Thank You for Being Part of This 50-Year Journey
This year marks fifty years since I started RR Auction. It’s hard to believe. Back in 1976, I was a kid in Boston with a love of collecting and no real sense of where it would all lead. My grandfather handed me $1,800 to get things going. He never asked a question and never asked for it back. He just believed in me. That belief is what set everything in motion.
What began as a one-man operation selling baseball memorabilia and simple autographs grew slowly, one step at a time. I spent ten years working out of my parents’ basement, doing whatever it took to keep the business alive. I typed up my own little mail-bid catalogs and mailed them out myself. I didn’t have much, but I cared about doing things the right way, learning as I went, and treating people well.
Carla, my wife at the time, was always there to help me from the very beginning when I was just trying to make things work. In 1986, I hired Bill White as our first team member, and he’s still with the company today, almost forty years later. And in 1996, Elizebeth Otto joined the consignment department, and she’s still here too. I’m proud of the people who have stood by this company, and I’m just as proud that my children and other family members have worked here at one point or another, including my son Bobby, who now serves as our COO. Watching him help lead the business has meant a great deal to me.
We became known as specialists in documents and manuscripts. Since 1976, we’ve handled pieces that span the full stretch of written history, from Einstein to Edison, from Henry VIII to Henry David Thoreau, and from Beethoven to Bob Dylan. At the heart of it all are the handwritten letters and manuscripts. They tell the story in the writer’s own words, and that’s always been the foundation of this company.
And as the country marks its 250th anniversary this summer, we’ll be offering a full set of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Button Gwinnett. For someone who started out selling single autographs, bringing all the Founders together again carries a certain weight.
Over the years, we’ve also handled some remarkable pieces in space exploration. We’ve represented several of the moonwalkers themselves and the things they carried with them, Dave Scott from Apollo 15, Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, and Alan Bean, Charlie Duke, and others. Space-flown hardware and mission-used artifacts have been a meaningful part of our story, and I never take for granted the trust those astronauts placed in us.
In the world of technology, we share something meaningful with Apple, we both started in 1976. It’s been something special to help tell that early Apple story through the documents and artifacts from those first months in the garage, the early checks, contracts, and Steve Jobs’s actual Apple-1 prototype. This January, we’re offering Apple Check #1, the first check the company ever issued.
Along the way, some things have come through our doors that I never expected. We sold the $28 million seat on Jeff Bezos’s first Blue Origin flight. We handled Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos archive, tied to one of the great modern code-breaking puzzles. And we even revealed and sold a previously unknown JFK film taken in Dealey Plaza. These aren’t the kinds of things you picture selling when you’re typing up catalogs in your parents’ basement, but they’ve become part of the story nonetheless.
And the truth is, the moments that stay with me aren’t the big headlines. They’re the times when we helped someone change their life, often by exceeding their financial expectations. When a consignor’s item, whether it was an Elon Musk archive, an Einstein letter, or a family heirloom, made a difference for them. That has always been at the center of this company. RR Auction has always been about people. Consignors. Buyers. The people who referred us to someone who needed help. And the staff who worked hard behind the scenes. None of this would have happened without them.
And through it all, I think about my grandfather’s gesture, the quiet belief he showed when he handed me that $1,800. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He just always believed in me. Half a century later, everything we’ve built has come from that same kind of belief. People believed in what we were trying to do. They gave us a chance. They sent others our way. For that, we are grateful.
With gratitude,
BOB EATON
FOUNDER,
RR AUCTION
