics of a bygone era.

[i] The Lucky Strike Hit Parade was a popular CBS radio program.  Millions listened every Saturday evening to hear the top songs of the week. The program was on radio and then television from 1935-1959. Many popular singers appeared on the show over the years, but the most famous was Frank Sinatra.  He joined the program in 1943 and sang for several years.

RJR Tobacco ‘alumni’ may like to know that while the radio show was famously sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarette, Frank Sinatra, was a Camel smoker.  His grave is at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, California. At his request, he was buried with a pack of Camel cigarettes, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a zippo lighter.