The dying strains of a song of the South

As with many Southern traditions, the rapid-fire refrain of the tobacco auctioneer may soon be just a memory.

Go to photo gallery and audio Auctioneer Bob Cage encourages a bid from buyer Michael Bailey at the Virginia-Carolina Warehouse. These days, auctioneers are mostly out of a job. Cigarette companies insist on computers.. [Times photos: Douglas R. Clifford]

CLARKSVILLE, Va. - The bales of golden, dried tobacco began arriving before the sun had drawn the dew from the surrounding fields, brought by old pickups that rattled into the gravel lot of the Virginia-Carolina Warehouse. It was as hopeful a start to the day as one could wish, considering.

By 9 a.m., when the sale was to start, there were just two rows of waist-high piles of tobacco inside, a puny sum against the 2-acre warehouse floor. Buyers from only three tobacco companies clustered around auctioneer Bob Cage as he took his place at the Sale Starts Here sign.

"Are you ready, men?" Cage asked.

The warehouse owner barked yessir, and called out the starting bid per pound for the first pile of tobacco, low-grade stuff from the lower stalk. "Dollar-sixty. Them's good primings."

Cage beckoned with his right hand, suggesting the buyers follow both in step and in bid, then let go with his ancient song.

"Daaah-laah SIX-teeee. GOL-den leaf," Cage began, and he set off down the row, entreating the buyers to pay a penny or two more for every pound in every pile.

Through the last tumultuous century of the U.S. tobacco industry, the lone comforting constant in the tobacco regions of the Southeast has been the auction, the weekly minifestivals where tobacco companies bid for farmers' crops.

Yet with every bid this morning, the auctioneer, the buyers and the farmers who watched knew they were taking part in a dying ritual.

Almost exclusively now, companies like R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and Universal Leaf Tobacco Co. buy directly from growers on contract, driving warehouses out of business. Meanwhile, a lawsuit accusing the buyers of price fixing at auction has forced the few remaining warehouses to replace auctioneers with computers.

In every tobacco town from Danville, Va., to Wilson, N.C., to Madison, Fla., the auctioneer has gone the way of other Southern commercial traditions, bits of rural fiber swept aside by an antiseptic corporate America: Closing shop after lunch on Wednesday, ostensibly for midweek evening church services. Stopping the textile looms for vacation during the week of Fourth of July. Mill town baseball teams that nurtured the likes of Shoeless Joe Jackson.

In every tobacco town, that is, but one: Clarksville, just over the North Carolina line. The Virginia-Carolina is the lone warehouse where the auctioneer still sings his song, agricultural experts and warehousemen across the South say, thanks simply to the owner's determination to keep the tradition alive.

"Get around get around get around," Cage sang as he reached the end of the first row and made the turn to start the second, the numbers tumbling from his lips far faster than a grandfather clock ticks off seconds, but in a meter just as mesmerizing.

Buyers bid with a slight hand motion, or even just a look.

Each 150-pound pile of tobacco goes faster than you can read this sentence; the tobacco auction is by far the fastest of all auctions, and requires the quickest tongue. Tobacco auctioneers made real money long ago, and folks once talked of young up-and-comers the way sports fans speak of emerging baseball stars like Rocco Baldelli.

"I got 80, can you one, can you one, can you one, 80 EX-ee," Cage called, indicating that Export had bought the bail for $1.80 per pound. The line took him less than three seconds. "Eight eight eighty dollars, and the five ... eighty-three, EX-port... One six oh, can you 58 to go, 57 in the CO-op.

"Fifty-seven, 65, 60, 57 in the Co-Op. Sixty-five, 58 in the BAIL-lee. Sixty-five, 65 in the EX-eee. Six-oh-six, sixty-eight to go, seven in the CO-op... Eighty eighty thank you now 80 dollars and a one one one one one one one - 80 dollars in the EX-port."

Someone whooped, and the sale was over. With just 25,000 pounds on the floor, it took just seven minutes, 30 seconds. A year or two ago, an average sale here would have drawn six buyers, and lasted a couple of hours, and moved hundreds of thousands of pounds of tobacco.

Cage, a slim, fit-looking competitive tennis player with a thick shock of silver hair, was hardly winded, and not a little disgusted.

"That's it, man," he said as he left. "The only damn sale in the United States."

Virginia's Tobacco Road begins in Danville and runs east with the Dan River, its muddy, swirling waters as red as the land it drains. It ends about 110 miles later near Lawrenceville, where the rolling Piedmont fades into the flat, loamy Tidewater and the orderly rows of chest-high tobacco yield to weedy tangles of peanuts and snowy patches of cotton.

This is called the Old Belt, and tobacco has been the economic engine here since colonial times. Declines in smoking and increased foreign competition have cut the amount of tobacco U.S. farmers can grow by half since 1997, and sale prices haven't increased significantly in a decade. Many small growers have quit, and many more now farm part time. The region's median household income is only $30,000, $16,000 lower than the state average.

But tobacco is still the top cash crop, grossing as much as $5,000 per acre.

While farmers might keep just a dollar of every $10 they gross, most of the rest will be spent locally, at equipment dealers, farm stores, merchants and the like. So as much of the nation has righteously chased smoking into the realm of social blight, smokers here need not worry about sneaking a drag in a windy doorway.

Most of the eateries don't bother with smoking sections; it's all smoking. Some people still argue tobacco may not cause cancer.

Nancie Motley, owner of Motley Warehouse, the last of six Danville warehouses still open, recalled an insurance inspector who found her cavernous warehouse in excellent shape, except for the absence of "No Smoking" signs on the floor. She laughed out loud.

Three ashtrays sit within a 2-foot radius in her office. A sign declares a "workfree smokeplace."

"I told him that if I put up "No Smoking' signs out there, he wouldn't have to worry about selling me insurance, because I wouldn't have any customers."

The auction system began 150 years ago in Danville. By the end of the 19th century, it was ingrained as a Southern political and social event, especially opening day.

In modern times, auction season has run from early August to late October, depending on weather. Opening day in each town drew hundreds of people, including state and local politicians and candidates for the fall elections.

Warehouse owners were among the most influential men in town. They took 2.5 percent of sales, so the more growers who sold with them, the better. Owners worked hard to recruit them, rambling the back roads of Virginia and North Carolina, each promising the growers he could get him the best prices come fall.

A big part of that was promising the best auctioneer.

A good auctioneer worked the buyers trailing him in the warehouse, ginning up the price and pushing for more. He changed his cadence to fit the mood, and changed the speed to control the sale. He'd come up with nicknames for the buyers: Ex-ee for Export, "Lawd-lawd" for Lorillard.

When R.J. Reynolds bought a pile, the auctioneer might call, "I'd walk a mile," from the old Camel cigarette slogan. If RJR bought the next pile as well, he might say, "I'd walk two."

A good auctioneer was entertainment.

"If we could get the buyers - all of them being professionals - if we could get them to an excited state, they would be bidding, trying to beat the other one into certain price holes," said Page S. Roberts, 72, of Clarksville, who won RJR's world tobacco auctioneer contest in 1982. He retired four years ago.

The auctioneer's championship, held through the 1980s at Auctioneer's Park in Danville, brought a $10,000 prize, but the real money came from endorsements for RJR. After Cage won in 1984, he demonstrated the auction on Wall Street and at the Statue of Liberty, on television and at festivals.

Cage, who calls himself "on the green side of 80," began auctioneering at age 27, following a stint in the Marines and a bit of rambling. He learned it after his mother got remarried to an warehouseman.

Typically, a young auctioneer would study under a veteran for a year or two, then start working small markets. As he earned a reputation, he would get hired in larger markets, like Danville, where he could command a cut as high as 6 percent of sales. Most traveled a circuit, starting in the southernmost zones for flue-cured tobacco - the main ingredient in cigarettes - and working north through season's end. Many moved on to Kentucky when the burley tobacco - often used for pipes - markets opened in November.

A good auctioneer could earn $75,000, working four days a week for less than half the year. But it was physically and mentally hard, requiring the ability to catch the slightest sign from buyers while judging the value of the tobacco and projecting his voice, usually for hours.

What has replaced the old auction requires little of that skill, and holds none of the charm.

This year, an estimated 80 percent of flue-cured tobacco grown in the Southeast will be sold directly to buyers under contract, while just 20 percent will be sold at auction. Towns that once had a handful of warehouses now have one, or none. Florida, which once had several between Lake City and Madison, hasn't a single one left.

Meanwhile, most tobacco companies settled a class-action lawsuit filed by growers that accused them of fixing prices at auction by instructing their buyers to stop bidding at predetermined amounts.

While they admitted no wrongdoing, the companies this summer pushed the warehouses to replace the auctioneer with a hand-held computer. You can see the new way in action at the Exchange Warehouse in South Hill, 20 miles east of Clarksville, and no one there seems happy about it.

The Exchange is one of the region's largest and, at 104, its oldest warehouse. On a recent sale day, bundles of tobacco covered the maplewood floor, worn as smooth and hard as marble. But there was no auctioneer's song, or grunts from buyers, or cajoling from growers watching from the wings.

Instead, an auctioneer, as he's called, keyed the starting price of each pile into what looked like a large Palm Pilot. Each buyer had one, too. The starting price dropped cent by cent until a buyer hit the buy button with a stylus, stopping the sale. The auctioneer called out the sale price and buyer, then moved to the next pile.

It is called a modified Dutch clock. It is plodding. And as many growers glumly noted, the price only goes down.

"I don't understand it," said Page Gardner, 45, a grower from Roanoke Rapids, N.C., after selling at the Exchange. "I thought an auction meant it goes up. When you go buy a tractor at auction, you don't start at $1,000 and go down."

That morning, the Exchange sold eight times as much tobacco as the Virginia-Carolina sold in Clarksville earlier. As the buyers there trailed Cage up and down the meager two rows, a pattern had quickly emerged:

The bidders never battled for a bale. The man buying for Universal Leaf Tobacco Co. never even bid. Brown & Williamson, also known as Export, bought a few hundred pounds, but the warehouse owner's own tobacco company, Bailey's Brand, bought nearly half.

The rest was bought by the Flue-Cured Tobacco Cooperative Stabilization Corp., or the Co-Op, a quasigovernmental, farmer-funded group. It buys tobacco that fails to bring a federally determined low, then sells it later, usually cheap.

Philip Morris announced this summer it wouldn't bother with auctions, man or machine. RJR is out, too. Dimon Inc. would purchase piles of similar tobacco later at The Exchange in South Hill, but the company has refused to participate in an auction called by a man. Even Bailey's Brands buys most of its tobacco on contract, from growers whose leaf the owner especially likes.

The only reason a traditional auction exists at all is warehouse owner Mack Bailey. He just loves it. Cage is scheduled to sell for him through October, but Bailey says he may not do it again next year. "I'm just holding on to something I know is dead."

Not everyone is sentimental. Some growers prefer the stability of a contract, even though the company may reject any tobacco for any reason. More important, companies are offering 5 to 15 cents more per pound for tobacco on contract.

Later this month in nearby South Boston, a new arts center will open in the Prizery, a former R.J. Reynolds plant where tobacco was packed a half ton to a barrel, then rolled to the railroad tracks for shipment to Winston-Salem.

In the foyer, an exhibit documents what residents here once knew as wholly as they know their own names: photographs and text explaining the growing, curing and selling of tobacco, including auctions during their heyday, the smart-dressed buyers following the auctioneer down rows of prime leaf.

It features old program covers from the National Tobacco Festival, held in South Boston throughout the 1930s. One shows "sun-suited lasses" in short dresses made from tobacco leaves. Another has women holding a giant corn cob pipe in a tobacco field.

In 1941, the year before the festival moved to Richmond, 165,000 people attended. Every one of South Boston's 5,517 residents was enlisted as a member of the welcoming committee.

Cage has been asked to attend the grand opening of the Prizery, to demonstrate the auctioneer's song. The museum staff plans to film him, then file the tape in its archive.

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