Photo by Bruce Weller
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Real Treasures
By David Dudley, July & August 2008
For 12 years, PBS’s Antiques Roadshow has unearthed the valuables that lurk in American homes. But it’s the nonvaluables people bring that tell the real story
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A sweet-faced woman deposited a silver steel tackle box on the table in front of me. Her name was Cheryl, and this was her grandfather’s fly-fishing equipment, which had been sitting untouched since the man died in 1955. The box itself was pristine. Opening it up, Cheryl carefully displayed its contents: tiny nested boxes and tin canisters full of hooks; handmade flies arranged in metal cases; a shiny reel, wrapped in gauzy fabric. Beside the box, in a faded canvas bag, lay a brace of bamboo fly rods, the wood the color of good brandy. Everything clean and oiled and ready to use, as if awaiting its owner’s return. “Look at this,” Cheryl said, removing a small glass jar of reel oil, still half full of a brownish liquid.
The man who was studying this collection, a Virginia antiques dealer named Ken Farmer, said little as he unwrapped and carefully replaced each item. Then he disappeared, leaving Cheryl and me to chat. She talked a bit about her grandfather. “I was his first grandchild and he spoiled me rotten,” Cheryl said. “The funny thing was, he never took me fishing.”
Farmer returned. “Let me examine the rods again,” he said. Finally he delivered his assessment. “It’s a cool group of stuff,” he said. “I’d say you’ve got about $1,200 there.” He broke it down: $300 a pop for the rods, perhaps $100 each for the flies, another $250 for the reel. He retabulated and revised his estimate upward, to $1,500 or more. Cheryl thanked Farmer profusely as she gathered up her goods. Behind her, another woman stepped up, towing a huge wooden pig in a red wagon. Farmer greeted her with the phrase I heard all day:
“What can I tell you about this?”
The public television program Antiques Roadshow—a 60-minute seminar on the meaning of value—is built on a plodding but strangely mesmerizing dramatic structure. Two individuals regard an object: a Tiffany-style lamp, a set of china, a music box. The first individual, typically dazed but eager, explains how he or she came to possess this object and why it might be worth something. The second person, an appraiser, briskly corrects that account: your priceless African tribal figurine is really an Indonesian knockoff; Grandmother’s Edwardian dresser was ruined by your amateur refinishing job. The payoff comes at the end of each three-minute segment, with the appraiser’s so-called reveal of the object’s estimated dollar value. Then the next pair of protagonists appears, and the cycle begins anew.
The executive producer of the show, Marsha Bemko, often describes this exchange as a sort of battle between two narratives, with the owner’s flimsy skein of hope shredded by the appraiser’s cool expertise. The show is known for the handful of miracle payoffs each episode unearths—the $25 garage sale finds that turn out to be worth thousands—but the opposite situation is more common. For most of the participants, this is where dreams die. “They’ve been told their whole life that this is a precious family heirloom,” says Jen Holmes, a Roadshow press agent at WGBH Boston. “Then they find out that it’s not, and it’s kind of earthshattering.”
Bemko seems to have a journalistic respect for the integrity of this exercise, and much of the backstage machinery at a Roadshow taping is designed to keep the owners in the dark about the true value of their stuff for as long as possible, so that the reveal, good or bad, carries an authentic emotional wallop. “Those reactions are honest,” Bemko says.
One Saturday last summer, I joined more than 6,000 other individuals who converged on the Baltimore Convention Center for the first taping of Roadshow’s 12th season. Since 1998 the show has been PBS’s top-rated prime-time offering, and the Baltimore event served as a bustling illustration of the concept’s appeal: the producers were flooded with 20,000 requests for free tickets. Only 3,200 were granted, via a random drawing, with two tickets distributed to each household; each attendee was allowed to bring two objects for appraisal, though many seemed to ignore this rule. At least 12,000 objects would be appraised by the 80 antiques experts on hand; a small fraction of them—the most valuable, the strangest, the most vividly recalled—would be chosen to appear on a taped segment of the show.
Participants began lining up before the convention center doors opened at 8:00 A.M., and by midmorning hundreds of them were stacked in a vast holding pen on the center’s main floor, standing placidly beside their stuff. The sight of this multitude shuffling beneath their burdens lends itself to religious metaphor: pilgrims hobbling to Lourdes, Islam’s faithful in mid-haj. Instead, I saw refugees, fleeing some unseen disaster. This sense of offscreen disruption was intensified by the number of attendees carrying weapons: enough men arrived with sabers and rifles to muster a militia. (A trio of Baltimore city police officers was there to make sure the firearms were unloaded.)
Naturally, I had brought my own family treasure—an ancient folding camera in a leather case, my grandfather’s name inscribed in fading gold on the flap. As a child, I was forbidden to play with this object; it seemed older than time itself, the design behind its mysterious unlabeled switches and knobs lost to the ages. Like so many family possessions, it had had a brief period of utility followed by a long and uncertain dormancy; too valuable to discard but not exactly a living room display item, it was hauled from house to house, first by my parents and now by me. Each time I came upon it, I felt the gnaw of responsibility. What to do with this thing? Does it work? What’s it worth?
The answer, at last, was at hand. I presented the camera to one of the six appraisers who subdivided the objects into 25 specialist categories. After inspecting the camera briefly, the appraiser handed me a ticket. I would be heading to the Science and Technology table, one of the less trafficked categories (more popular were paintings and furniture). There I found a white-haired man named Philip Stanley.
When he’s not traveling with Roadshow as part of its troupe of regular appraisers, Stanley has an antiques business in Worcester, Massachusetts. His specialty is vintage scientific instruments, and he opened my camera’s disintegrating paper bellows with a practiced hand. “It’s a Kodak pocket camera,” he said, not looking up. He spoke deliberately, twiddling knobs and switches. “This is a first-generation folding camera, from the early 1920s.” From the rear of the camera body, he removed a small steel stylus that had always mystified me. “This was for writing notes on the paper backing of each picture.” He handed the camera back. “It’s worth $85 to $100.”
My audience with the oracle over, I thanked Stanley and stepped aside for the man behind me, who presented him with a small, dun-colored object. “It’s what they call a reconnaissance compass,” Stanley said, with barely a pause. “It’s World War II military issue. You sight it through this hole in the cover. It’s worth about $25 to $30.”
It’s difficult to explain why I found this exchange so gratifying. Part of it was the reassuring finality of the man’s judgment, a childhood mystery finally put to rest. Most attendees bring objects that are worth less than $100, and many seem relieved that the paintings and credenzas entrusted to them are not in fact irreplaceable museum pieces. Later that afternoon I saw a woman who had spent hours waiting for an appraiser to look at her ornate wooden chair. The verdict—an 1890s machine-made piece, essentially worthless—took her aback. “The people in line thought it was much cooler,” she protested. But she quickly rallied. “Now I won’t worry about it when I sit in it,” she said, shouldering the chair and stalking off.
One might guess that the rise of eBay and the relative ease of acquiring once obscure information online would have made Roadshow attendees a savvier lot on average than they were a decade ago. “They’re a little more cautious,” Bemko says. “They don’t want to be embarrassed on-air.”
Still, there was a strange alchemy of memory and family history at work here, a process that transformed the mundane and mass-produced into the rare and precious. It was a force that made otherwise sane people drive hundreds of miles and wait in line for hours to show their favorite teakettle to a stranger.
The overworked art experts staffing the painting tables saw much of this as they gently accommodated a parade of characters bearing store-bought prints, bizarre amateur efforts, and other non-masterpieces. A mother and daughter handed over a framed picture of a beatific Jesus, clearly a factory-made print. The appraiser inspected it for a polite moment. “It’s 20th century,” she began slowly. “It’s one of these images of Jesus that we see all the time. It’s also not a painting.” She handed it back. Estimated value: $20, generously. Still, the owners smiled broadly. Their favorite painting had been professionally appraised.
For some time, I sat beside Nicholas Lowry, a dapper Manhattan print specialist and a well-known figure among Roadshow groupies. He was wearing a three-piece suit in a startling plaid and bantering with people in his line. The pictures presented to him were almost uniformly terrible: murky etchings, treacly Victorian chromolithographs of blond-haired moppets and spaniels, a water-damaged abstract of unknown provenance. Then a woman appeared with a large circus poster. Her husband, now deceased, was a poster collector. “I lost him,” the woman said by way of explanation. “And all I have is this.”
Lowry’s face became a mask of utter neutrality, neither bored nor unduly interested. An assistant whisked the woman away for makeup. Several hours later she would go before the cameras and get her answer: printed by the Strobridge Lithograph Co. of Cincinnati, the poster was worth $2,000 to $3,000.
When the great tide of stuff finally washes in something of actual value, the appraiser finds a producer and pitches the object and its owner’s story for a taping. Then the expert ceases all contact with the owner. (Generally there’s some homework to do, as well; Roadshow has a 300-volume library of reference bibles.) The tapings themselves are brief but highly ritualized exchanges. The director plants the owner and the appraiser on stools and tells them not to look at the camera. (The owners also never give a last name, for security reasons, and we agreed not to give last names in this story.) A large boom camera stoops to inspect the artifact. After a minute of chitchat and a practiced two-minute seminar from the appraiser, it’s over. At each event the crew will shoot about 80 such segments; 50 of them eventually will air, divided into three episodes.
A poised, silver-haired woman named Diane sat beside her father’s ukulele. It turned out to be no ordinary ukulele: it was made by Martin, the celebrated American builder of high-end acoustic guitars, using rare koa wood harvested from the forests of Hawaii’s Big Island. It had mother-of-pearl inlay and an original hard-shell case trimmed with a fleecy green fabric. “This is the ne plus ultra of ukuleles,” declared the appraiser, a Boston violinmaker named David Bonsey. It sat on a tiny stand as the cameras zoomed and panned about it. It was worth $12,000.
I caught up with Diane later, as she and her husband, Peter, were heading home to Virginia. Diane was carrying the little uke under an arm and seemed beset with worry. Bonsey’s rapturous appraisal had added a new burden in her life; she needed to call an insurance agent. “I’ll be afraid to let it leave the house,” she said.
Roadshow imposes strict rules on commerce: its cast of appraisers, although most of them are professional dealers, cannot buy items directly from the people who flock to the tapings. Sometimes this rule seemed to bring the appraisers nearly to tears. A woman named Jessie brought in a battered but handsome painted chest; it turned out to be a rare 1784 black unicorn blanket chest from the Pennsylvania Dutch community of Berks County, worth upward of $70,000.
The chest drew a big crowd, in part because it wasn’t going to go on the air: its actual owner was Jessie’s father, and the show’s producers told appraiser J. Michael Flanigan that this essentially disqualified Jessie from taping a segment. But Flanigan, a Baltimore-based antique-furniture dealer, didn’t want to let her go. He hovered around for a good 20 minutes, admiring the chest’s intricate painted unicorns. It belonged, he seemed to be saying, in a museum, not in the back of a pickup truck on its way to someone’s living room, and the thought of the piece’s uncertain future seemed to reduce Flanigan to unabashed fandom. “Keep it out of direct sunlight. I’m serious. Well kept, this will fund your children’s education,” he said.
As he fussed over the chest, attendees looked on. Some had had items appraised and found wanting; others may have still held out hope. But the sight of a genuine museum piece seemed to transfix them all. Was this—this dirty box with chipped paint—what it looked like? Was this the elusive Real Thing?
Late in the day the scene took on an air of melancholy. The voyeuristic novelty was replaced by the realization that my family’s precious and unique belongings were unique only to us. Stand long enough in one place at an Antiques Roadshow taping and you will see everything you ever owned parade by. At first this is fascinating. Then it’s depressing; I wanted the mystery back.
If nothing else, this process teaches a lesson about the peril of allowing someone else to determine the value of something you love. Many of the Roadshow appraisers made a habit of concluding their more harsh evaluations with a cheerful sign-off designed to soften the blow. “Treasure it,” they would say, again and again. The rest of this command is left unspoken: “Because no one else will.”
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As I left the convention center, I followed a woman struggling beneath a preposterous gilt-framed mirror and offered to help her get it into an elevator. The mirror was a dead ringer for the one that hung over the fireplace in my living room as a child and now sits in storage. I can’t find a place to put it—with its rampant eagles and acres of golden foliage, it looks as if it belongs in the stateroom of a prewar ocean liner. But I can’t get rid of it, because of the belief, instilled in my mother as a child and then passed on to me, that this was an object of incalculable value. So I was curious to discover what its near-twin might be worth.
The woman shook her head sadly. “It wasn’t what we thought it was,” she told me. I handed the mirror back to her, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to take it. Then she smiled and took it in her arms again. It bent her nearly double as she bore it away.
David Dudley wrote about regrets in the January & February 2008 issue.
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