It must have taken years to accumulate. Collectible plates commemorating the Russo-Japanese
War. A grandfather clock. Old comic books. Baseball cards. A gumball
machine from the 1920s. Wooden chests. Tonka trucks. A Mickey Mouse Club
beanie. Rare books. Antique furniture. World War II artifacts.
Depression-era baby strollers. Vintage photographs. Old dolls with price
tags still attached. Enough musical instruments to supply an entire band. “It’s a pretty awesome collection,”
says Sharon Durbin, the new executive director of Land of Lincoln Goodwill
Industries. All this and more was hidden above Goodwill’s
thrift store on North 10th Street. The locked compartment was stuffed floor
to ceiling when employees pried off a padlock and opened it a few months
ago. No one knows how long the stuff had been there. Call it the secret vault of Larry Hupp, the former
Goodwill director who was forced to resign last fall by federal
prosecutors, who threatened him with criminal charges [see Bruce Rushton,
“Ill will,” April 27]. “Under the previous
administration, there were areas no one was allowed into,” Durbin
says. “It’s kind of a bizarre situation.” Normally, such high-end items would be sold at
Goodwill stores as they are donated. But there are so many antiques and
other valuable items on hand now that Goodwill has hired an auctioneer to
sell everything on Saturday, June 3. The sale will be held at Goodwill
headquarters, on North 10th. Ron Williams, auctioneer with the Williams Auction
Co., says he normally advertises on 8 1/2-by-11-inch sheets of standard
office paper. For this sale, he used an extra-large legal-sized flier to
list dozens of the items. It will take as long as four hours to auction
everything, he says. He says he never makes predictions about what an
auction will net, but the stars of the show will likely be furniture and
pottery made in Roseville, Ohio. Prized by collectors, a single Roseville
vase can fetch more than $1,000. “I only have two pieces, but
they’ll bring good money,” he says. “They’re
beautiful, and they’re numbered. There’s not one flea bite on
them. I don’t know how they survived all that banging around up
there.” Goodwill can certainly use the money. James Verpoten,
the former interim director summoned from national headquarters to clean up
after Hupp, has said that the agency lost about $30,000 in fiscal year
2005. Durbin took over from Verpoten last week. Former Goodwill employees suspect that the stuff may
have been accumulating at least since 1997, when Hupp and his top
assistant, Debra Neece (who also resigned rather than face criminal
charges), ordered a worker to buy things from secondhand stores to sell in
a silent-auction fundraiser. Workers were puzzled because they’d seen
silverware, artwork and other items they believed could have been auctioned
to raise money for the disabled. Neither Hupp, who worked at Goodwill for
more than a quarter-century, nor Neece could be reached for comment. They
are opening a for-profit thrift store near the intersection of Wabash and
Chatham and will remain under the supervision of federal probation officers
until next year. Durbin would prefer to talk about the future rather
than the past. “We’re just taking advantage of the
treasures we found to help our organization,” she says.
“We’re excited about it.” In the future, Durbin hopes to establish a Web site to
sell high-quality donated goods so that potential buyers don’t have
to visit stores. Besides offering convenience, such a Web site could boost
prices. A national online-auction site, Shopgoodwill.com, already brings
top dollar for goods, raking in more than $15 million since its 1999
startup, with a portion of the proceeds going to a California Goodwill
chapter that runs the site. “We have a white canvas right now that
we’re working with,” Durbin says.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2006.
