Beauty in a ‘Big Glass Glob’ : Camp’s Auction Joke Turned Out Funnier Than Anyone Hoped

The bird cages always sell like crazy. So do the hay and the firewood.

But the folks who run the Kidder Creek Orchard Christian Youth Camp in Siskiyou County knew they would have real trouble unloading the “big glass glob” on the steel pedestal at their annual fund-raising auction. It looked, said one camp worker, “like a big chunk of glass somebody found at the dump.”

So they pulled out all the stops. They billed it as a gag gift, a conversation piece the highest bidder could keep for a year, like the Super Bowl trophy, before returning it to be re-auctioned. They even had the local woman who does a Minnie Pearl impersonation put on her little spiel to warm up the crowd.

And by golly, it worked. By $1 and $5 increments, they got the bidding up to an astounding $45, and gaveled it sold.

But the “hunk of glass,” the Coke-bottle green bust of a woman, is the signed work of Suzanne Pascal, a Beverly Hills sculptor whose oeuvres have sold from $9,000 to $250,000; one of her works was the wedding gift from Dr. Armand Hammer to Diana, the Princess of Wales.

“None of us had a ghost of an idea what we had,” explained Norm Malmberg, secretary-treasurer for the interdenominational camp, whose latest newsletter carries the story under the headline: “Ugly Duckling: Art Holds Surprises in Wake of Auction.”

“We didn’t know,” murmured camp executive director Al Davidson. “No one saw there was any value with it--just a chunk of glass on a pedestal, just a conversation piece for the home. It’s like somebody got a Rembrandt painting and didn’t know about Rembrandt.”

The treasure is now “in a safe place,” Malmberg said, it having been given back to the camp once its true value was ascertained. “I don’t want this thing anywhere near my house,” Malmberg said the temporary owner had declared.

Now Malmberg wants to find another buyer, at the piece’s true market value, to pay off some pressing bills. “This work to us is only a gift that we might convert to cash assets to plunge back into the ministries.”

Malmberg and his wife, Pam, had picked up the sculpture from the donor, local painter Ethel Benight, along with some of Benight’s own paintings, just three days before the September auction--the major fund-raising event for the summer camp, which operates entirely on donations and camp tuition.

He and his wife “got in the car and looked at each other, and kind of laughed--’Who’s gonna want this old piece?’ ”

Even Benight, who had been given the work years earlier by a now-dead friend, did not know its worth, but “she was delighted and she was pleased it was working out this way,” Malmberg said.

When they cleaned up the piece a bit, Malmberg saw the chiseled signature, “Pascal ‘66,” but the name meant nothing to him, nor to the man who was coaxed into buying it three days later.

Finally, it was a cowboy, a horse-wrangler up at the camp, who was flipping through a magazine a few weeks after the auction and saw a story about Pascal and her work.

“Wasn’t that the name on that sculpture we had?” he asked Davidson.

It took Malmberg nearly two months, but he tracked down Pascal, who looked at a photo and “knew it was mine.”

And the celebrated glass sculptor said Friday that she is delighted that the work surfaced--and delighted at who found it.

“I thought it was deliciously dear--why would they know about a Pascal? I’m not known to the man in the street, only to major collectors . . . and my work doesn’t exist in reproductions. I just thought it was wonderful--it tickled me so much that it could happen.”

Also Hopeful

And she is just as hopeful as Malmberg that some collectors might be interested in acquiring the 20-year-old piece and helping out the camp to the tune of something more than $45.

Pam Malmberg--who thought up the rotating trophy idea as “a great gag gift,” like the camp’s antique harvester, auctioned off each year for $50 to $75--had attached a little brass plaque to the statue’s steel base: “The Master’s Touch Benefit Auction, Kidder Creek Orchard Camp.”

They call it The Master’s Touch, Malmberg said, after the fable of an auctioneer, who was asking a dollar, two, then three for a scarred and battered violin. But as he spieled, an old man tottered up out of the back row, dusted off the violin and played it with magnificent sweetness.

“And then the auctioneer said, ‘Who’ll give me a thousand, two thousand, three?’ ” Malmberg said.

The sculpture, he said, “is like the old violin--here we had this thing nobody thought was worth anything, till the master came along and touched it and made people aware. We sort of feel the Lord has already blessed us with this gift.”