Charles City Rotary Radio Auction will offer thousands of dollars of items up for bid

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Thousands of dollars worth of merchandize, meals, art items, services and gift cards will be up for bid Saturday morning, Feb. 3, at the annual Charles City Rotary Club’s Radio Auction.

Now in its 14th year, the auction on KCHA radio serves as a fundraiser for the club’s community activities and scholarships, and now for the third year, splits the proceeds with another community organization – this year PAWS Humane Society.

Rotary Club member Tammy Elthon has been organizing the yearly event since it began.

“I was president of the Rotary Club in 2010. That’s the year Jim Koloff, the owner of the station – who is also a Rotarian in Cedar Falls – presented the idea,” she said. “We said yes, and didn’t really know what we were doing. I think the funniest thing probably was we didn’t realize we would need to be on the air as well.”

She said Koloff was at the station the morning of the first auction and shortly before it was about to begin he looked at her and said, “Are you ready to go?”

“And I said, ‘Where are we going?’” she said, laughing. “We went on the air and the rest is history, as they say.”

She said the addition of a community partner has been a wonderful change.

Two years ago, in the first year with a partner, the auction proceeds were split with TLC: The Learning Center, which was fundraising for its move to the North Grand Building. Last year the community partner was Central Preschool.

“This year with PAWS has brought a whole different kind of an excitement too,” Elthon said. “I have to really commend them. They have really promoted it, and that’s another group of people that are listening and possibly calling in that maybe wouldn’t have even been aware of it or knew about the auction.”

She also said the PAWS board has contributed some unique items for the auction, including “a really cool” gift basket for dogs.

There are 102 items up for bid, which Elthon said is about the maximum number they can sell within the time period they have to follow. The total value of the donated items is about $7,000.

To date the auction has brought in $79,428, running each year since 2010 except for 2021 because of the pandemic.

The auction will run from 9 a.m. to noon on radio station KCHA, 95.9 FM.

People can bid on the items they are interested in by calling 641-228-1000 with their name, phone number, bid item and amount of bid. No early bids will be accepted.

Rotary Club guest announcers will list and describe items on the air, and a few items will be on the auction block at any one time. Latest bids will be updated as they occur, with bid deadlines for the different items occurring throughout the morning and the winning bidders announced on the air as each item sells.

Elthon said some of the items to be bid on this year include tickets to “The Cher Show” April 4 at NIACC, a Deerfield Locker beef bundle, a honey package from Storybook Honey, a 50-inch TV and four tickets to the Iowa-Iowa State football game that will be Sept. 4 in Iowa City.

There will also be lots of gift certificates, meal packages, tools, memberships and gift boxes that have been put together and donated.

All items auctioned off are donated by area businesses and organizations, or purchased by Rotary members and donated to the auction.

A complete list of the items is available by clicking the Rotary Auction link on the Rotary Club website at CharlesCityRotary.org.

Elthon said she has also printed out the complete list for people who want to follow along with a paper copy, and those are available on the counter at her business, Circle K Communications.

“We’ll go on the air at 9 o’clock sharp, and we have to be off at 12 o’clock, and then I’ll open back up from 1 to 3 out here at work so that people that got items can come and pick them up right away,” Elthon said. Circle K Communications is at 1003 5th Ave.

People can bid on items by following the auction on the radio station website, kchanews.com, but Elthon advised that the streaming version lags behind the live on-air version by several seconds.

“If it’s not a high hot item it’s probably not a problem,” she said about listening online. “On an item that is being fiercely bid from three or four people you probably will lose out”