As he does on every trip like this, he sang along loudly with each song — “Over the Rainbow” by Sam Harris and “Baby Grand “by Billy Joel and Ray Charles — even though he admits: “I’m the world’s worst singer.”
It’s not that he was trying to polish his vocals to step onto the stage at “The Voice.”
He’s been a showman most of his 74 years.
He started as a 3-year-old tap dancer at Mary Hiatt’s dance studio on Wilkinson Street in downtown Dayton and later was one of the featured teen dancers on the WLWD show — “Disco 2,” an American Bandstand knockoff — hosted by Johnny Gilbert.
An accomplished horseman, he’s also been a regular in local parades dressed as Rooster Cogburn, the one-eyed sheriff portrayed by John Wayne in a 1975 film and later by Jeff Bridges.
Sorrell’s best known though for his 46 years as an auctioneer.
The most successful charity auctioneer in the history of the Miami Valley, he’s also one of the nation’s top equine auctioneers.
Over the years he’s had a hand in selling 35,000 equines in 30 states.
In that same time, he’s conducted over 1,000 charity auctions, raised more than $50 million and been the auctioneer in the four highest-grossing, single-evening charity fundraising events ever held in Dayton.
Each was a Gala of Hope evening to combat cancer. The first biannual event raised $1.1 million in 2014 and by 2022, it hit $1,714,198 in a spectacular night at Carillon Park.
Over the years, Sorrell has been involved with most of the area’s top charities, as well as schools like Wright State, and other organizations. He’s shared the stage with everyone from Muhammad Ali, Anthony Munoz, and Barry Larkin to Buster Douglas and three Miss Americas.
While his wife Diana often has suffered through those car rides as he sings — it’s how he warms up his voice in much the same way, he said, as athletes do calisthenics — once her husband hits the stage, she has to admit his voice gets magical response.
Ali, who shared the dais in a gala he sponsored in Louisville to raise funds for amateur boxing, looked over at him and whispered admiringly:
“YOU … are The Greatest!”
Over the years Sorrell has shown he can sell anything. Early on it was cakes made by Cub Scouts and their dads. Since then, it’s been everything from $60,000 Final Four packages to African safaris and Tuscan getaways.
And then there was that single vasectomy that birthed bankrolls on two separate occasions, years apart.
Although Sorrell has a lot of great stories — we’ll get to the vasectomy tale soon — he said that part of his life is coming to an end this week.
His last auction before retiring will be at the Compassionate Care Heals Gala on Saturday evening at Sinclair. The event raises funds for the Fisher-Nightingale Houses at Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the Dayton VA and serves military families.
Saturday morning he’ll serve as the parade marshal at the Miamisburg Spring Fest, an event he helped organize decades ago.
A 1968 Miamisburg grad, Sorrell spent two decades helping run his family’s western wear shop in what had been the old Plaza Theatre downtown. After the shop closed in 1993, he made it a goal to return the theater to the way it was when it opened in 1919.
Today, he’s president of the board of the Historic Plaza Theatre and the place has been tremendously successful in helping draw visitors to a downtown now filled with restaurants and shops.
That Sorrell feels a special kinship to his hometown is understandable.
It’s where his future was already being forged when he was a 3-year-old boy.
‘That pony changed my life’
“When I was delivered, I suffered a problem that left me with a crippled left arm,” he said.
He said he has about 30 percent use of that arm because of the brachial plexus injury.
He said his grandfather, Art Sorrell, who ran the Dixie Auction Company in downtown Miamisburg, told his dad, Bill Sorrell: “You need to get that boy a pony so he can get some confidence!”
His dad did just that, Sorrell said: “He brought home a wild Shetland pony in the back seat of his ‘48 Kaiser. I called it Calico, and it threw me all over the side yard.
“And each time my grandpa said, ‘Get back up on it. Don’t let it get the best of you.’
“That pony changed my life.”
That same year, his parents tied tap shoes to his feet, and he began taking lessons from Hiatt. Five years later, he starred in one of her shows, dancing a solo in a black sequined top hat and tails to Ricky Nelson’s “Be-Bop Baby.”
As he got older and endured teasing from some of his peers for his dancing, he said his dad reminded him: “Jim Brown takes ballet!”
After high school, he attended the International College of Broadcasting and helped create WTUE with Sam Yacovazzi and Don Kidwell.
A week before he turned 21, he said the pair handed him a phone book and told him to start reading: “I sounded too much like Buck Owens for them to put me on the radio, so I ended up the sales manager.”
In 1979 he attended auctioneers’ school in Illinois — his dad was a licensed auctioneer — and intended to become an equine auctioneer.
He’d begun by gluing numbers to horses before they entered the sales ring and later worked the crowd as a bid spotter for veteran auctioneers.
To learn the job, he started with bottom-rung charity events and quickly got a top-shelf lesson.
“A Cub Scout troop used to meet in the Trinity Church basement in Miamisburg,” he said. “They wanted to raise $225 to buy a tent, so they had the kids and their dads and even some grandpas create cakes without the help of women.”
They asked Sorrell to help sell them, and his auction garnered $350.
“They were over the moon and as I walked out of that church, I thought: ‘If that little amount of money can cause that much joy, why would you ever want to stop doing this?’”
He began to partner with philanthropists in town like the late Bob Mills — with Sorrell’s help Mills raised enough money to become the National Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Man of the Year in 2010 — and soon he was involved in a wide variety of charity events.
He recalled Rent a Gent, a multiple sclerosis charity event at the Dayton Mall where they put together date packages with several men.
“One of the guys we had was (future Hall of Fame infielder from the Cincinnati Reds) Barry Larkin and another was (future NFL All-Pro lineman) Jim Lachey. Something like 600 women jammed the place, and the fire marshal wouldn’t let anybody else in. We must have made $6,000 or $7,000.”
The wildest success story is the vasectomy that kept on giving.
“I did a Junior League event once and one of the items was a vasectomy,” he said. “I sold it to Bob Nutter, and I was baffled.
“But he stood up and said, ‘It’s not for me. I bought it for my dentist. Every time I go to get my teeth cleaned, it costs more money. The guy just had his fourth or fifth child, so I’m giving it to him. I’m gonna put a stop to this!’
“The crowd roared. And then years later I’m doing an American Heart event at the South Dayton airport.
“I’d sold some packages to go to the American Music Awards in Los Angeles and one brought $10,000. After it was over, a guy comes up and says he just bought that $10,000 package.
“I thanked him, and he said, ‘Do you know why I was able to buy it?’
“I said, ‘No sir.’
“And he said, ‘It’s because I’m that dentist. I’m the recipient of that vasectomy you sold years ago. I used it!’ ”
Something out of nothing
Sorrell was able to afford the fancy coat he wore at the Dublin Pub on Monday night thanks to some ingenuity that helped him turn sportscoat ruin into sartorial splendor.
“I saw John Legend wearing that coat and searched until I knew it was an Alexander McQueen,” he said. “I found the model number and called the factory.
“A nice lady there located one in my size (52) at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
“She said it was $4,695.
“I said, ‘Let me get back to you.’
“There was no way I was giving anybody $4,700 for a coat, but I remembered several years earlier I’d done an event for the Hamilton County SPCA and had been wearing a white sport coat. A volunteer gave me a red feather boa to wear, but by the end of the night it had stained the back of my white jacket.
“The cleaners couldn’t get it out, so I’d put in the back of the closet and forgotten it.
“Then I remembered a retired Northmont art teacher. Her brother used to show horses and I’d known them both for decades. I sent her a picture of the coat I’d seen and told her I had a white coat and a black coat and wondered if she could duplicate the look on them.
“She had them about three months and did a wonderful job.”
Sorrell always had a knack for making something out of nothing.
In 1997, he read a USA Today article about Ali sponsoring that gala fundraiser in Louisville.
“It had the phone number of the guy putting it together, so I called him in Connecticut and acted like I was somebody,” Sorrell said. “I told him I was the greatest auctioneer in the Midwest, and he needed to have me at their event.
“The guy said, ‘We hadn’t thought of that. What kind of things might work?’
“I said, ‘How about auctioning three minutes in the ring with Ali? You videotape it and Ali signs the gloves. The guy who buys it just has to hope Ali doesn’t have a flashback to 1964.’
“The (organizer) liked it. And when I told him I’d do it for free, he agreed. The next thing I knew, I was on the dais with Ali and his wife, Lonnie.”
Sorrell said Ali was one of his heroes growing up.
“I liked Cassius Clay because he said outrageous things and always backed them up.
“It was the same with Joe Namath saying his Jets were gonna beat the Colts (in Super Bowl III.)
“And the Beatles were anti-establishment. My parents hated them, so I had to wait until I got to the end of our driveway before I could comb my hair down on my forehead.
“I grew up admiring those kinds of unconventional people.”
That’s why he was thrilled to be a part of Ali’s event.
“When I got up to do my little bit, I talked about three defining moments in my life.
“One was little John John (Kennedy) saluting his dad’s casket.
“One was Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon.
“And one was Muhammad Ali with the Olympic flame at the Atlanta Games.
“Well, everybody got to their feet and applauded, and Ali looked at me — he couldn’t really talk that well anymore — but he smiled and said:
“’YOU … are The Greatest!’
“That put tears in my eyes.”
Memorable moments
At his home in Miamisburg, Sorrell has the mounted head of a longhorn steer hanging from a wall. It’s from Texas and was a birthday gift from his mom.
“Everybody else has deer heads, but I never went deer hunting,” he said. “I’ve always been tied to cowboy stuff and this fit.”
Diana was also involved in horses — she competed in dressage — and their son J.D. became a bona fide cowboy after graduating from Miamisburg in 1999 and then Ohio State. For a good while he worked on a dude ranch in Idaho.
The Sorrells used to board and train horses when they lived on a nearby farm and Doug served as president of the Dayton Horse Show.
Photos from those times and so many other ventures are on display in their basement.
There’s a montage taken from his night with Ali and pictures from parades he’s ridden in around the nation.
There are photos with the U.S. Olympic Equestrian team he raised money for before the Barcelona Games and shots with Woody Hayes, Andy Dalton, and Floyd Patterson.
But he seemed most moved by one particular photo taken at an American Heart Association event at Sinclair in 2015.
It showed Sorrell in one of his trademark vests onstage with a little girl holding up a sign that read: “My name is Natalie. I was born with TAPVR. I am Why!’
TAPVR stands for Total Anomalous Pulmonary Venous Return, a birth defect in which pulmonary veins aren’t connected properly to the heart.
“I told my wife, ‘One day, when you have my visitation, just put that picture out,’” Sorrell said. “I told her if somebody comes up and asks, ‘What was that rascal all about?’ she should just show them the picture and say that’s what I did.”
And while a picture may be worth a thousand words, those four from Ali still sum up Sorrell’s efforts the best:
“YOU … are The Greatest!”
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