Collection of a Lifetime up for sale

Just read this in the Plain Dealer...

Collection from a lifetime up for bids
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Carl Matzelle
Plain Dealer Reporter

If there's an auction house in heaven, Larry Southworth is probably bidding from the front row.

Southworth was an auction junkie, said his son Jeff.

Family vacations started with sightseeing and ended with auction hunting, he said.

"We were like the Beverly Hillbillies, driving away with furniture and unique items he wanted for his house, duct-taped to the roof of the car," Jeff said.

Southworth, an insurance salesman and carpenter, died Dec. 29 at age 73, about 25 years after he began to build - but never finished - his 6,000-square-foot dream home in Geauga County. He was outfitting the house with unusual architecture from Cleveland's past.

"Everything else left at the end of the auction, that's what dad bought and built into his home," Jeff said.

That included the lava rocks and clamshells from the popular Kon-Tiki restaurant in the downtown Sheraton Hotel. In four 40-foot trailers, Southworth stored the wall, ceiling and floor decorations until they could be built into the architecture of his home.

Jeff, 43, and his brother, Greg, 44, spent days helping their father take apart the Kon-Tiki's entrance and the decorations after it closed in 1976.

Southworth also bought the wooden walls and sign from the Terrace Room restaurant in Mentor and built them into the first-floor entrance to his home.

"One of my friends proposed to his wife at the Terrace," Jeff said. "I told him if he wants the sign, he has to buy the whole house."

He isn't kidding. The family plans to sell the home sometime next year. Everything built into the house stays, Jeff said.

Southworth slowed down after his wife, Janice, died in an auto accident in 1989, but he continued to fill the home with auction purchases. The collecting made it difficult to finish building the house, Jeff said.

Southworth's friend Barbara Sindelar said: "He wanted his house to be a collection of all the pieces that establish our past. He wanted his Indian one-armed bandit to greet you at the door on the right and the old nickelodeon player piano to greet you on the left."

As a child of the Depression, Southworth kept everything, Jeff said. "And he loved telling stories about his purchases, too."

Such as Southworth's trip to China six years ago. He hired guides who took him to a remote village where he bargained to buy a 12-by-18-foot hand-stitched silk rug for $14,000.

The rug is among 700 items from the Southworth estate that will be auctioned Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 12 and 13. The items include Euclid Beach memorabilia; a horse-drawn sleigh; a Gorgar pinball machine, one of the first talking pinball machines; Italian porcelain; Capodimonte clowns; and a Stafford Nickelodeon player piano.

"This isn't your typical estate sale," auctioneer John Farkas said. "Usually, collectors focus on certain things like furniture, rugs and dolls. But Larry collected everything - and knew what he was doing."

Plain Dealer news researcher Mary Ann Cofta contributed to this story.

Where is this auction? Is there a link to the auctioneer?

Sorry no, but here is a link to the actual story

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/lorain/1131014064122321.xml&coll=2

Whoa - a Gorgar pinball machine? I can't tell you how much money I sank into one of those at the arcade when I was a kid! Probably enough to buy this one...

Nothing from the KON TIKI will be in the auction.if it was not built into the house, I all ready bought it.you can see some of the caved panels ,spear fenceing,haning lanterns, carved Moais in my pics post. TD