$45 ‘Blob of Glass’ Fetches $5,000 the Second Time Around

It was, said Norm Malmberg, “a far cry from $45”--about as far as the distance from Siskiyou County to Beverly Hills.

The “big glass glob” that a Greenview, Calif., church camp once auctioned off for $45, then found out was a valuable oeuvre by glass sculptor Suzanne Pascal, was re-auctioned this week--but this time, said Kidder Creek Orchard camp treasurer Malmberg, it fetched $5,000.

The buyer, a Beverly Hills woman who still has “no idea” what the piece looks like, made her last-minute offer almost as a lark, after a friend told her about the sculpture.

“I thought, ‘Well, just as a kick I’ll make a bid,’ ” said Betty Hollingsworth, whose National Arts Assn. benefit ball this spring had already planned to honor Suzanne Pascal.

‘I Almost Died’

When Malmberg called her to tell her the news, “I almost died,” said Hollingsworth, who collects Lalique glass but has nothing by Pascal. “I didn’t think I had a prayer. . . . I can hardly wait to see it.”

The camp had sold the stylized glass bust of a woman last September as a gag trophy, and then learned it was a one-of-a-kind work by an artist whose pieces are in the collections of Armand Hammer and the Prince of Wales.

The buyer hastily gave it back to the camp, which sent out full-color flyers to art galleries and collectors, hoping to sell its little glass windfall and help pay off a mortgage.

And the bids came rolling in.

Well, not precisely rolling. There were only two “legitimate” bids, said Malmberg, and a number of frivolous offers from people who apparently thought the camp might make the same mistake twice.

Of course, $5,000 wasn’t the $10,000 sugarplum they had envisioned. “We had dreams of grandeur, hoping we’d get more than that,” Malmberg said. But “we decided it was time to get on” with camp business and not the art business, “and consider the blessing we had at hand.”