Here’s how it goes, Michael R. Corcoran said on a recent morning, summarizing his take on the cycle of life: “It’s doctor, undertaker, lawyer, then me.”
Mr. Corcoran is an auctioneer. Born in 1928, just as Herbert Hoover was elected president, he is both the proprietor of and the force behind Gustave J.S. White Estate Auctioneers in Newport, R.I. If he is not, at 96, the oldest person still actively plying his trade in the area — although that seems likely — he may be the best known and connected.
Death, of course, is not the only event that feeds inventory in his business. There are also debt and divorce. Yet, regardless of the reason, when the time comes for the material evidence of a life to be dispersed, for a great mansion or a Colonial landmark or a Victorian pile or an old farmstead to be emptied out, Mr. Corcoran is often the first call.
“There’s not another one like Mike out there,” said William Vareika, the president of William Vareika Fine Arts, a gallery in Newport on Bellevue Avenue, the city’s grandest thoroughfare. “It’s worth the price of admission just to see Mike conduct a sale,” he added, speaking figuratively (auctions are typically free).
Mr. Vareika was referring to Mr. Corcoran’s habit of whipping through hundreds of lots while engaging crowds with a blend of repartee, potted histories, antiquarian acumen and name-dropping with the subtlety of an anvil being shoved off a roof.
When the action lags at his auctions, Mr. Corcoran can be counted on to enliven them by tossing antique plates in the air (his employees always manage to catch them) or by chiding attendees for sitting on their hands (he calls them “bottom feeders”). Until recently, he demonstrated his disdain for slow bidding by lying on the floor and feigning sleep.
After nine decades on Earth and almost half that time in his current profession, Mr. Corcoran has a vast knowledge of the smallest state and its inhabitants. He draws on it to reel off the provenance of objects high and low, commonplace and pedigreed. Case in point: a mirror in a recent sale that had once furnished Hammersmith Farm, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ childhood summer home in Newport.
“It’s intrinsic value is maybe $500 to $800,” Mr. Corcoran said in an interview before the auction, which took place on a chilly Wednesday morning in late October. “But then you have to add the Kennedy factor.”
The mirror was one item in a diverse array of some 350 lots on offer at the sale, which drew a crowd of roughly 130 people. Some came to watch Mr. Corcoran in action and others, like Ed Hill, 75, a rare metals specialist from Hopkinton, R.I., came hunting for deals.
At a preview before the event, Mr. Hill and other early arrivals prowled around tables weighed down with items like a hefty sterling-silver Tiffany & Company vase; a repoussé silver dresser set from the Baltimore maker Samuel Kirk & Son, and a child’s porringer with the inscription “From Granny, 1896” on its base.
Though most auction houses have long embraced virtual operations, Mr. Corcoran has steadfastly resisted e-commerce: His motto is “always on time, never online.” Operating at the fringes of an ecosystem in which global buyers are a click away from the stuff they seek is a big part of his appeal. That and the fact that bargains abound at his auctions, where it is not rare for lots to sell for sums in the low three figures.
“The internet killed real auctions,” Mr. Hill said. “Mike is one of the last places where you can uncover real finds.”
Mr. Corcoran’s e-commerce allergy is just one of the atypical ways he conducts his business, which is a welcome anachronism in an age of increasing specialization among auction houses.
His auctions are held according to no set schedule and are announced through eccentric advertisements in Antiques and the Arts Weekly, a trade publication. (One ad, for a collection of midcentury modern items, described the offerings as “out there” and possibly “repulsive.”)
Sales are recorded not on laptops but by hand in a ledger kept by Ruthie Corcoran, 63, Mr. Corcoran’s niece. When a phone bid comes in, Mr. Corcoran’s longtime assistant, Paul Murphy, 59, holds up his smartphone and puts the caller on speaker.
“We’re dinosaurs,” Mr. Corcoran said.
Over the years, he has handled material ranging from a lost portrait by the American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase — found in a third-floor bedroom of a house in Providence, R.I., and sold for $234,000 — to a pony consigned by a group of local nuns.
The lots at the recent auction were typically eclectic. They included bamboo étagères and a leather trunk studded with brass nailheads, gilt bronze chandeliers and a framed lithograph of George Washington with one hand tucked into his vest, Chinese cachepots and Spode chamber pots, and Napoleonic busts and antique tea caddies turned into lamps.
Many items were spread across the two-floor building where Mr. Corcoran has his auctions and his “office” — a card table with a typewriter and a landline phone set up near a window. Those that could not fit inside were placed on the lawn and in a nearby barn.
“People tell you there’s nothing left out there,” said Mr. Corcoran, who is ruddy-faced and all but radiates vitality. “Let me tell you, there’s plenty of good stuff around.”
Becoming an auctioneer in the first place, as he explained, was a fluke. Mr. Corcoran was one of five children raised in an Irish Catholic household on Everett Street in Newport. Two of his siblings joined the clergy, he said, and the other two pursued law careers like their father.
“My father was in practice with some members of the town hierarchy,” Mr. Corcoran said, referring to Newport’s moneyed elite. If socially separate from that stratum of local society, he became, through his father’s business connections, intimately familiar with its characters and inner workings.
After graduating from the Portsmouth Abbey School, a private Benedictine high school on the Narragansett Bay in Portsmouth, R.I., Mr. Corcoran attended Syracuse University before graduating from Georgetown University and joining the U.S. Navy.
He served in Okinawa, Japan, for two years and later worked as a high school teacher in Newport, a vocation he abandoned when another career fell into his lap. His uncle used to run Gustave White, which has been operating in Newport since the 1920s, and Mr. Corcoran would moonlight as a runner at auctions.
“One day the auctioneer had a hangover and my uncle, who was the boss, said, ‘You get up there and do it,” Mr. Corcoran recalled. “That was 1967 and I faked it. I still fake it sometimes.”
Not long after, he made an impulse purchase, the kind auctioneers know only too well. For $2,500, Mr. Corcoran acquired an ownership stake in the Newport Tent Company, a party rental business that he ran for several years.
While reflecting on his career trajectory, Mr. Corcoran glanced at his wristwatch and pushed back his chair. It was 10:01 a.m. — a minute after the auction of 350-plus lots was set to begin.
“I’ve got to warn you, we move fast,” Mr. Corcoran said, before briskly making his way to the sales floor. Dressed in a shirt with a sweater vest, khakis and sensible thick-soled shoes, he started to sell items with no fuss and considerable alacrity, moving through lot after lot at a pace of just under two minutes per piece.
The first item to go was a large Persian Heriz carpet for $400. “Nice buy!” Mr. Corcoran said as he took the winning bid.
Next, in quick succession, he sold an enormous set of cranberry-ware dishes ($25), a 19th-century desk lamp with a green glass shade ($20); a pair of gilded sconces ($135); and three Windsor chairs ($300), one of which, Mr. Corcoran jokingly said aloud, came with the customer who happened to be sitting in it at the time.
“Stay there, Charlie,” Mr. Corcoran said. “Charlie comes with the lot.”
So it went for just over three hours, during which Mr. Corcoran only occasionally tapped his assistant to relieve him. When certain items failed to stir much interest, as happens at every auction, Mr. Corcoran wasted no time before shouting “Pass!”
“I like action,” he told the assembled. “More vigor.”
Winning bids came fast for the lithograph of George Washington ($150), a set of English ironstone plates ($400), a library ladder ($100) and a Shaker rocking chair ($300).
It was only after a portrait of an unidentified woman sold for the relatively modest price of $150 that Mr. Corcoran revealed whom the painting depicted. “That’s Mrs. Wiley T. Buchanan,” he said, referring to Ruth Buchanan, a Dow Company heir and former chatelaine of Beaulieu, a mansion built in 1859 that is among Newport’s more storied “cottages.”
As he cycled through the lots, Mr. Corcoran dispensed his brand of offhand wisdom freely, educating attendees on the finer points of Baltimore silver, the rarity of blush coral and the problem with stained glass windows that depicted religious subjects — “the kiss of death,” he said.
He also schooled them on elements of Newport’s social geography that seldom feature in tourist brochures. “That piece came from Liberty Street, a great street in Newport,” Mr. Corcoran said, referring to an ornate settee. “It’s where all the prostitutes used to live.”
The highlight of the day was undoubtedly a sailor’s large framed Valentine artwork with the words “Newport Heart and Home” written in shells. Bids came rapidly in increments of $200 until an antiques dealer from Maine finally claimed it for $4,250.
A 19th-century portrait that Mr. Corcoran said was found inside an ash barrel at a house in East Providence, R.I., generated less excitement. “We should have left it in the ash barrel,” he said after it failed to attract a single bid.
Watching Mr. Corcoran work, it was easy to forget his age and challenging to imagine that he was born around the time of the Great Depression, the discovery of penicillin and the creation of Mickey Mouse.
When asked before the auction about what kept him vital, Mr. Corcoran was quick with an answer: “There was not a time when I didn’t want to get up and go to work,” he said. He paused to gauge his effect and then quoted a line attributed to the American orchestra conductor Arthur Fiedler.
“‘He who rests, rots,’” Mr. Corcoran said.
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