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Carpenter calls his last auction

LAKE BENTON — The office echoed from the emptiness that comes with the end of an era.

Auctioneer/Insurance and Real Estate Agent Mike Carpenter is retiring three businesses this fall. A new business was moving into his office building at 101 N. Grant Street in Lake Benton Dec. 1, and he had just one desk left with a box of real estate files setting on top of it Thursday.

“I sold the insurance business and am just finishing up with a couple of real estate clients before going south for the winter. I sold the real estate portion to a salesperson.” Carpenter said Thursday. “I also sold the insurance business. There were a couple of young people interested in the auction business, but that didn’t come to fruition, so I shut that down.”

Carpenter said that since he began to build his businesses in 1980, he has seen various reactions to people selling their estate, antiques or other property and now it’s his turn.

His life will be “different,” he said, “but it’s time.”

Carpenter’s wife, Lynn, will also be retiring in January, he said. So it was working out well. She works with the First Independent Bank System as well as with the auction business.

“It’s been good for me,” the self-made man said. “I started each of the three businesses from scratch. I like writing my own paycheck.”

Carpenter said when he first started out, he had an office in a bank, but then moved to the Kinner & Company LTD tax office on Lake Benton’s main cross street. It used to be a laundromat, he said.

Then he built the new office suite and auction facility at 101 N. Grant St. It has large picture windows and blond woodwork for a bright, cheerful atmosphere.

“Many of the people selling special collections don’t want to hold the auction on their front yard,” Carpenter said. “That’s why we added on the auction room on the west side.”

That auction hall was large enough to drive a small vehicle into it, and sported a garage door on the south end.

The offices also had a smaller room to the north for smaller auctions.

Carpenter had taken a banking class at the Pipestone vocational technical institute when he had graduated high school. It was a two-year course that gave him the basics for clerking in the bank, but the rest he said was simple.

“You just need to get a $1,000 bond and an auctioneer’s license to be an auctioneer,” he said.

In later years, the business was also licensed as a federal arms dealer and a motor vehicle dealer because of the various types and volumes of those items on their auction bills.

As his business grew, he added about six women to the staff and often asked a couple of other auctioneers to help him with auctions.

“We specialized in many types of auction experience,” Carpenter said. “In the 20-plus years we’ve been in business, our knowledgeable staff has auctioned extensively on farm, household, estate, commercial, charitable, real estate, antique and collectable items.”

His auction company generally stayed in a 75-mile radius of Lake Benton, but there were a couple of exceptions. “We’ve been as far as Omaha and also took a trailer out to Chicago.”

Retirement isn’t for everybody, Carpenter said. So, he’s going to retain his auctioneering license in case any other auctioneers call him for assistance. That way he can dabble in something he enjoys without all the paperwork that comes with owning your own business.

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