LATE AUCTIONEER’S LEGACY WILL LIVE ON IN NEW STAMPEDE GALLERY
“I used to go where Archie was selling. I used to get the roof of my mouth sunburnt just watching him.”
In 1989, Vern Scown shared with a Herald writer his early days as an aspiring auctioneer 40 years earlier. The auctioneer he spoke of, Archie Boyce, is well known even today thanks to his name adorning the theatre in Stampede Park where a variety of events, including the annual Rangeland Derby tarp auction, take place.
Few, though, are familiar with the name Vern Scown, although, in his heyday as an auctioneer more than 60 years ago, his musical tenor echoed through a corral filled with cattle, a handful of salesmen chasing them to the scales for weighing.
“He was head auctioneer in Calgary for 21 years,” says Diane Hunter, a former Calgary city councillor and the eldest of Scown’s four children, as she points to a circa 1960s yellowed newspaper that hails him as one of the top auctioneers in Alberta. “He never missed a day of work, he just loved it.”
Soon, Scown’s name and story will become known to a new generation of Calgarians thanks to his daughter and her husband, former oilman Doug Hunter, who, through their Hunter Family Foundation, have generously donated to institutions ranging from the University of Calgary to the Calgary Counselling Centre.
The couple’s $1.5-million donation to the Calgary Stampede will go to the future development of the SAM Centre to feature the Vern Scown Gallery, an overdue recognition not only of Scown but other Alberta entrepreneurs of yesteryear. The SAM Centre was kick-started in 2013 with a $15-million donation to the Calgary Stampede Foundation by Calgary philanthropist Don Taylor.
When completed, the centre — named for Taylor’s late father Sam — will become the centrepiece of the Stampede’s youth campus, housing the organization’s heritage archive collections and providing permanent and temporary galleries that focus on western heritage and southern Alberta history.
While live auctions and auctioneers can be traced back as far as the ancient Greeks, the bartering and trading of goods with the auctioneer at centre stage is something of a lost art today, as most auctions are now conducted online.
In southern Alberta during the Dirty ’30s, though, it was very much a going concern.
“Farms were being sold due to the tough times,” says Diane. “Farm sales were the only way people could get at least some value out of their assets.”
Although he was the third generation of a farming family — his grandfather Sam Scown had come up from Arkansas in 1902 with his wife and 10 kids to homestead near Carstairs — Vern Scown soon realized this would not be his destiny.
“He didn’t own his own land, so he knew he wasn’t going to make his dreams come true on the farm,” says Diane. A couple of years after marrying Vivienne King and a year after Diane’s birth, he made a decision to try his hand at auctioneering.
“He went anytime there was a sale with Archie Boyce as the auctioneer,” she says of the man her dad studied closely to learn the art. “Archie started the Alberta Auctioneers Association and encouraged dad to join.”
Scown first worked at farm sales before moving into livestock, a much more steady business. In 1953, he got on as a spare auctioneer at the Calgary Stockyards. “He was never a spare, there was too much work,” says Diane. Her father revelled in his work at the third-largest terminal livestock market ( by volume) in Canada, serving a vast region from the Bow River down to the U.S. border.
“We’d start at 8 a.m., sharp, and still be selling after midnight,” Scown told the Herald in 1989. He built up his powerful auctioneering voice, he said, “the way a blacksmith builds his arms pounding an anvil.”
The morning after addressing hundreds of people, he said, “I couldn’t even ask my wife for a cup of coffee.”
In addition to his usual gig in the city, Scown would venture to Brooks every second Saturday to work at its cattle auction.
“We had to get married on a Friday so he could go to Brooks the next day,” says Doug, who married his junior high school sweetheart in 1961.
Scown was the quintessential auctioneer, able to project his voice in the days before microphones helped to amplify what is known as the auctioneer’s chant.
That was just one of his many skills, says his son-in-law.
“We were told he was the best,” says Doug. “Animals would come in and he could tell within pennies per pound what they would go for.”
When the Calgary Livestock Market and Stockyards closed in 1989, Scown continued in his beloved profession, auctioneering at car sales in Okotoks and still making trips out to Brooks for the cattle sales.
In 1991, Scown went to the doctor’s for a checkup and the sprightly 72-year-old got a clean bill of health.
“He went home and that evening, he had an aortic aneurysm and was dead instantly,” says Diane.
“It turned out his father died of the same thing.”
While Scown left his loved ones nearly three decades ago, those loved ones are now ensuring that his story and his auctioneering legacy will live on.
“Auctioneers are a huge part of the western heritage,” says Doug.
Or, as his father-in-law once proudly said of his profession, “It’s a piece of history … it was my life.”