THRIFT SHOP : The FSLIC has put remnants of seized S&Ls;’ high-rolling days on the auction block.

The four teak elephants were attracting a good bit of attention, as was the 1957 Bentley automobile.

Collectors and art dealers pored over paintings and bronzes. Two delicately carved ivory tusks lay on a Persian rug.

There in the back, covering what seemed like acres, were row after row of furniture and telephones and computers and safes and copying machines and even a kitchen sink--all of it once used to decorate and furnish the offices of savings and loan associations around the Southwest.

And all of it is a monument to failure, a warehouse full of reminders of how the savings and loan industry had fallen on desperately hard times, especially here in Texas.

Silver-Inlaid Saddle

All of these goods will be sold at auction, beginning today, as the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. attempts to recoup a small fraction of the tens of billions of dollars it has pledged to bail out failed savings and loan associations in recent years. And with 237 more S&Ls; under federal conservatorship around the country, many more billions will be lost in bailouts before the crisis is over.

David Loveday, a spokesman for FSLIC, estimated Friday that $500,000 should be raised by the time the auction ends Wednesday. This is just the first of four such sales that would be held in the coming months. A 250,000-square-foot warehouse in Dallas was filled, he said, and the back half of the Houston site was piled high with items that will be disposed of at another auction.

Among the items that will be up for auction is a 16th-Century Spanish door that was part of the decor at Vernon Savings & Loan Assn., as well as an exquisite silver-inlaid saddle that was used by a Vernon executive when he rode in parades. The teak elephants were found in an S&L;’s warehouse, as was the Bentley, which needed engine work. A row of carved teak desks had belonged to Lamar Savings in Austin, and 30 cars on display in the parking lot came from various other failures.

John Pace, FSLIC manager for receivership in Dallas, pointed to a bronze of a bare-breasted Indian woman--titled “Indian Love Call”--that a savings and loan association had commissioned for $112,000.

“It’s been appraised at one-10th that, and I think they are being very generous,” Pace said.

‘They Wanted Prestige’

Bill Wright stared at all the high-priced merchandise that S&Ls; had once considered so important to the ambience of their business.

“The lending institutions had no business having some of this stuff,” he said. “But they wanted prestige and used other people’s money.”

Wright should know. He once was president of Houston’s Home Savings, another of the more than 200 S&Ls; that either went belly up or merged with other institutions last year. But Wright got out of the S&L; business in 1980, long before anyone knew that a major crisis was looming only a few years down the road.

“We only had two original artworks,” said Wright, who had come to see what was left of the Home Savings furnishings and if there was anything he wanted to bid on. He was startled to see what he considered to be one of the uglier paintings he had ever encountered, an oil that the S&L; had seized as part of a foreclosure on a bad loan years earlier.

“We kept it around just to remind ourselves not to lend money for furniture,” he said.