Column: Future Vice President at your auction? Perhaps
Vice President Joe Biden. According to Lancaster Online, Biden transported cars for dealers at what is now known as Manheim Pennsylvania back during his college days in the 1960s.
You never know who you might meet in the remarketing industry. You might be at an NAAA Convention, and end up talking baseball with Lou Piniella.
(Wonder if he will cheer for Cubs in the NLCS?)
Or, you might be at that same convention and catch a lively discussion between auction executives and political stalwarts/ D.C. power couple James Carville and Mary Matalin.
Speaking of politics, if you happened to be around Manheim Pennsylvania sometime in the 1960s, you may have run into a young man named Joe Biden, according to a Lancaster Online story.
Yup, that Joe Biden. Mr. Vice President.
As Lancaster Online reports, the then-University of Delaware student would earn a few extra dollars transporting cars from the Manheim, Pa. auction to dealers down in Delaware.
“They’d go up to buy these cars, and they’d pay (me) to go up to Manheim and get those cars down,” Biden is quoted in the story as saying at a 2008 campaign event. “I’d gather up a bunch of guys from my dorm, pay them five bucks and charge 10 bucks to the dealers. That’s how I made my spending money.”
I got the chance to visit Manheim Pennsylvania this summer, one of several of auction visits I’ve made to places like Florida, Arizona and just down the road from my hometown of Raleigh, N.C.
Who knows, maybe I have seen a future U.S. senator or vice president working on the lot?
Given the combination of ingenuity and work ethic I’ve witnessed in the auction lanes, it seems a great place to learn the foundation of business management — and that certainly can foster leadership, be it the corporate world or in the halls of Congress.
