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auction because of the sentimental value of many of the items.
• "What we're hoping is that a significant number of these things will either go to people we either know or have some connection with, and my parents collected a fair amount of art and some really nice pieces over the years, and to see them sort of sold at an auction or something where everybody is trying to get a bargain so they can resell it would be pretty distressing for us," she said.
• No family members plan to be present during the sale, Ann McGovern said. Money raised during the sale will go to Ann McGovern and two other sisters. Proceeds from the sale of copies of McGovern's book, "An American Journey," will be donated to the hunger relief organization Feeding South Dakota, which McGovern championed.
• "The hardest part for the whole thing is putting a price on his items. You know, it's so valuable memory-wise, maybe not monetarily, but it's his, so it maybe means more," said Deb Sorensen, who runs Finders Keepers Estate, Collectable & Antique Sales, which is handling the pricing of items and the sale.
• Items up for sale include antique furniture pieces, fine china, campaign buttons and photographs of McGovern with other Senate leaders, including Robert Kennedy and Bob Dole.
• And there are lots of books. Among them are a Franklin Library collection and some of McGovern's own titles -- many of them out of print and a few autographed. One book is especially personal: In "Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism," McGovern writes about Teresa McGovern's years-long struggle with alcoholism. She died at age 45 in 1994, her body discovered facedown in a Madison, Wis., snow bank.
• In another book, "The L Word: An Unapologetic, Thoroughly Biased, Long-Overdue Explication and Celebration of Liberalism," McGovern, who lost the 1972 presidential election in a historic landslide to Richard Nixon, wrote the forward for the author , David P. Barash. When the Barash sent him a copy, McGovern reread it and made notations on how he could have improved his writing.
• "I thought that was so funny. He was always critiquing himself," Sorensen said.
• A copy of "An American Journey" signed to someone named Melinda is being sold for $40.
• All the items have a story behind them, Sorensen said, and the two women have tried to find out as many stories as they could, though some have been lost over the years.
• A cloth embroidered with McGovern's name across the top is from his last trip to Africa, Sorensen said. An off-white wooden armoire with floral patterns was among

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