Bruce Brock wonders where his inner tough-guy has gone, although it's hard to image he ever really had one.
The international champion auctioneer from Le Mars, Iowa, can, using only his voice and charm from across a room, pry open a bidder's wallet and coax out, say, $250,000 for a painting; he can sell off a big lot of used cars at a clip of one every 15 or 20 seconds; he can chant a farmer into raising his bid higher than planned for some cattle or a piece of land.
Nowadays, Brock, 54, owner of Brock Auction Co. in Le Mars, gets choked up watching a mini-van commercial. You know the one where the dad is all smiley and contentedly driving a van full of little boys dressed in their football uniforms? That one gets to him.
And he darn near tears up introducing you to Teri, his wife of 32 years - "She's the one who deserves the congratulations," he says - or telling you about his kids, Libby, a junior at Morningside College, and Bobby, a second-year law student at Drake University.
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Maybe it was the killer chemicals that took away the tough guy, drip-dripping from seven bottles, all hanging overhead at the same time as Brock lay in the Mayo Clinic last year. He was a guinea pig for a stem cell transplant therapy, one of just 22 people in the whole country chosen to try their luck at the hoped-for lymphoma cure.
The chemo, along with a radioactive search-and-destroy substance injected afterward, killed off all his white blood cells and all his bone marrow, along with the cancer cells that were killing him.
"They take your body down to nothing with knock-your-socks-off chemo," Brock says. "For three weeks you have no resistance to anything."
A week after the seven bottles emptied into him, doctors filtered what was left of his blood through a machine, hoping to collect platelets. They gave him a week to produce 5 million. "The first day I collected 4.7 million. The second day I gathered 4.5 million," Brock beams. Some people in the study couldn't make more than a relative few.
"The seventh day they transplant new stem cells into your body. In five or six weeks, your body will make new bone marrow," he says. "Through this whole thing, God just carried me in his hand."
He adds, "This has been a blessing, not a burden. Teri never left me. We rented an apartment up there in Rochester. Actually, it was a wonderful experience, especially to come out of it cured. I was in awe the whole time. Honestly, I don't remember feeling really bad. I did get sick once or twice. I did lose all my hair. I said I looked like ET, grown up. Now I hope my mission will be to help others, give them hope."
Brock laughs about having to get a whole new set of childhood shots this summer; his youthful immunizations were filtered out along with the old stem cells.
There are other new things in his life, already.
"We used to say, 'Some day we'll do this, do that.' Now we do it, if we can. I can't afford to put anything off. 'Gee, I wish I would have' is not going to be in my vocabulary anymore. It's been life-changing. I wonder where the tough Bruce Brock went."
Tough or not, Brock is anything but slowed by his ordeal.
Celebrities abound in Brock's life
Brock, who has offices or franchises in Le Mars, Kingsley, Danbury, Ida Grove-Battle Creek, Webb and Pomeroy, Iowa, works hard.
The family firm handles auctions of land, implements, estates and livestock in addition to autos and other everyday items. That's the bread-and-butter. But a few times a year, Brock flies off to serve as auctioneer at glamorous, celebrity-packed charity auctions. That's the icing.
At those, he is the star of the show, center stage at a gathering of household names from Hollywood, Washington, pro sports and music. One of Brock's regular jobs is auctioneering for a major Safari Club International event held in Reno, Nev., each year.
"One year they sold an African diamond," Brock recalls. "They brought in dancers and drummers from Africa. They carried this little travois on their shoulders and a princess riding on it was carrying the diamond."
(A little different from the Journal's annual Little Yellow Dog auction, which Brock also has performed for the past eight years, although that event is not without its own pageantry. He is also the regular auctioneer for the annual Catholic Charities auction in Sioux City.)
For the last nine years Brock has also been the auctioneer for the world's largest original Western art auction, a fund-raising event for the Charles Russell Museum of Western Art in Great Falls, Mont. The three-day event is filled with entertainment, too, and draws 2,000 people looking to buy original sculptures, paintings and sketches.
It's a lot different from a used car auction. "You're talking about people buying a painting for $250,000 or $1 million," Brock says. "You have to give them time to think. You don't sell that in15 seconds.
"We do that with a lot of charity auctions, make it entertaining and light-hearted. Our goal is to maximize the revenue for those boards because a lot of times that's their annual income."
Brock has chatted backstage and at cocktail parties with the likes of Tanya Tucker, Tim McGraw, Lou Brock, Lynn Swann, Louise Mandrell, Tony Oliva, retired Army Lt. Col. Oliver North, former Secretary of State James Baker, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf and former President George H.W. Bush, as well as Tommy Thompson, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services, and members of the Oak Ridge Boys and Sawyer Brown, to name a few.
And Brock, who would likely also be a world champion storyteller if he entered such competitions, has a tale about each one. Brock said when he was fighting lymphoma many of the entertainers offered him use of their personal planes if he needed to fly somewhere.
Tommy Thompson may have impressed him the most. It was early in September 2001 when the two met at an auction in which Thompson was involved. "He came over and said, 'If you need anything you call my office and we'll get you the best.' I thought that's really nice, but it's a lot of talk." Other people from Washington had been equally friendly to Brock at auctions, and then by the cocktail party the same night, forget they'd met him. Not Thompson.
"A few days after I met him, it was Sept. 11 and ka-boom. You know what that did. Then - it was so cool - here comes this letter dated Sept. 13, just reinforcing what he'd said. I had it framed."
For the record, Thompson had nothing to do with Brock's participation in the stem cell experiment.
And, Brock remembers Schwartzkopf raving about what a great American Brock was after spotting the U.S. flag motif in his necktie. The former president, however, just left after a chat. "You getting ready to start the auction, Bruce?" Bush asked. When Brock said he was, Bush replied, "Well, I'd better get out of here - before you sell me something."
Auctioneers made, not born
Bruce Brock says most world champion auctioneers grow up in the business or fall in love with the chant the first time they hear it. Not him.
"I did it strictly for business reasons, then fell in love with it," he says.
Brock grew up in the real estate business in Battle Creek, Iowa. His family has sold properties since 1919. In 1972, he joined his father and grandfather in the firm.
"They decided the auction method should be part of our sales portfolio," he recalls. "A lot of land was selling at auction and it was selling quite a bit higher than normal listings. His grandfather was almost 80 and his father wasn't up for learning such a complex skill in middle age. Brock was fresh out of Black Hills State at Spearfish, S.D. They said, "OK, Bruce, it's gonna be you."
Brock attended the Worldwide College of Auctioneering in Mason City, Iowa. The livestock auctioneering drew him in. Then came the art, cars and high-profile celebrity auctions. Each opened doors he'd never imagined.
Twenty-two years after auctioneering school, Brock won the 1994 World Championship of the Livestock Market Association, in Atchison, Kan., and the International Championship, in Calgary, Canada. He was the first person to win both titles and the first to hold them both at once.
Each contest is highly competitive. In the World Championship, just 30 auctioneers are selected from a large pool of first-round tapes to compete in person. And the International Championship likewise draws the top auctioneers from much of the English-speaking world: Australia, New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Canada and the United States.
Brock's wins didn't come by raw talent. He studied and practiced six to eight hours each day. He built a sound studio next to his office. "I had microphones. I would read. I would sell. I would practice. Then I'd come home and watch tapes of people I liked."
It drove his family nuts. "When our kids were bad, I'd say, you guys settle down and be good or we're gonna make you watch auction tapes," he remembers, grinning. "They'd settle down."
Brock isn't resting on his laurels or basking in the afterglow of celebrity auctions, however.
Ten years ago the Brocks moved the business to Le Mars to be more centrally located. And two years ago they started working with a firm in Boston to start a new company, Auction Realty of America, which they plan to franchise. Internationally.
