Auction Featuring Sadony Lab's Old Equipment Drawing Interest
Friday, August 05, 2005
By Dave LeMieux
Muskegon Chronicle Staff Writer

A Challenger Chris Craft Dyneto outboard motor by Owner Corp. The caller insisted that the ultra-rare item listed on a handbill announcing the auction of the contents of Valley Research Corp. didn't exist. "But there it is, big as life," said auctioneer Roger Schultz. The vintage outboard motor stood amid a dusty array of obscure and obsolete machinery and laboratory equipment in what was once one of the company's airy lakefront workshops.

Schultz will be selling the contents of the building at 7139 Old Channel Trail at a public auction beginning at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Built as the Sadony Bros. Boat Works on the shore of White Lake's Indian Bay in the early 1930s by Joseph A. Sadony Sr.'s two sons, the rambling 10,000-square-foot building was later converted into a state-of-the-art research facility. The elder Sadony was renowned for his lifelong study of the mind's powers of intuition and his ability to foretell events.

After service in World War II, Sadony's sons Joseph Jr. and Arthur turned their own talents to invention. With their father as a consultant, the Sadony brothers organized Valley Research during the closing days of the war, working to develop waterproof packaging for military material.

Sixty years later, sunlight streamed through mammoth plate glass windows as Schultz and two others sifted gingerly through the contents of musty cement-block building on a recent afternoon. Outside, a meticulously restored wooden speedboat bobbed at anchor in Indian Bay. Schultz says he has already received numerous calls from people across the state interested the in the partial list of contents he's circulated. Valley Research Corp.'s labs and workshops were once equipped with such esoteric devices as an Elmendorf tearing tester, an International clinical centrifuge and a precision penetrometer.

In the post-war years, the company worked on a variety of products including a sonic device for Continental Motors Corp. that detected flaws in metal parts. The lab also patented a home humidifier and a machine that wrapped, folded and sealed food packages in moisture-proof material. But by the late 1950s, business at the lab had tapered off, said Arthur Sadony's daughter Jennifer Sadony Westrate. Both brothers walked away from the lab and got jobs as supervisors at Howmet Corp.'s forerunner, Misco. The labs and workshops were left largely untouched for the next 45 years.

"It's pretty much like they walked away in the late 1950s, closed the door and that was it," said Sadony Westrate. Sadony Westrate recently filled four dumpsters with water- and rodent-damaged contents in preparation for Saturday's auction. Out of respect for their recently deceased mothers, Sadony Westrate and her cousins, Joseph Sadony III and Arthur C. Sadony, have waited until now to sell the property. The trio have hired Schultz, a local auctioneer, to sell the contents to the highest bidder.

The granddaughter of one of Joseph Sr.'s foremen has purchased the building and plans to convert it into a summer home. Saturday's auction will include laboratory equipment and furniture, office furniture and boating equipment. Among the items on auction are a double mahogany Herman Miller office desk, a large band saw and Graus 2 kilo lab scale.

Schultz has been working as a auctioneer since a fall in 1985. Over the years since then, Schultz and his partner, Joe Cook of Lowell, have auctioned off the contents of countless farms. But family farms are fading away and Schultz is doing fewer and fewer farm auctions. Saturday's auction at Valley Research is unusual for the variety of vintage laboratory equipment being offered for sale.

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