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Twenty-nine thousand dollars for a vintage barber chair, $3.3 million for a hundred-year-old Oldsmobile. Clocks, an organ, a giant carousel. The Milhous brothers sold it all over the weekend, emptying out a 39,000-square-foot Boca Raton warehouse stuffed with things they’d collected in their travels over the years.
It took Bob and Paul Milhous more than 50 years to fill their private museum, according to a news release. The Associated Press reports they bought the items with proceeds from their various printing and manufacturing businesses, according to CBS, and they sold it off because their family said they didn’t want to get saddled with it after they died.
They must have manufactured a lot of stuff: In total, the auction had more than 550 lots ranging from 1850s revolvers to 1950s cars to an airplane. An airplane.
“Our wives say, ‘Most people go to the museum and buy a postcard,'” Paul Milhous told CBS. “‘You go to the museum and buy the museum.'”
The auction was put on by RM Auctions and Sotheby’s; you can check out the whole collection in the online catalog, but it’s kind of hard to read. Some highlights:
- A 35-foot bar made of wood, brass, marble, and cowboy sweat.
- A Rusty Wallace racing uniform?
- Vintage carnival posters advertising a sheep with five legs, a bull with two tails, and a cow with two heads.
- A fake tree apparently worth $12 grand.
- Enough grandfather clocks to make the top of every hour absolutely terrifying.
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