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EDEN — It was midmorning on May 16, just hours before Linda Wyatt would open Wyatt Auction Gallery, face an audience of eager and experienced bidders, and conduct her very first solo auction.

Nervous? Terrified, she admits.

It’s a bit like stage fright.

“You’re the one up there making all the calls,” she says.

So how did she calm her jitters?

She went to an auction.

By 10 a.m., Wyatt was at an auction house in Martinsville, Va., bidding on a few chairs to put in her auction gallery in Draper Village — the auction house she’d be opening for the first time in just a few hours. 

For the past 20 years, Wyatt has been traipsing to auctions all over the country. Along the way, she’s encountered at least two female auctioneers, though it’s certainly a field dominated by men.

Something about that fast-paced atmosphere, the possibility of stumbling upon a real treasure, made Wyatt add “becoming an auctioneer” to what she calls her “bucket list” — the list of things she wants to accomplish in her lifetime.

She likens being at an auction to fishing. “You never know what you’re going to get,” she says.

In her mid-50s, Wyatt works part-time as a nurse at Dayspring Family Medicine in Eden. She owns an antique shop in Draper Village, runs an online antique business, and restores and shows vintage cars. Corvettes are her favorites. And, with what leftover time she has, she helps her husband, Frank Wyatt, sell the honey he harvests.

But in November 2008, she packed her bags and headed to the Mendenhall Auctioneer School in High Point for 10 days of mind-numbing, exhausting 12-hour classes.  She was one of 38 students — five of them women — who came from all over the country and Canada.

They studied the regulations governing auctions and learned the rudimentary skills of appraisal. They added numbers, figured percentages, and practiced those verbal calisthenics that teach the auctioneer to chant queries for bids at tongue-tangling speeds.

It’s something Wyatt is still working on. “I practice in the car and on the treadmill in the mornings,” she says. 

After completing the class, Wyatt took the test required for licensing.

She says her love for antiques and vintage cars started in high school, when she was growing up in Martinsville, Va.  A boyfriend’s father collected old cars and that was her introduction.

A couple of decades ago, when she and her husband bought a house in Eden that was built in the 1930s, Wyatt decided to furnish it with items from that era.  

“I started buying antiques,  and one thing led to another,” she says.

About nine years ago, she opened Granny’s Variety & Antiques, a business she first shared with some friends. She specializes in glass and pottery but also sells furniture, books and other items in the shop.

Buying the items, stumbling upon bargains and great deals is part of the thrill for Wyatt. 

While visiting relatives in Kansas, she started attending estate tag sales — something she’d really like to get started here. She conducted her first one in April and was pleased with the response.

Instead of auctioning items, she went into the home and priced everything for her client. Buyers came through and shopped. They didn’t have to wait for an item in which they had an interest to hit the auction block.

There is some bartering at a tag sale, but usually not until the sale is winding down, she says.

She plans to hold auctions at the gallery in Draper Village at 5 p.m. on the third Saturday of every month.

In the meantime, she’s thinking about her next venture — going to appraisal school. “They’re very hard to get into,” she says, but that’s not deterring her. It’s on her bucket list.

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com