Holding an “auction” to solicit prayers for a mother of three killed
by a drunk driver is not what eBay executives
are used to seeing on their popular Internet auction site. But to Carol
F. Rommel of Wadsworth, Ohio, eBay seemed the perfect place. She never
imagined, however, the kind of response it would generate.
Before it was all over, Rommel’s three-day auction posting solicited
some $11,500 in prayers — at a dollar apiece — along with over 3,000
hits to her site, 300 e-mails from as far away as Australia, and an
avalanche of cards and letters for the mother’s widow.
It all started after Rommel’s friend and fellow eBay auctioneer
Christal M. Beckler, 26, also of
Wadsworth, was killed by a drunk driver on Aug. 8. A grieving Rommel
said she wanted to do something to publicize her friend’s death “because
it was so real and so tragic.”
So Rommel decided on the “auction” site partly because she and
Beckler were regular eBay auctioneers and partly because of the site’s
popularity. When she finished, she posted it with this headline: “Mother
of three killed by drunk driver.” Soon after it began to resonate across
the Internet.
Rommel told WorldNetDaily she provided URL links to the original
Akron Beacon Journal articles on the site,
as well as links to Beckler’s auction page, “because I wanted people to
know this was a real person,” not simply another abstract news article
about “somebody nobody knew.”
She didn’t ask visitors to send money, though.
“Instead, I just asked visitors to please bid on prayers for the
family.” She also said she would provide the mailing address for
Beckler’s husband, Roger, and their three sons, if visitors contacted
her by e-mail. Hundreds did.
“I wasn’t ready for the response,” she said. “I already knew that
millions of people visited eBay everyday, but I had no idea the response
to my auction site would be so intense.”
Rommel said she initially had trouble answering all of the e-mail she
received, estimated “at well over three hundred.”
She said the increased amount of visitors to her memorial auction
site also increased the visits to the Becklers’ site, causing a sharp
climb in the number of bids for items they had listed for auction.
After people began visiting, word spread across the Internet.
“They put my announcement out on AOL Café, on a lot of newsgroups —
it just went all over,” she said. “This story of just one person who was
killed by a drunk driver” was making an impact.
In all, “we got over 3,000 hits,” Rommel said. “There was over eleven
thousand dollars worth of ‘auctioned’ prayers.”
Rommel said she “had no idea” the site was garnering such popularity
because she had not kept an eye on it.
“I had to have some minor surgery, so I couldn’t keep track of the
responses,” she said.
She was surprised, albeit pleasantly, after three days went by and
she examined the auction site’s hit statistics. eBay removed the site
shortly thereafter.
“That’s a lot of money,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure how
she would pay for the high fees generated from the bidding.
“Then I got a letter from eBay telling me they would waive the fees,
and had sent a condolence letter to Roger (Beckler) and his kids,” she
said. “That was just great for eBay to do that.”
Though eBay’s rules prohibit posting an auction for any reason other
“than to sell something of value,” Rommel said she believed her effort
was important enough to risk bending the rules. In the end, she learned,
eBay agreed.
The experience has left Rommel filled with hope and faith in “the
human spirit, the human condition.”
She believes that “this was a huge response about God, about prayer.
It’s heartening, just when you thought the Internet was Sodom and
Gomorrah.”
Rommel said other media organizations have contacted her and have
shown an interest in publishing the story. But, she said, she’s afraid
some of them “may put a sort of, ‘Look at this — Strange Internet
auction,’ kind of spin on it. I hope they don’t do that, because that’s
not what this is about.”
“I just don’t want them to lose the whole point about God and how
life can be so short,” she said. “This was somebody’s life. And God was
there for her.”
