New York City, Hour 2 (2015)

Antiques Roadshow is back in New York City.

The Dumpster diver in me jumped out and grabbed the garbage and took it home and found this rehearsal rundown from The Ed Sullivan Show.

That immediately got my attention.

I don't know whether you saw my eyes get bigger.

Yeah.

My mother would be turning in her grave with this.

Check out some of New York's best antiques and collectibles coming right up.

Welcome to Antiques Roadshow.

Hi, I'm Mark Walberg in The Big Apple.

New York City has a lot of nicknames, but The Big Apple may be the most well known.

Supposedly, a sportswriter in the 1920s picked up the term from the racetrack and put it in his column.

It caught on and was eventually embraced by the New York Convention and Visitors' Bureau in the 1970s.

The rest, as they say, is history.

So let's take a bite out of this giant fruit and show you some treasures from The Big Apple.

I've brought you a Tiffany inkwell.

It was part of my mom's collection.

My mom was an avid antiquer and would drag my sister and myself to antique shops, secondhand shops and auctions.

And I think maybe on one of those forays, she picked this up.

I don't know much about it.

I know it has some damage on top and otherwise I'm just all yours.

(laughing) Okay, well, it's actually quite a rare piece.

What makes it rare is, it's not part of a mass-produced desk set in which there would be 40 different pieces.

This is much more of an art piece.

It's made by Tiffany Studios, and I can show you the mark right here.

Tiffany Studios, New York, with the number.

And the number corresponds to the number that you would find in the catalogue that was published around the time that this was made.

This was made circa 1905.

It's got the mosaic design, and this is all Tiffany favrile glass mosaic.

Then it has the liner.

We have the part that fits into the inkwell, and then we have the center.

And if you look at it very closely, it's a poppy.

This is pressed and molded glass where these are all beautiful Tiffany glass tiles that have been iridized and then cut individually.

And you have this incredible bronze sculptural design of poppy leaves.

Now, the fun part about this is, even though this was made at Tiffany Studios, Louis Comfort Tiffany did not design this.

In 2007, there was an exhibition in New York at the New York Historical Society.

The title of it was, "Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls: A New Light on Tiffany."

And it turns out that it's very likely that Clara Driscoll designed this inkwell.

And if she didn't actually do the work on it, it's very likely that the Tiffany girls did.

Do you know what your mother might have paid for this?

She didn't have much money in those days.

I think she started collecting the '40s, the '50s.

She probably paid under $50.

In the condition it's in, in a retail shop, it could sell for between $25,000 and $30,000.

Whoa.

Now, you could go out and find the liner.

They can be priced anywhere from $2,000, $3,000.

And they're fairly rare, but it can be done.

And if you were to replace the liner-- and it would be perfectly fine, as long as it's original Tiffany-- the inkwell would be worth as much as $50,000 in a retail shop.

Oh, my goodness.

MAN: These items have been in my family for years.

My uncle, who was a sailor and stationed at Lakehurst for a bit, gave them to my grandmother.

And my grandmother gave them to me, thinking I was the person in the family that was most interested in history.

The story I heard was that they were from the Hindenburg.

I was quite young when I got them.

I didn't think too much about it then, but years later, I was watching an episode of the Antiques Roadshow, actually.

Someone brought in a fork that had this mark on it, and I thought, "That looks like the mark that's on the things I have."

Since then I've been able to do a little research and it appears to be that I think that mark is from the company that owned and operated the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg was the largest airship every made, largest aircraft of any sort.

Over 800 feet long.

It crashed on the sixth of May, 1937 in Lakehurst, New Jersey, at Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

And everyone has seen the film strip of it crashing and burning.

You know, hearing the "Oh, the humanity."

And at the time, it was this horribly tragic accident.

When the Hindenburg crashed, it caught on fire.

And there were over 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas that basically burned the ship in 35, 45 seconds.

There were 97 passengers and 36 people died.

The Hindenburg burned so badly and so hot that almost everything was destroyed.

There are a few items that were left and most of those were kind of shoved off to the side, later to be picked up by the German authorities and sent back to Germany.

Sure.

So there were very few items that not only survived the fire and the crash, but survived the recovery.

You mentioned it has the mark of the German Zeppelin Transport Company.

And it is on both items here.

They are both marked with the appropriate hallmarks for the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin.

Now, the Graf Zeppelin was assembled in 1940-- it didn't crash.

The Hindenburg with its fiery crash is really an icon.

It kind of signified the end of airship travel.

So what are we looking for?

How do we prove that these were on the Hindenburg?

Right, nothing says "Hindenburg" on it.

Right, nothing says directly "Hindenburg."

Well, one, Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Your uncle was stationed there.

Yes.

This is also made of silver-plated copper and this is a silver-plated base metal.

And, see where the silver plating has peeled and bubbled up, especially here?

That's what that is, huh?

And underneath here.

You've got to get at some significantly high temperatures you're not going to get from a normal fire in order to generate those kind of marks.

You've also got areas here of slight discoloration, slight bubbling and peeling on the platter, too.

This great bowl, this great plate from the Hindenburg-- we estimate, at auction, it would sell for about $3,000 to $5,000 a piece.

A piece.

Wow, that's terrific, to say the least.

To say the least.

WOMAN: I inherited it from my grandmother a few years ago when she died.

And I loved her very much and I love this chair.

We've done some genealogy research and we think that the family was originally Dutch and came to Bergen County, New Jersey, quite a long time ago.

Like, how long ago do you think?

I don't know if it would be late 1600s or early 1700s.

Okay.

Something like that.

I've been watching you look at this chair and put your hands on it and everything, and I can tell that you love it.

I do love it.

Well, you should.

It's such a rare survivor.

What this chair represents is a school of chairmakers that began in the late 1600s, and the best ones were made in the late 17th, early 18th century, and then they kept doing it in the tradition of this elongated finial.

And the earlier ones were going to have turnings like this in the back in between the slats.

And the other thing this one has is those sausage turnings.

That's one of the things, when you look at early American seating and you're looking for things that go way back that are rare survivors, this is one of them.

This is probably from the first quarter of the 18th century.

This chair is part of a group of seating that we find from Dutch descendant folks who were in New York and New Jersey.

And the earliest ones were made in the New York area.

In the old inventories that I've seen, they actually call it a "great chair."

That's what it was called.

It feels kind of throne-like.

This was a very important piece of furniture in the house.

This is where the patriarch of the family sat every night, probably, and read his newspaper or smoked his pipe or whatever.

And the other thing is that it's been a revered thing in your family ever since then because it's been taken care of.

These are very fragile.

As they get old, they dry out and if you tipped the thing over the wrong way, you'd break the finial right off.

Yeah, nobody's allowed to sit in it.

I think this is probably a second-generation coat of paint on it.

There's a lot of little brass decoration.

And I was going to show everybody this rondelle on the side.

I love that, yeah.

I think what happened was, sometime after the early 1800s, they decided that they were going to jazz it up a little bit, maybe during the Regency period.

But it didn't really hurt anything.

I think that might even be a patriotic thing.

And the seat is fiber rush, and my guess is that's probably a replacement.

In the 18th century, it would have been bigger twine in the rush.

Oh, interesting.

For insurance purposes, a chair like this-- I'm being conservative-- would be $6,000.

Wow.

Wow, okay.

Yeah, that's a surprise.

Ten to 12 years ago, this chair would have probably sold for $12,000 or $15,000.

Wow.

WOMAN: My father-in-law received it from his boss, Jasper Crane.

My father-in-law was a chauffeur for Jasper, and Jasper was one of the vice-presidents of the DuPont Company.

My father-in-law chauffeured him back and forth to work and whenever they went on trips, and he was just very good to him and replaced his clock and gave my father this one probably in the late '60s, I'm going to say.

I had a sister-in-law who wanted his grandfather's clock, which was new when he got it, so he told me he wanted me to have this one.

This is a 19th-century bracket clock, but more importantly, it's a 19th-century miniature bracket clock.

Standard size for these is maybe twice this size.

This form was very popular in the 18th and early 19th century, but the most popular today with collectors, and the most valuable, are the very large ones and the very small ones, like this.

So it's very desirable because of its size.

It has an ebonized case and this wonderful miniature handle here and these ball feet.

If we open up the dial door, we can see that it's signed on the dial, "Grimaldi and Johnson."

They were on the Strand, a street in London.

They were in partnership between 1809 and 1828, so we know that this clock was made during that period.

Wow.

It has a brass dial with a silvered surface, and we can see it's got one winding hole, so it's a time-only clock; it does not strike.

It's got these wonderful fish-scale side lights, and if we turn all the way around, we see that it is signed again, "Grimaldi & Johnson," and "London" on the back plate of the movement.

Now, this is a miniaturized movement.

It's a very small example similar to what would be in a larger bracket clock, but it's very, very high quality.

It's a very well-made movement, and this would have been expensive in its day.

A conservative auction estimate for this clock would be $6,000 to $8,000.

Oh, my goodness.

(laughing) I'd rather have it than the grandfather clock.

I'm sure you would.

MAN: I collect bobble heads and I went to get a bobble head from a yard sale, and the woman who sold me the bobble head invited me in her house.

She just kept bringing out amazing thing after amazing thing.

And she had gotten them from her aunt, who she said worked for the Mets and that's how she got the whole collection.

And you're a Met fan yourself?

Die-hard Mets fan born and raised in New York.

These are all dating from the 1960s, the very birth of the team.

So which one of these is your favorite?

Probably Lady Met because she doesn't exist anymore, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me because she's so cool.

This is obviously a souvenir item from the 1960s.

I think there's a date of 1967 on the back, but not a lot of these were sold at the ball park and not a lot of them are out there in the wild.

And when you do find them-- and it's rare-- the hat, always gone, the pendant, always gone.

You have a very early Mr. Met bobble head doll.

This probably predates that.

What also you have here is this wonderful ashtray.

This is from the dedication of Shea Stadium.

Shea Stadium came into being in 1964.

And what else is neat, you have a signed ball from the era as well, probably '63 or '64.

And then you have a pin here from one of the hot dog vendors.

Amazing collection, wonderful things.

There's more stuff, but just what's on the table here, I'd insure it for $2,500.

Wow, great.

WOMAN: May dad has always been a self-taught mechanic, and he became an automobile dealer, and he thought it would be an interesting idea back in the '60s to try to work out sort of a barter arrangement with artists-- new artists and anybody who had anything of interest, really-- and he put an ad in the Times wanting to trade automotive repairs, parts, cars, actually.

It took a long while, but ultimately, the response was just certainly wilder than anything he had expected.

CBS News did a radio interview with him, the New York Times picked it up, and he got flooded with written letters wanting to engage in some type of a barter arrangement.

This is a work by Alex Katz.

Yes.

It's signed and dated here '63.

Is that around the time your father acquired it?

Yes it is, a few years later.

The big response was somewhere in the 1967 range.

Oh, okay.

I believe that there was an introduction made by another artist and that my father actually met Alex Katz and did whatever type of exchange was done.

And who was the other artist?

The other artist was Neil Welliver.

Interesting.

Alex Katz was born in 1927.

He studied both at Cooper Union in New York and Skowhegan in Maine.

And he said that he learned how to paint from drawings at Cooper Union, but at Skowhegan, they encouraged him to draw from life, and this was a major factor in his development as an artist.

He also later taught at Yale, and he got that teaching position through Neil Welliver.

Oh, that's interesting.

Katz lived in Greenwich Village in the '50s, and that's when abstract expressionism was the major dominant school of painting in New York.

And he and a few other artists decided to buck this trend and embrace the idea of realistically painting figures and landscapes.

Katz actually became known as kind of the leader of the school of new realism in contemporary art.

And what he's most known for are these images that are sort of flatly painted.

They look almost two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional.

Your picture is a bit more sketchy.

It does have this wonderful green color that is associated with Katz.

You see, he used the green in a lot of his pictures.

This is in oil.

It's painted on board which may be masonite, but I can't see the back of it.

One thing that might affect the value of this work is if it could be determined if it was a study for another work.

I think if this were to be offered in a retail gallery, the asking price might be in the $50,000 range.

My goodness.

What a wonderful surprise.

I bought it probably 40 years ago in Freehold, New Jersey, and I went to an antique store, and the woman was a bit of an eccentric.

She was wearing a top hat.

I bought the rug from her for probably $25, and she told me that she had used some rugs like it for drop cloths.

She said she threw them out.

So I went to the local garbage dump and I looked around for them and I couldn't find them.

APPRAISER: And do you have any idea what type of rug it is?

I knew it was Caucasian, but I didn't know what kind it was.

I thought it was a dragon carpet.

Okay, okay.

Well, you are correct about the Caucasian attribution.

You know, the Caucasus is a mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea primarily populated by nomads.

And they're known for weaving very graphic rugs like this using primary colors.

This type of rug comes from the Kuba district, which is in northeast Caucasus, and it comes from the village of Seychour.

And there are a few defining characteristics of this rug that make it a Seychour.

First and foremost, it has a blue triple-chorded selvage, or edge finish.

And then it has liberal usage of bright orange and bright red.

Now, we date these rugs based on the dyes.

Aniline or chemical dyes generally didn't appear in carpets until around 1900, so the fact that you have these hot reds and hot oranges, it more or less dates the rug to the early 20th century.

And it's also very unusual because the standard type of carpet from this region is going to be a smaller carpet, perhaps four by six in size, or sometimes a runner size, but this rug is really in a gallery size, approximately five feet in width and 15 feet in length.

You've got a little bit of bleeding of color over here.

Some orange has bled into the white.

And we have some areas that are torn.

Those rips were there when I bought it.

Now, you said that this rug has a water event in its history.

Would you like to share that with us?

Hurricane Sandy.

I had it in my garage underneath the house on Long Beach Island and I got 18 inches of water in my garage.

I had a box of rugs.

By the time I got to the box, it was probably 15 days.

Okay, so this rug was more or less saturated in water for 15 days.

Yep.

The retail value for this carpet in this condition would be $5,500.

WOMAN: I had a neighbor.

She was an elderly woman, and she really had no family.

And she was very kind to myself and my children, and she gave it to me as a gift.

I never used it, I never inquired about it.

It was beautiful.

And I just put it away.

I figured one day, I would give it to one of my children.

How long ago was it that she gave it to you?

I would say it was in the early '70s.

Okay, and do you have any idea how she acquired it?

No, I would say... She was very wealthy and she enjoyed the arts and she went out all the time.

She went to the opera all the time.

She had many beautiful, beautiful objects.

Well, I'm not surprised because it's a beautiful purse.

First off, what we have here is this beautiful silk brocade.

And this is in a Persian motif, and it's really in extraordinarily fine condition.

Now, this piece is from the 1920s.

Oh, really?

I would date this about 1925.

Oh, I'm very surprised.

It is by Cartier and it is signed on the inside here.

On the inside edge, it says "Cartier."

And when Cartier uses those block letters, that's how I know that it's a Cartier New York.

Oh, really?

This was probably designed in Paris.

The frame is 18 karat yellow gold, and we also have some white enamel here.

The pinkish stones around the outside edge here, these are all pink tourmalines.

Little diamonds inset into the buckle clasp.

In addition, on the thumb tab, it's pink tourmaline as well.

There was a time in the 1920s when Cartier must have acquired a large amount of this particular brocade because I've seen a number of purses, hand clutches, items that they made out of these.

I even once had a cigarette case where they took this pattern and engraved this whole pattern into the surface of the cigarette case.

Oh, that must be beautiful.

At auction, this piece would bring anywhere between $15,000 to $20,000.

No.

Yes.

Wow, oh my goodness.

Really?

Yeah.

This is a phenomenal example and it's in such pristine condition.

That's the beauty of this, because of the silk being in good shape.

I'm glad I didn't give it to one of my children to play with.

I was going to say... To play dolls with.

Really, have one of the kids take it to school.

(laughing) The Apollo Theater in Harlem is an iconic cultural institution.

It's been a top venue for predominantly African-American talent since the 1930s, nurturing emerging artists and attracting the biggest names in jazz, rock and roll, soul, hip hop, comedy and more.

The Apollo Theater is building an archive to document the history of this legendary performance space, and they're calling on the public to help them in their search for Apollo-related treasures.

Tell me about the legacy of the Apollo Theater.

BILLY MITCHELL: It's the epicenter of black culture and American culture, and it's a place where you knew if you came here, you were going to see great performances every time you came.

The building itself was built in 1914 as an all-white burlesque house, but at the end of the Harlem Renaissance around the 1930s, African Americans were coming in to perform at the Apollo Theater.

And it brought in the best of the best.

Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, the Isley Brothers, Dionne Warwick.

All of these people started on Amateur Night at the Apollo and then went on to become legends.

James Brown started on Amateur Night, and James Brown has had the most attendance of any performer at the Apollo Theater.

What are some of the things you hope to recover?

We would love to recover posters of different concerts, any snapshots of people performing on the stage.

Whenever there were shows here, the band, the Apollo House Band, had the band stands right in front that says "Apollo Theatre."

If anyone has that, that would be awesome for us to have for our archives.

There was once a microphone that used to come up out of the floor here.

When the Supremes would walk out... ♪ Stop!

In the name of love ♪ ...and then this mic would come up out of the floor.

If anybody knows where the mic stand that came up out of the floor of the Apollo, please contact us.

We would love to have it.

Where do you think some of these iconic items went over the years?

The Smithsonian has some objects.

Some artists have just taken things with them.

There was a fire here, and the caretaker Doll Thomas had a chest of different Apollo Theater tools and costumes, and he couldn't keep them.

He couldn't store them, and he gave them away.

So there's a lot of things out there that people might have that are part of this Apollo Theater history.

We need your help, we want to keep this legacy and the history alive, so let us know.

And I thank you very much for your time.

You're more than welcome, Mark.

WOMAN: This hat was given to my ancestor by Teddy Roosevelt, and this cartoon was drawn about my ancestor resigning from the election.

You have this cartoon of your ancestor, whose name is Jonas VanDuzer.

And I did look him up, and he was active in Republican Party politics in the late 19th and early 20th century.

He ran for the state assembly a couple of times.

Never won, but he was still an active party member.

But apparently in 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt broke away from the Republican Party-- because he was very frustrated with all of the internal fighting and the rightward drift of the Republican Party-- he broke away, did form his own party, the Progressive Party or the Bull Moose Party, your ancestor followed him, left the Republican Party, which would have been a very big deal, and then campaigned as a Progressive, or a Bull Moose Party.

So as a member of the Bull Moose Party, Teddy Roosevelt gives your ancestor this hat.

And you can see your ancestor wearing the hat in the photograph.

That's a piece of campaign material, and it says "Jonas VanDuzer for Congress, 1914."

So Roosevelt runs for president in 1912.

He does not win, the party is not successful, but it also doesn't die.

It continues for a few more election cycles, and so your ancestor is part of that political process.

So here is the hat, and it actually has the gift presentation.

So it says "TR to JVD," so Teddy Roosevelt to... Jonas... ...Jonas VanDuzer.

And the cartoon, it's a 1914, so it's from his election for Congress, which he doesn't win.

Only five out of 138 people were elected from this party.

The cartoon is by a man named Zimmerman who was a popular political cartoonist of the day, and it's a caricature of your ancestor and the fact that he's hanging up his hat.

He's dropping out of the race, he's bidding adieu, but he still has the chip on his shoulder, which is the chip the Progressives had when they left the Republican Party.

It is one of these groups that is greater than the sum of its parts, right?

And because you've kept everything together and everything fits so nicely into the narrative, for the group, I would put an auction estimate of $3,000 to $5,000.

Wow.

WOMAN: In 2001, my mom died, and I found this box in her safety deposit box.

She was very frugal.

She grew up poor, and then even though she wasn't so poor, she would go shopping in the Bronx, and my father would shop at Fifth Avenue.

They traveled a lot through Europe, a lot to England.

I would think he probably bought that box.

I can't imagine her buying a box like that.

So it's made in England.

It is?

Yes.

It's an English silver box made by Gerald Benney.

Okay.

And he is considered one of the most important, celebrated craftsmen of the 20th century in England.

And I think one of the things that really sets him apart is that he really started to sort of make in the '50s and '60s... His era is really defined by trying to find new ways to depart from existing styles.

So he was really trying to forge new decorative schemes that really spoke about the period in which they were made.

And I think to people who collect post-modern pieces, he's considered very important, and very important to the history of British design in general.

At one time, he held up to four royal warrants, which means that he was a producer for the Queen in certain categories-- jewelry, silver, etcetera.

So that, I think, is a real way of gauging how important he was and how fine his skill was as a craftsman.

Mm-hmm.

This particular box is silver with 18 karat gold knobs across the top.

The decorative scheme on this actually became known within the trade as the Benney bark sort of technique, or Benney bark finish.

Uh-huh.

And that is this wonderful textured finish that we see here.

Yeah.

And he actually fell upon this particular finish sort of by accident.

He was hammering a piece of silver out and he didn't notice that his hammer was broken, and he looked down at what he was hammering and it had these wonderful gouge marks in it, which sort of looked a bit like bark.

Now, there are a series of marks on this.

His name is written underneath, and also "Sterling" and "18K."

And another really nice feature of this box is that it has also the radially finished underside.

It's basically got everything that a collector of boxes-- and there are many of those-- would want to find.

It's hallmarked 1972, it's got the date letter on it for 1972.

He first started making boxes in the '60s.

An identical box to this one recently sold in June 2014 at auction in London for 3,750 pounds, which would be around $6,000 at auction.

Right, wow.

I would estimate it at auction for anywhere between $5,000 to $7,000 to reflect that result.

My mother would be turning in her grave with this.

(laughing) MAN: My great-uncle served in World War I, and he was a radio operator.

And he transmitted this message after the Armistice was signed to let the armies know that the war was over.

He initialed it, he dated it, and put the time when he received the response back from each of the armies that he sent it to.

He died when I was, like, three or four years old, so I never got to meet him, never really got to know him.

I heard about the message and was always interested from being a little boy and started to talk to his daughter, and she gave it to me in 1997.

Well, what's interesting about this particular telegram, obviously there's historical importance of it announcing the Armistice for the end of the war, but you mentioned these notations.

So he talks about receiving response back.

This is happening while he's doing this.

This is all real-time telling.

This occupied the same space when this entire war was ending.

And here we are, this year is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the war, and this is a telegram signaling the end of the war.

So obviously, there were probably more than one of these.

There would have been ones from the Germans and the French and the British, and there would have been ones from different army units throughout the geography.

But because this is one that clearly was annotated in the field, it's one of the early versions of it going out.

Your great-uncle also wrote about this in a letter, and we have part of it here.

Tell me about this letter.

Well, he wrote his father, describing some of the events when he was serving during the war.

He actually wrote in the letter saying that he sent this message out.

Do you know where he was when he sent this?

I believe he was in Seuilly, France, but I haven't been able to substantiate that.

On the photograph, it says on the back, "Somewhere in France, Daddy."

It would take some effort to figure out exactly where he was, but clearly he was in France at the time.

From a collector perspective, you have the richness of the letter, which puts it all into context, and the fact that we know that it was there at the time, in the field, with original annotations as it was going out.

And of course, to make it even more complete, we have the photograph of him at his signaling device.

I would say we're looking at a minimum retail value of $2,000 to $2,500.

Oh, okay.

That's more than I expected, really, so... MAN: Back in 1996, I was driving down the street and saw some trash that didn't look like trash.

The Dumpster diver in me jumped out and grabbed the garbage and took it home and found all kinds of neat stuff, but probably the most important thing I found was this rehearsal rundown from the Ed Sullivan Show.

And after looking at it more, I realized that it was from February 9, 1964, which was The Beatles' very first appearance on the show.

So you found that in the Dumpster.

That was in the Dumpster.

And was this in the Dumpster with it?

That wasn't.

After finding the interesting stuff, we knocked on the door of the house and met the owner's son, who was cleaning out the house, and developed a rapport with him and proceeded to purchase some items from him, and the autographed photo is one of the items I purchased.

I paid $100 for it.

Wow.

And how did his dad come up with this stuff?

Where did it come from, did he tell you?

From what I know, his father was a photographer for the CBS network, and The Ed Sullivan Show was one of his beats, so he had access to The Beatles during one of their appearances.

That's great, that's terrific.

And you know, when you think about The Beatles, what comes to mind is their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and interestingly enough, Ed Sullivan wanted them to make one appearance and he offered them a pretty good sum of money, and their manager, Brian Epstein at the time, said, "No, I'd rather take less money but have them on three times."

So this was their first appearance, and they were to appear once a week for three weeks.

And when you look at the rehearsal sheet, you can see right there, it lists The Beatles' three songs they were going to play there, and they came on at the end and closed the show again with some more songs.

It's really a question now of the provenance, and when you have a photo like this signed, and I believe it's inscribed up here and it says, "To Grace," and from what you were mentioning, you think Grace was the gentleman's daughter.

I'm not 100% sure, but most likely.

So now what we've done is we've taken a photo that the son has said that it was signed at the show that night, his dad got it, and you've tied it together for provenance with the original rehearsal list, which is very scarce in and of itself.

Rehearsal lists like that, there may not be another one out there.

There may be plenty of them, but I've never seen one.

That does add quite a bit of value.

In terms of the photograph itself, signatures are authentic, it's a wonderful image.

A couple little question marks, but nothing major.

I see where Paul signed there, you do have a little bit of a loss of ink for a second and then maybe a restart, but again, 100% authentic.

Beatles photos signed run the gamut in a very wide range.

If I was going to place the two pieces up at auction, and we're assuming that it was signed that night, I would put a presale auction estimate at $18,000 to $24,000 for the pair.

So I'm thrilled that you found it, I'm glad that you saved it, and I'm really glad that you brought it in.

If the photograph was dated, I would have put the estimate way, way higher.

MAN: It's my grandpa's mandolin.

He passed away about nine years ago, lived here in Brooklyn most of his life, and he left it to me.

And you played it yourself a little?

I played it, actually.

Right before he passed away, we had it restrung, we went out and bought them ourself, and it worked.

It's a 1924 Gibson A2Z mandolin.

It's in its original case, and it's in original condition and shows some pick wear.

It's clearly been played.

The rest of the mandolin is crack-free and all of its original parts, including its original tail piece cover, marked "The Gibson."

You can tell it's a 1924 for a couple of reasons.

One is the celluloid around the sound hole.

It has a snakehead headstock, and this is the old style pick guard with the clamp on the side, and they changed to a newer style pick guard in 1925.

You have the most desirable Gibson A-model mandolin that they made ever.

It's the one that everybody wants to play for A mandolins.

On today's market, at retail, this mandolin would bring $5,500 in a retail shop.

Nice.

I'm gonna leave it in a case from now on.

MAN: I've been doing some of my own research on it by reading a lot of different books and everything else.

I'm hopeful that is a George Ohr authentic piece.

I purchased it from an antique shop in northwestern New Jersey.

I was told that they could not authenticate it.

To me, it was an item of beauty.

It looked like it had a possible potential of being an Ohr piece.

I was looking at the walls, which I thought were thin-- not being an expert, I don't know if they're thin enough-- and I was looking at the manipulation.

When I turned it and looked upside-down, the clay looked like it could have been real to me, but nobody could authenticate it, so more or less I said, "Well, I like it, I think it's beautiful, but I can only pay what I think decorative value is for it."

I offered him $250.

He balked at me and everything else and then eventually said, "Okay."

If it's real, I'm very thrilled.

If it's not, I think I'm okay.

Well, you've certainly done all your research.

It is not real.

Okay.

George Ohr is a bit of a victim of his own success.

Well over 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there was a whole crop of George Ohr vessels that came out that had started out being real or bisque pieces, as in unglazed, and they were brought to a professional potter who put a new glaze on because it was so much more desirable and expensive when you would sell a piece that had Ohr layers versus bisque.

Right.

And so there was a whole lot of faked glazes out there, and those became fairly easy to spot once you knew what to look for.

Right.

As we talked on Antiques Roadshow to our millions of viewers about this situation, and as the prices for George Ohr kept chugging along, and as there's this beautiful Frank Gehry-designed museum opening in Biloxi, Mississippi, there's a lot of attention to George Ohr.

And so it was easy for people who really wanted to make something new.

They had enough data to become better.

This is the second generation of fakes.

This is fake from the ground up.

You're right, it is thin.

The weight is good.

The folds, if you're familial with Ohr folds, he did fold, but they're not exactly like that.

It's a subtle thing.

The dimples, he did dimple, but not exactly like that.

The interior would not be quite so limpid and pale as that.

He used a mottled glaze in gun metal over amber, but he didn't really use a glaze that looked exactly like that, and not in combination with these.

It's subtle stuff.

And by telling you this and by telling our millions of viewers, and by telling the forger, who is I'm sure listening, I am giving him or her...

Right.

...more data to make these even better, so I cannot tell you everything on camera.

I will tell you other things just between you and me later.

Right, right.

So all these things known, it is not perfect, it's not good enough.

It is very close.

What is a concern to me is that this person, who is in the Northeast, keeps producing them, selling them on the Internet.

They appear, and they are seen and they are purchased by people who just don't know.

Wow.

Okay, okay.

Its decorative value just as it is may very well be in the $250 range, retail.

Right.

To me, it's still attractive.

MAN: This is a desk.

It came to me from my third great-grandparents, who lived in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Well, it's interesting that you say your family's from Massachusetts, because this desk is a distinctive form for Massachusetts.

It's what we call a Federal figured mahogany ladies writing desk, and was made between about 1790 and 1810.

It's an amazing form.

This is really high quality cabinet making.

I just love this bookmatched veneer on the doors.

It's got this great swirling grain.

We've got this nice, distinctive line inlay with a bellflower, you've got this wonderful shaded triangular border, and what's really another nice touch is if you look below the border, they've got this kind of tiger-striped mahogany.

Additionally, if we move to the inlaid escutcheon, they've used figured maple, which gets this extra vibrant tiger-striped grain.

And the selection of the wood is amazing.

It's almost a lyrical quality to it that draws your eye up the drawers as the grain goes back from left to right and continues up.

It's a really magnificent piece.

If we open up the desk door here, you've got a nice arrangement of what we call short drawers and these wonderful pigeon holes with the cyma curve-shaped aprons.

If you open up your door, you'll find a distinctive characteristic.

Your ancestor that used this was likely right-handed.

This was where she kept ink.

Nothing on the left, but over here, we can show the writing surface, and this is how it operates.

We can tell that it's been refinished, but it's been gently refinished.

There's still good figure and color to the wood; it hasn't been scrubbed.

The brass has been replaced at some point in its life.

It would have had oval-plated brasses at one time.

But overall, it's a superb quality piece.

If I had to put an insurance value on it today, I'd safely say insure it for about $10,000 in today's market.

Wow, great.

It's a fantastic piece.

WOMAN: When my mother was pregnant with me, she was turning 40, and my father had befriended the widow of Carlebach, the famous art dealer and collector.

And he ended up purchasing about 20 pieces of pre-Columbian and African art as a collection for my mother for her 40th birthday, and these are two of the pieces.

So now without revealing your mother's age, that would have been approximately when?

Approximately about 27 years ago.

Okay, we apologize to your mother for saying that.

What have you learned about them?

Well, the shell piece was used in an art show at a museum, and they said that it was from the high Mayan period.

It might have been a piece of jewelry.

And then the jade piece has never been appraised.

We don't know much about it.

It might be Costa Rican or Mexican, we're not totally sure.

Okay, let's start first with the Mayan shell piece.

It is Mayan-- I think it's from Guatemala-- and it's carved shell.

And this is what we would call a prestige piece.

It has holes up here in the top, and it could either have been worn as a pendant or it could have been sewed onto a garment.

This is from a group we call Mezcala.

Mm-hmm.

And this is from the western side of Mexico.

This one dates 100 to 300 B.C., and when you say high Mayan, this one over here, it's 600 to 900 A.D. Now, Carlebach was pretty much done by the end of the '60s.

Right.

And so if we find an object that has Carlebach or Klejman or one of those early dealers in New York, we know that all by itself, that's really great provenance.

Since these are both Carlebach pieces, that immediately got my attention.

I don't know whether you saw my eyes get bigger.

Yeah.

Collection history is really a big deal, so that's important.

But now there's another reason why it's important.

In 1970, the United Nations passed something called the UNESCO Convention, and this was to protect the patrimony of various countries.

Now, most important museums in the United States are using that date of 1970 as a "do not access something after" date.

In other words, they're using it as a firewall saying, "If we know where this thing's been prior to 1970, it's okay."

Right.

So that added provenance is really a big deal.

How much do you think your father paid for these?

I know that the shell was purchased for upwards of $1,000, and that the jade statue was probably between $300 and $400.

Okay.

There is an issue that we have in pre-Columbian art.

Anytime anyone sees something green, it's jade.

I would have to describe this as a green stone until it was tested and I could say definitively it's jade or jadeite or that sort of thing.

So it's green stone at this point.

Would that change the price at all?

Probably not in this case, because I think it's a pretty strong piece regardless.

Okay, let's get to the good part.

(laughs) Now, on the shell piece, it's beautifully executed, it's really nicely done, you have that museum provenance.

I'm going to say $4,000 to $6,000 on that.

Now, $4,000 to $6,000 would be, like, a gallery price.

I would not be surprised at all to see that at $8,000 to $12,000 if you were in some important gallery on Fifth or Madison or something, in New York.

On the Mezcala piece, it has this beautiful angularity.

The sculptural quality of this is great.

It's a little bit small, but it's elegant and it's got that great collection history.

I'm going to say $4,000 to $6,000.

Wow.

Now, again, I wouldn't be at all surprised if, say, this were in an auction or it was in a great gallery and it went for $5,000 to $7,000 or $6,000 to $10,000.

I wouldn't be surprised, but I want to be conservative and I don't want you to come after me later.

(laughs) You've brought in a very interesting painting by the artist Joseph Kleitsch, and I understand you know a fair amount about him.

He lived and worked in Southern California from around 1920 to the mid-1930s.

And I lived in Laguna Beach then, I grew up there, and this is a picture of the way the town looked at that time.

Oh, my goodness.

So this is probably done in the early 1920s, would you judge?

I would say toward the late '20s or '30s.

How did your family acquire it?

My father knew him, and unfortunately, he passed away, but my father and mother knew his widow, and they did buy it from his widow.

What year would that have been?

That was 1939.

Well, that's perfect provenance, going right from the artist's wife to your family.

Joseph Kleitsch was actually born in Hungary, and he studied in Budapest, Paris and Munich, and he was quite accomplished.

Even at the age of 17, he was doing major portraits and painted the portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria.

He comes to the United States in 1901 and ends up going to Chicago, where he teaches at the Art Institute.

And all the while, he seemed to be painting mostly portraits.

But when he moves to California around 1920 and he moves to Laguna Beach, he finds that he's infatuated with the countryside, with the town, with the townspeople, with the ocean, and so he documents what he sees.

And here we have, as the label on the back indicates, this is a drugstore in Laguna Beach.

He also travels to Northern California, and by the late 1920s, he also spent some time in Europe.

He comes back to the United States by 1931 and passes away at the age of 49, so he was quite young, and therefore, his works are fairly rare.

He was considered one of the premier California impressionists, and you can see how wonderful this painting is, with the beautiful light.

He was known as a colorist, and it has wonderful bravura, or flourishing brushwork.

And this is an oil on canvas.

Now, when your parents bought the painting, how much did they pay?

They paid $100.

$100?

Yes.

Although the market in general for this kind of painting has fallen off in the last ten years, his market has remained the same.

If this were in a gallery, most likely in California, although his work is collected elsewhere, a gallery price would be $500,000.

Oh, really?

That's quite nice to know.

Yes!

When we saw the painting, we were all very excited, so it's a pleasure to be able to talk about it.

Oh, it's certainly all my pleasure.

(laughs) And now it's time for the Roadshow Feedback Booth.

We brought in my Clare Graham bottle cap sculpture.

We thought it might be a hat, a brooch, or a pterodactyl, but it's just a sculpture out of bottle caps.

We brought this letter that I received in high school from Robert F. Kennedy and found out that it's actually his signature.

Thought it was a stamp, so we got a pleasant surprise.

I brought my family heirloom, right?

I figured, "Oh, I'm going to make a fortune," right?

I go up to the desk, and the appraiser, one of my favorite appraisers, is talking about it, and then he tells me, "The two of them are worth five dollars."

But at least I made a killing with this.

This is worth $150 to $250.

Life's not fair.

We were hoping that these prints would pay for a college education, but they... ...can barely even pay for lunch.

I brought this brooch that my grandmother left me.

Apparently, they're from the '70s, and they had them made in porcelain or in plastic-- I have the plastic.

I thought it would only be worth five dollars.

Turns out it's worth $25, so yay!

I brought this beautiful, I thought, valuable bank because my husband told me to bring it, but it turns out that it's not worth the price of a Coney Island hot dog.

But instead of taking a limo home, we're taking the train home.

But we had a wonderful time at Antiques Roadshow.

(humming theme song) I'm Mark Walberg.

Thanks for watching.

See you next time on Antiques Roadshow.

Hi there!

What have you got?

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