Mighty memorabilia

Restaurant chain's auctions provide windfall for charities

Auctioning of wall decor at the Ninety Nine Restaurant in Charlestown began this week and will continue through Dec. 2. (Photos by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

Gail Metropolis absolutely had to have the eagle.

It was carved in a wood plaque, painted blue and gold, and measured five feet wide. Bids started at $100, and on the last day of the auction she stayed until midnight at the Ninety Nine Restaurant in Lowell where it had hung near the bar for 15 years, locked in a fierce bidding war.

Back and forth she went with another customer, the price jumping in $25 increments. Finally, a determined Metropolis placed the winning bid - $325 - for the patriotic plaque, which now hangs in the "man room" of her brother's Chelmsford home.

"I was going to get that eagle for my brother one way or another," said Metropolis, 52, who lives in Billerica, "and I did."

By buying the plaque, Metropolis did more than acquire a housewarming gift for her brother. She also made a charitable donation to Lowell's public school system and the city's Boys & Girls Club, two of the beneficiaries of a series of silent auctions being held at Ninety Nines throughout the region.

When the Woburn-based chain began to renovate its restaurants last year, it made a startling discovery: Customers actually wanted to buy the memorabilia that decorates its casual-dining eateries, from vintage photographs to old trophies to commemorative plaques. Some guests were even interested in purchasing booths, bar stools, televisions, and other items otherwise destined for a trash heap.

Sensing an opportunity, the company decided to auction the items for charity. Basically, if you can carry it away - Norman Rockwell prints, life-size Indian statues, window awnings - you can try to buy it.

"Anything we're going to discard we'd be happy to take bids on," said company president John Grady, who began working as a bartender at the Ninety Nine Restaurant in North Andover in 1975.

The auctions, which take place during the two weeks before each restaurant closes for renovations, are spurring a frenzy of bidding and buying in many of the communities where they're being held.

One customer bought a boat that he plans to turn into an at-home bar. Another bought two booths so he could create a miniature Ninety Nine in his basement. One guest bought the bar stool he'd been sitting on during his visits over the past 25 years. Some customers are tracking renovation schedules at different restaurants so they can hop from auction to auction buying coveted items; in one instance, a family that owns a horse farm attended several auctions to bid on plaques that depict horse barns.

And at the Hudson Ninety Nine, the restaurant's staff pitched in to buy a plaque that memorializes the Sept. 11 firefighters. They then gave it as a surprise gift to the Hudson Fire Department, where it hangs in the foyer.

Kitchen equipment is not for sale; the auctions are focused on decor in the dining room and bar areas. And they have not been attracting many restaurateurs or used-equipment suppliers, Grady said, "probably because we're advertising these as fund-raisers for the community, not as equipment auctions."

As word of the auctions spreads, they are raising increasing amounts of money, which is split between the local school system and local Boys & Girls Club. On average, the auctions are raising between $6,000 and $8,000 per restaurant, but the Tewksbury restaurant recently reaped nearly $15,000, the North Andover location made $14,000, and one of the Ninety Nines in Worcester raised $12,000, according to the chain. If there isn't a Boys & Girls Club in the community, the money is donated to a similar local charity.

By year's end, 43 of the company's 115 restaurants will have been renovated and an estimated $270,000 in charitable proceeds will have been raised, said Grady, the president. An additional 40 locations are slated to be rehabbed in 2008, he said. Eventually, all of the restaurants, which are located in the six New England states, as well as in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, will be overhauled.

The Ninety Nine, a publicly traded chain whose parent company is O'Charley's Inc. in Nashville, was established in 1952 with a single restaurant at 99 State St. in Boston - thus, the name - and now has 7,000 employees. Its horseshoe logo was born when the wife of the founder, Charlie Doe, gave him a horseshoe for good luck and he hung it at the restaurant.

The reasonably priced, family-friendly chain is popular for its folksy ambience, casual bar, and something-for-everyone menu, where offerings range from sirloin tips to Caesar salads to cedar plank salmon.

Company officials embarked on the chainwide renovation project because they felt that their restaurants had become cosmetically outdated. The revamped Ninety Nines will be brighter, less cluttered, and more contemporary; they will have new plateware, glassware, lighting, carpeting, and sound systems; their vintage photos will be replaced with more current ones; and their staffs will be retrained and get new uniforms.

"It's a much crisper, cleaner, neater look," Grady said.

During the silent auctions, items for sale are numbered and guests can bid on them by recording their names and offers in a book kept at the hostess stand, where people truly committed to an item can keep track of the bidding. Once the two-week auction period ends, bids are reviewed and the highest bidders are notified they have won and can pick up their items. Then the restaurant is shut down for a three-and-a-half day facelift, closing on a Sunday night and reopening, newly renovated, for dinner the following Thursday.

The most recent auction, at the Charlestown Ninety Nine - the site of a brazen shooting in 1995, when four men were killed and one was wounded as they sat in a booth eating lunch on a weekday afternoon - began this week and will continue through Dec. 2. Bidders looking for mob hit memorabilia will be disappointed; the restaurant was extensively overhauled after the bloody crime.

At the North Andover Ninety Nine's auction, Kathy Boshar - who, in a reference to "Cheers," calls herself "the Norm of the Ninety Nine" because she often eats there three times a week, and sometimes twice in the same day - spent about $400 to buy several wood signs hanging at the bar. One of them, in tribute to her favorite menu item, says "chicken wings." They're now displayed in the kitchen of her New Hampshire vacation home.

The auctions are a "phenomenal idea," said Boshar, who believes strongly enough in the mission of the Boys & Girls Clubs that she recently began working as the development director of the Lawrence club. "To take things that would have gone in a Dumpster and turn them into a way to give back to needy children - it's ingenious."

Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com.