Antiques roadkill

Digging for dollars in Rhode Island

by Gerald Peary

The signature moment on PBS's Antiques Roadshow comes when some ordinary citizen turns up with a cherished heirloom and is informed, to his or her surprise, that it's fabulously more valuable than anyone expected.

What you don't see on TV are the endless lines of hopeful losers: the people who've toted paper bags of knickknacks, wheeled in handcarts of unmistakable trash. When the Roadshow hits town, as it did recently at Providence's Rhode Island Convention Center, most people don't even come close to striking it rich. I'm talking people with a recent dime-store-bought plastic toy in one hand and a dusty kitsch print in the other, or a five-foot wicker monstrosity hauled in on rollers. For the appraisers who act as gatekeepers, the hardest task must be remaining polite through the long day off-camera, as they kindly (or not-so-kindly) reject the most dubious of non-collectibles.

Waiting in line with my own goodies, I actually saw a man stroll in with Picasso's Don Quixote, that ubiquitous print of the freshman dorm room. Presumably an antiques appraiser clued the man in that what he owned was, alas, a Pablo copy. I was there when Noel Barrett, the ponytailed toy expert from Carversville, Pennsylvania (he's often on the televised show), examined a metal black Mammy and also a Jonah and the Whale and informed their poor owner: "These are fakes, made in Taiwan in the last few years. Sorry!"

And sorry, too, for those with items a step up, such as the woman who had been hoarding her spiffy boxed Barbie and Susie Goose furniture since 196l. "I think they're worth maybe $3000," she told me, just before being quoted a value of $200 each. Ditto the nice couple holding a lovely Victorian print in a stylish oak frame. "Sixty dollars," they were told. If anything, the off-camera appraisers for Antiques Roadshow seem to lean toward underestimates.

I hope. Or else my choices of what to have evaluated were just as pie-in-the-sky as anybody's. A Swiss gold watch that my grandfather transported from Eastern Europe in 1950, and which my mother believes to be worth many thousands of dollars, was called only "several notches over middle-of-the-road" and priced at $600 to $700 by watch expert Kevin Zavian. A Lincoln-Andrew Johnson 1864 campaign song book was dismissed by an expert on political memorabilia as "not a lot of value . . . mass-produced . . . maybe worth $15 to $20." Most dismaying, an appraiser knowledgeable about popular culture practically yawned holding up my nine shiny James Dean fan magazines from 1956. "These might be worth two to four dollars each," she said.

Two to four dollars?

So who actually gets on the TV show? Perhaps one person in 500 shows up with something deemed genuinely valuable. When this happens, the appraiser, via walkie-talkie, calls over the program's executive producer for a look. If the producer approves, the person with the precious object is invited to adjourn to the green room for makeup and a powdering. Soon after that, the cameras roll.

At the convention center in Providence, someone arrived with slave tags dug out of a yard in South Carolina. The worth: $15,000. A woman unveiled a jade, ivory, and gold box. Estimated price tag: $125,000!

On TV, the Roadshow administers its disappointments sparingly; occasionally a greedy person gets comeuppance on camera, and we feel that justice has somehow been served. But the real disappointment is dispensed in bulk, here in the vestibule. In Providence, 6500 people showed up with items. Of those, about 50 were videotaped, and only about 30 will make the final cut when the show is aired next spring.