It took a while until Bill Henke found his niche, but after he did, his life really started to speed up figuratively and literally.
You see Henke is an auctioneer, who turned his knowledge of business, and love of people and the gift of the gab into a more than 40-year career.
That is what the 82-year-old Bloomsbury native told the Barrhead Leader on his way to Drayton Valley to conduct another auction, before returning home to B.C.’s lower mainland.
In February, the Alberta Auctioneer’s Association (ACA) at a ceremony in Leduc presented Henke with its Distinguished Service Award, something he said wouldn’t have happened if he had not grown up in the Barrhead area.
“I have always been a bit of a character, and I bring my personality into my sales. I think that is why I have been as successful as I have been,” he said.
However, if someone would have told Henke in his youth that he would end up as an auctioneer he wouldn’t have believed him.
“I was one of nine children and I grew up on the farm. Actually, I was born on the farm, a midwife delivered me,” he said.
Like many people that grew up on farms in the 1930s and 40s, Henke’s family did not have a lot of money, so he was always looking for ways to earn money.
One of the ways he did this was by riding up and down county roads every spring looking for discarded beer bottles as soon as the snow started to melt.
“But you didn’t want the snow to melt completely because it made them easier to spot,” he said.
When he got older, Henke often worked as a farm hand when he wasn’t in school and when he was about 17 he took a year off to work as a jug hustler for an oil exploration company in the Swan Hills area.
“When companies are searching for oil they are looking for lakes and pools underneath the ground and one of the ways they do that is by planting explosives into the ground, setting them off and reading the seismic results,” he said, adding a jug hustler’s job was to layout cables that had large jugs or geophones which would record and convert the vibrations in the ground after the explosives were set off into volts.
Although Henke said it didn’t pay very well he earned enough to give to his father so he could buy seed for the coming year and have a bit of pocket money.
In the summers Henke worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway starting as a dishwasher in the dining car eventually moving through the ranks to become second waiter where he was responsible for 14 tables.
“You had to be a bit of an athlete. The dining cars on trains aren’t very wide and when you are going through the Rocky Mountains going this way and that way you have to handle a tray,” he said, attributing his dexterity to being a boxer.
Starting from when he was 12-years-old Henke trained at Barrhead Boxing Club.
“Boxing was really big in Alberta back then, and Barrhead had quite a reputation for turning out good boxers,” he said. “Promoters would bring fighters in from places like Vancouver and Winnipeg. That is how good our boxers were.”
It was also where he earned his nickname “Wild or Buzzsaw Bill Henke.”
“A lot of people think it is because of my style as an auctioneer, but really it comes from when I was a boxer and I would just come out of the corner, win or lose, and just go after my opponent.”
It was also by working on the trains that Henke became a lifelong Saskatchewan Roughrider supporter.
At that time, in the 1960s, CFL teams traveled to the majority of their games by train and Henke was asked if he would be willing to work on their dining car.
Henke made quite an impression on the Roughriders organization so much so that eight years later when he was living in Vancouver he was asked to be the team’s water boy for the 1966 Grey Cup game in the city.
After graduating from what was J.R. Harris high school in Barrhead, moved to Edmonton where he took a variety of odd jobs, but nothing really kept his interest so after about three years Henke decided to move to Vancouver, in large part to follow his girlfriend, who would later become his wife, who took a job with Canadian Pacific Airlines in that city.
Through an old boxing acquaintance, Henke got a job with a dry cleaner. His job was to pick up and return clothes.
“I was making decent money, but I just wasn’t my cup of tea, so I ended up taking a job with a financial collections agency,” he said, adding eventually he started his own business and started work as a bailiff repossessing items. “It can get scary, people threatening you with a knife or a gun.”
Once again Henke decided to make a change and went to the Western College of Auctioneering in Billings, Mont.
“I just loved it,” he said. “Here I was 42-years-old and on the fourth day my instructor had to make me take a day off because I was working so hard,” he said.
Within two years of graduating Henke secured the contract as the auctioneer for the City of Vancouver, its police force as well as Canada Customs.
As for what Henke credits his success in the business, he said there are multiple factors, being prepared, knowing your items, and keeping your sales entertaining.
“They never know what I’m going to do, but more importantly I’m a people person and I care what type of experience everyone who attends one of my sales have,” he said.
Currently, Henke is semi-retired preferring to only do single site or charity auctions as well as sharing his knowledge by writing about auctioneering.
“I have been blessed to be a farm boy from Bloomsbury, Alberta and to be involved with the Auction Association of Alberta and to be recognized by them it is quite an honour,” he said.
