Bill Menish: Talking The Talk
Betty Bottor bought some butter but she said this butter’s bitter. If I put this bitter butter in my batter it will make my batter bitter. So she bought a bit of better butter, put it in her bitter batter, made her bitter batter better. So it’s better Betty Bottor bought a bit of better butter.

Bill Menish’s face brightens with impish delight as he delivers these lines without skipping a beat. Sitting in front of a crackling fireplace in the living room of his Poway home, the award-winning morning news anchor for NBC 7/39 finishes the tongue-twister with a satisfied grin.

"Betty Bottor" is just one of the alliterated chants that Menish practiced during his time at auctioneering school. He also learned how to work the audience, always keep his cool on stage, and bring in the big bids.

He wasn’t honing the auctioneer’s craft as part of another memorable story for the morning news. On February 29, Menish will leave his position at NBC to pursue a new career as a professional auctioneer, a significant leap on a most appropriate day.

Getting into auctioneering was a happy accident, says Menish. "I’d been emceeing for ten years. When I was a reporter, nobody cared, but as soon as I became an anchor, people wanted me to emcee their events. Eventually somebody said, ‘Hey, will you also be our auctioneer?’"

Menish grew up in the Midwest, going to auto auctions with his dad, so he knew what auctioneers sounded like: fast and smooth-talking. When the first nonprofit asked him to lend his charisma and oratory skills behind the auctioneer’s podium, he warned that he wasn’t very good. But he kept at it, and organizations kept asking him back.

Three years ago, Menish auctioneered Scripps Cancer Center’s Scripps Spinoff with an Orange County auctioneer named Chuck Dryer. The two helped bump the fundraiser’s yield from $750,000 to $1.3 million. Dryer told Menish he’d missed his true calling, but Menish — still passionate about his longtime career in journalism — took it as a compliment and little more.

Then, as fate would have it, the National Auctioneers Association held its convention in San Diego this past summer. Menish called them up to express his interest and they encouraged him to come on by.

The auctioneers at the convention, says Menish, "were the nicest, most giving and caring and embracing and card-handing-out people that I’ve ever met in my life, even more so than television news!"

From there, Menish did things in reverse order, signing up for an intensive course in benefit auctioneering before receiving any general training.

"I was the only one in there who couldn’t talk fast," he recalls. "But I learned so much about how I could benefit nonprofits during this three-day session. I walked out of there convinced that Chuck Dryer was right: I either had a dual calling or I had missed my calling. Because I knew that I wanted to do this."

Menish completed satellite courses through the Worldwide Auctioneering College — a school known for turning out champion auctioneers. Now that he had solid skills, it was time to make a tough decision.

As a journalist, Menish couldn’t take paid auctioneering jobs because it would represent a conflict of interest. But as a morning anchor at a major station, a career pinnacle in local broadcast news, he didn’t have much room to grow professionally without leaving San Diego, where he and his family — wife Dorothy and daughters Kylie and Madison — are happily settled. (Menish also took into account the fact that for years he’s been waking up every morning at 2:30am.)

He decided to pursue his missed calling.

Menish since has launched his own auctioneering firm, employing freelance auctioneers when there’s more demand than he can meet on his own. He’s also working closely with his wife, who runs a video production company, to create innovative presentations for fundraisers. For example, he recently auctioned off a ride behind the rear steering wheel of a fire truck, and to generate interest showed a video of a woman whooping with glee as she turned the wheel on a gleaming red rig.

It all adds up to big dollars for worthy organizations, and for Menish — a tongue-twisting heckuva good time.
— AnnaMaria Stephens, photo by Kristy Ann Mann