EVANSVILLE, Ind. — It’s pretty quiet within the walls of Roberts Stadium these days. The cheering there stopped long ago.

It’s something of a strange place to come to work for 32-year-old Andrew Wilson of William Wilson Auction & Realty, Inc., the Evansville firm charged with liquidating the historic venue’s assets.

“It’s pretty humbling, especially when you’re the first one in the building in the morning,” Wilson says. “I wouldn’t call it ‘creepy,’ but it’s definitely quiet.”

For several weeks now, Wilson, along with his 28-year-old brother Aaron, has made daily trips into Roberts, where the air-conditioning is off. They’ve dutifully spent their time organizing and cataloging assets — some big, some small — in preparation for Saturday’s auction.

The event, which will commence at 10 a.m., will be preceded by two public preview sessions — 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday.

Eventual demolition notwithstanding, Saturday’s auction will, once and for all, bring down the curtain on a building that has been a part of the Evansville landscape since 1956.

It’s a place that has hosted presidents and presidential candidates, witnessed storied moments in small-college basketball history, and on two occasions (1972 and 1976), was even fit for a king. Indeed, none other than Elvis Presley filled the fabled hall, as did subsequent performers such as Garth Brooks and Elton John.

And in December 1977, it’s where a community gathered to mourn an unspeakable tragedy — the deaths of 14 members of the University of Evansville Purple Aces basketball team and their coaches in a plane crash at Evansville Regional Airport.

Most of what’s left behind at Roberts Stadium now doesn’t bear any kind of direct link to what transpired within its walls; nor does it offer a connection to the iconic leaders, athletes and performers who appeared there. Bidders hoping to find Jerry Sloan’s locker or a couch that Elvis once relaxed on are out of luck.

For the Wilsons, organizing the venerable facility’s assets was a laborious undertaking, but in many ways it was no different from a typical estate sale.

“The principles are the same,” Wilson says. “We have these assets, and we have to identify what they are, identify the market for them and then sell them. No matter what the size of the asset is or the value, usually the same procedures apply.”

As a general rule, if it’s not nailed down (and even if it is, in some cases), it’ll be sold to the highest bidder. That includes everything from the vintage 1950s sinks found in several of the original bathrooms to some 20 turnstiles to a pair of portable stages, upon which the likes of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama once stood.

For those who are longtime University of Evansville basketball fans, or just generally sentimental about Roberts, the auction will provide a final chance — with the possible exception of acquiring a post-demolition brick — to own a piece of the past.

Collectors won’t have the opportunity to purchase an individual stadium seat, but there will be a total of 13 lots of seats up for bid. Those seats will be offered in sets of two, three and four, and they’ll come mounted on concrete risers.

Of Roberts Stadium’s 11,000-plus Hussey chair backs, 5,500 are bound for Mesker Amphitheatre; 5,600, meanwhile, will be sold as a single lot. Five units of rollout seats, custom designed for the facility, will be sold separately from the 5,600-chair back lot.

The interlocking parquet basketball court will also go. The portable maple hardwood floor, manufactured in 1994, has been sanded twice in the ensuing years and is adorned with the Aces logo. It’s being sold as a single lot.

Then there’s the Roberts Stadium scoreboard. It’s a four-sided, 6,000-pound Fair Play model — hardly 21st century, but still very functional.

“It’s nearing obsolescence,” Wilson says. “It’s only three colors, for instance. But it is LED, and it does have the specific hoist for it. So it’s for a buyer that has the space and the need for it.”

Wilson isn’t in the business of predicting how much money an item like the scoreboard could bring. In theory, if only a single buyer were interested, and if that buyer were willing to pay no more than a dollar, the Roberts Stadium scoreboard could, in fact, be bought for a buck.

But, like most things in life, buying a massive item at auction isn’t quite that simple. Once a bidder wins something, it’s immediately his, and the buyer has an obligation to arrange transport of their bounty.

“The important thing to keep in mind is that to get the scoreboard out of here, it’s going to require some pretty sophisticated industrial rigging and removal,” Wilson explains. “Just to move it will probably cost you $5,000 to $10,000 easily. So you’ve got to add that into the purchase price.

“It’s important that people realize that,” he continues. “Yes, there may be some (final sale) values that seem like they aren’t what they should be, but there is a lot of extraction and removal and rigging that has to occur to get some things out of here.”

So who, exactly, might want to purchase a single lot of 5,600 stadium seats? Or, for that matter, who would happen to be in the market for a 6,000-pound scoreboard?

The answer, in short, is an industrial buyer — a highly specialized buyer who has a very specific and unique knowledge of the market for things like, well, a lot of 5,600 stadium seats or a 6,000-pound scoreboard.

“They’re professional buyers,” Wilson explains. “They have professional resources, and because of that they can buy these assets and know the market well enough to have a plan for what they can pay for it, what it will cost to move it, and then know who the potential buyers are.”

With that in mind, many of the stadium’s largest assets — the Bryan flexible tube boilers or the Trane Centravac centrifugal chiller and Marley cooling tower, to name two examples — likely won’t be snatched up by individuals.

But that doesn’t mean casual buyers are left out in the proverbial cold. There are still plenty of possibilities.

“That’s what we want to be sure to convey, is that there are real items out here that people can use, in their homes, in their businesses — especially for small-business owners,” Wilson says.

Many of those smaller items, while not necessarily collectibles or unique to Roberts Stadium, have ample utility value. They include things such as desks, tables, televisions, trash cans, filing cabinets, telephone systems, photocopiers and bar stools.

And a restaurant, church group, school or civic organization, meanwhile, might be able to make use of things like stoves, ovens, ice machines, walk-in coolers, even the popcorn poppers. They’ll all be up for bid.

“This is an absolute auction with no restrictions,” Wilson explains. “Everything will sell regardless of price. These are all assets that have to be sold, and that’s what we’ll bring to the table — to establish a market value for those items on that given day.”

While Wilson is aware that letting go of Roberts Stadium is hard for many people, he won’t be getting sentimental about the task at hand.

“It’s what we do, and we take it very seriously,” he says. “There’s always a human side to it, but at the same time it’s something that we look at from a completely different perspective. As part of our marketing, we obviously can bring in that emotional side. An auction can be very emotional. But from our standpoint, it’s all business.”

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