Natalie Boydston / Staff Photographer / nb397205@ohiou.edu

Wes Hart, from Circleville, Ohio, and John Stiefel, from Bucyrus, Ohio, move furniture from the old Baker Center that they purchased at an auction Saturday. The chairs are to be used as personal furniture for Stiefel. The old Front Room tables in the foreground are to be moved to Uncle Buck’s Riding Stable in New Marshfield, Ohio.

Pool tables, pianos, kitchen equipment and hundreds of chairs lingered in the deserted rooms of the former Baker Center on Saturday.

By the end of the afternoon, they all went to the highest bidder, with nearly 1,000 attendees shelling out about $40,000.

Ohio University’s Moving & Surplus Department and Athens-based auction firm Shamrock Auction Service, 14567 Mansfield Road, spent about eight hours Saturday unloading almost 2,000 items, mostly furniture and kitchen equipment that remained in the closed-down center.

The items on the block Saturday included almost 100 Front Room chairs and the pool tables that once were a part of the basement-floor Recreation Center, which sold for $800 to $1,000. The upright piano that was a fixture of Front Room open mic nights and the occasional impromptu afternoon performance sold for $15. The big-ticket item of the day was a Hobart-brand kitchen mixer, which sold for $1,600.

The bidders carted home less than a quarter of what was in Baker when its doors closed in November, said Gary Dicken, director of Moving & Surplus. The rest had been cleaned up and then purchased by other departments in the university — particularly Hudson Health Center and the Radio-Television Building — that had the first chance to purchase Baker’s remnants for a “nominal fee” that covers moving and refurbishing costs, he said.

“Our first charge is to recirculate stuff back into the university,” Dicken said, adding that departments pay Moving & Surplus an average $15 for a used desk chair and $50 for a used desk. “Some departments that are not as well-funded as others capitalize on this.”

What’s left after recirculation is then up to Moving & Surplus and Shamrock Auction Service to auction once a quarter at The Ridges. The Baker auction was extra this quarter, but the quarterly auction on March 10 at Building 9 will feature 10 university-owned vehicles, more than 100 computers and camera equipment, all items common at university auctions, said Wanda Sheridan, Shamrock’s business manager.

While the money collected at the quarterly auctions is headed back to the university’s general fund, it makes a few stops before landing that take away about 80 percent of gross auction revenues, Dicken said.

The auctions bring in about $100,000 annually, and Shamrock takes a 10 percent commission from all auctions. Dicken’s department takes an additional 70 percent to fund printing, advertising, food service, employee overtime and the department’s three or four student employees, he said. That leaves about $20,000 of the $100, 000 that goes back to the university.

Dicken said Moving & Surplus doesn’t market the auctions in outlets widely seen by students, but the auctions have a small following of students who come to pick up furniture for off-campus living.

It was mostly area residents that gathered Saturday in the former Front Room, picking up the pieces of the decades-old student hangout.