Robert Losey, 82, Longtime Local Auctioneer

Robert Losey Sr., a one-time Washington State College football star who ran the popular Renton Auction Barn for more than 40 years, called them as he saw them.

Football plays or 19th-century oak tables - they were all the same to him. He knew their value.

He had fun, and embarrassed his family, calling out opposing teams' coming plays when he was a Seattle Seahawk spectator in later years.

But calling the bids on oak tables paid the rent, fed his family and kept a 30-plus auction staff employed. Every Saturday night, he staged an eight-hour auction, selling about 800 old and new household items.

"The auction has given me 40 years of friendship with the people in this area, and I don't want to throw it away," he once told a reporter. "It's the people that keep me going."

Mr. Losey died Saturday (Aug. 7) of heart failure. He was 82.

The 6-foot-4-inch Seattle native played football at Ballard High School. He graduated in 1933 and attended what is now Washington State University. For his work as a Cougar guard and lineman, he was named a 1935 All-American.

In 1938, Mr. Losey played on a local farm team for the then-Cleveland Rams.

He subsequently did sheet-metal work at Boeing. When Boeing employees went on strike after World War II, he needed temporary work.

Mr. Losey's wife, Winona Losey, who worked as a cashier at 6-month-old Renton Auction, talked him into taking a loan and buying the business for $1,500 in 1947. At first, he ran it from a barn where Valley Medical Center now stands.

He learned auctioneering by doing. He quit his Boeing machinist's job in the early 1950s to devote himself full time to the auction business.

During the business' first nine years, before he moved it to a barn near the old Longacres racetrack, Mr. Losey drove around in a pickup and banged on doors to obtain goods. He looked to courts and bankruptcy lawyers to point out distress sales.

By the time he closed the business' doors in 1990, he was drawing traders from all over the world to consign furniture. The auction had a $1.5 million annual turnover.

The barn was an attraction itself. Built in the 1880s and decorated with old guns, hunting trophies and tools, on good nights it also was packed with hundreds of antique dealers, junk-shop owners, collectors and families.

Mr. Losey knew all the tricks of selling. He spoke from the diaphragm to save his throat and sometimes sold more in 15 minutes than the operation had cost him in 1947.

"Dad was a workaholic," said his son, John Losey of Cle Elum, Kittitas County. "He lived his whole life for his business, his whole life for his kids, his whole life for his family.

"He wasn't one to say he loved us. That was just the way he was raised. But we knew he did."

Mr. Losey had been inducted into the National Auctioneers Association Hall of Fame. He was an active Mason, and belonged to the Renton and Tukwila chambers of commerce and the Tukwila Lions Club.

Also surviving are his children Robert Losey Jr. of Kent and Roberta Abhold of Renton; his brother, James Losey Jr. of Florida; three grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife of 58 years, Winona, and by his granddaughter, Teresa Anne.

Services have been held.

Carole Beers' phone-message number is 206-464-2391. Her e-mail address is cbeers@seattletimes.com