Profanities exploded suddenly inside Portsmouth's Quick Shop Convenient Store on a drizzly Friday afternoon. A few seconds before, buyers in a two-hour auction had been filing out of the store with their wares ? pots, beverage coolers and security cameras.

The rough-and-tumble world of auctioneering is serious business for Calvin, 73, and son Stephen, 33. Buying, selling and the never-ending quest for a deal have fostered a unique bond between father and son. They have become the most recognized auctioneers in Hampton Roads, weathering a number of legal scrapes together.

Calvin claims a half-century of experience in trading, selling and auctioneering. With Stephen's help, he presides over Norfolk-based Zedd Auctioneers Ltd., with subsidiary businesses in appraisals and secondhand goods.

He's probably right. A few of the things we have heard of: cheap watches, IBM typewriters, a tractor-trailer-load of bottled water and the confiscated weaponry of a biker gang called the Renegades Motorcycle Club.

Stephen -? he goes by ?Stevie? -? officially joined Zedd Auctioneers as a teenager and is preparing to someday lead the company his father built. He is gradually taking responsibility for a growing share of its operations, crying auctions and driving around Hampton Roads evaluating possible sales. A major part of his job is learning from his father.

The Forty Thieves, that is ? a group of Greek, Italian, and Jewish men who banned together to bargain and buy at now-defunct Plume Street auction houses.

They didn't want to bid against each other for iceboxes or other prizes, so young Calvin helped coordinate their wish lists and break up arguments.

Calvin attended college for two years, first at the University of Alabama and then at the Norfolk Division of The College of William and Mary, but dropped out to work.

He has worked for others only three weeks in his life, he said. As a door-to-door salesman of household goods, his bosses required him to get a $2 down payment from customers who often did not speak English. But if they didn't have the money, no problem: Calvin would give cash-strapped customers $2, earn his $5 payoff for a new account and come out $3 richer.

?Calvin would give you the shirt off his back, but he's an astute businessman,? said neighbor Robert Marcus, who owns Bob's Gun Shop across Olney Road from the Zedds' store.

But pounding the pavement eventually grew less profitable. Calvin never had an official lesson in auctioneering, but he gradually moved into that business. By 1968, he was salvaging desks in New York and running auctions in Tennessee and North Carolina with the Virginia Beach Auction Co. He registered Zedd Auctioneers Ltd. in Virginia in 1991.

didn't halt the roadshow right away. Calvin whisked his family to auctions along the East Coast and through Southern states for several more years.

Mark Wiggleton, owner of Mark's Discount Office Furniture in Virginia Beach, worked for Calvin for five years in the ?80s. He went on several trips to towns too small to have an office furniture store, where the crews would unload furniture from trucks and set up auctions in fire stations, dance halls and hotel ballrooms.

Competitor Scott Freeman, president of Dolphin Fixtures in Norfolk and a former employee of Calvin's, remembers him much less fondly. Freeman said he worked with Calvin for a year in the early 1980s on a commission basis, earning a share of auction proceeds. He split from Calvin after a nasty dispute over the proceeds from a bankruptcy sale of copying machines that Freeman said he helped organize.

The quest for attractive markets led Calvin's auctions to the U.S. side of the Mexico border. His crews learned that typewriters and calculators were popular, but so were fraudulent certified checks used to pay for them.

The unions in New York were demanding, the crowds in South Philadelphia were rude, and it was time for a change. Calvin took his last long auctioneering trip 11 years ago.

Calvin, who once ran up a $1,900 bill for business calls during a 10-day Baltic cruise, now finds peace most Saturdays at Temple Israel on Granby Street. It is ?the only place where the phone can't find me, where people don't know where I am,? he said.

for Zedd Auctioneers Ltd. says that Stephen Zedd ?was born and raised in the auction business,? and it's no exaggeration. At age 10, Stephen told a reporter that he bought magazines and toys and resold them to his friends ? at a profit, of course.

The rangy Stephen was an athlete in high school and taught himself how to play 8-handicap golf during his senior year. Offered junior college scholarships to play basketball and baseball, he turned them down to attend the Missouri Auction School.

But there were indications Stephen was doing what he was meant to do. Even before he started the course, the hallmark auctioneer's chant ?just kind of rolled off my tongue,? he said.

Stephen is the company's lead auctioneer at sales for items ranging from real estate to restaurant equipment. He sometimes catches himself reciting professional-grade tongue twisters and has an oil-smooth auctioneer's chant to show for it.

For someone who can cut loose with a joke in the middle of an auction spiel, Stephen can be reserved and introspective. He sat on a couch and read a newspaper for much of the football game two weeks ago between the Washington Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs. He loves poring over the World Almanac for trivia about the economic output of smaller nations.

But he also takes risks. Riding a four-wheeler on a North Carolina hunting reserve last year, he gunned the engine ? 30, 40, then 50 mph. ?When I do something like that, I got to see how fast it'll go,? he said. He turned slightly to the right, and the machine flipped.

Six lawsuits against Calvin or Stephen Zedd or their company filed in Norfolk Circuit Court have either been dropped, settled or dismissed since 2000; two others remain active.

Dennis K. Kruse, president of the Overland Park, Kan.-based National Auctioneers Association, of which Calvin and Stephen are members, said it is uncommon for auctioneers to be sued.

In January, the Auctioneers Board of Virginia's Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation fined Zedd Auctioneers Ltd. $500 for being a month late in giving a seller his money.

In June, a plaintiff in Norfolk Circuit Court won a $610 judgment against the company after claiming it did not properly account for the proceeds of his family's estate sale and then delayed payment.

Stephen was reprimanded and fined $2,000 by the North Carolina Auctioneer Licensing Board in March for failing to disclose on a license application form his 1998 arrest on felony drug charges and his subsequent guilty pleas in Virginia Beach Circuit Court.

Eight of 104 sanctions imposed by the North Carolina board since August 1999 have been leveled at defendants committing felonies or not disclosing them, according to online records.

Records of the board's disciplinary action show Stephen told the board that, because rules and requirements vary from state to state, he was not aware he was required to disclose the charges on his auctioneering application.

At last count, the company was preparing for 15 real estate sales, with more coming. The company's back office had one administrative employee last year. There are six now, Stephen said.

Calvin said the company was on pace to sell more than $8 million total at auction this year, and it could hit $15 million next year if the real estate market keeps growing. The company makes money off a 10 percent buyer's premium, or fee, that it charges the buyer in addition to the final asking price.

They'll find slot machines imported from Japanese nightclubs mixed in a maze of stacked desks. Jumbled collections of chairs and televisions bump against disassembled mannequins. Televisions, turned on for demonstration, are in various stages of focus.

Calvin plans to phase out the retail operation soon. To capitalize on Norfolk's wave of residential development, he wants to convert his warehouse on Monticello Avenue into condominiums and sell the Granby Street retail store.

Calvin wouldn't have it any other way. Some of his retired buddies have left for Florida and indulge themselves with the classic golden-years lifestyle: golf, movies and trips to the racetrack. Not Calvin.

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