'Antiques Roadshow' offers rich cache of stories

     Whether or not they were pleased by appraisals of their belongings, people were eager to tell the stories of their prized possessions at the recent "Antiques Roadshow" event at the Century II Performing Arts & Convention Center in Wichita.
    "Antiques Roadshow" is PBS’ highest-rated television series, with 11 million viewers weekly. Eighty appraisers conducted the taped appraisals in Wichita for the first time for the series' six-city summer tour. 
    Some 6,800 people — many of them lugging their antiques in red wagons, metal carts, and wheelchairs —- attended the all-day event. A select few will have their appraisals televised during PBS' winter programming.
    William and Susan Bunyan of Dodge City learned that two miniature portraits of William’s great-great-great-grandparents — who were born in the 1700s — were not as valuable as they had hoped. 
    “The miniature portraits are a bit faded, but they are family heirlooms,” William said. “My mother, Elaine, was named for my great-great-great-grandmother. The portraits are three inches each, hand-painted on paper.  They would have been more valuable painted on ivory.”
    Highlights for the Bunyans were meeting "Antiques Roadshow" celebrities following the day’s taping and sighting Paula Ripple, Karen Evans and Cindy Shipley of Dodge City, who also brought their valuables to be appraised.
    The high point of the day was the news that five checks issued to Mickey Mantle in 1949 — the first year he played on a minor league team — were worth $30,000 to $50,000 each. But not everyone was happy with their appraisals. 
    William said he spoke to one man who was toting a curious six- or seven-foot piece of molded plastic.
    “I’m looking for a dumpster!” the man told William.
    Nancy Prester of Augusta was well pleased that her 5-foot brass Asian lamp was appraised at $800 to $1,000, however. 
    “An elderly lady, Marian Martin, who used to buy bird seed from us, told me she was going to put me in her will — and that she would place the will in her refrigerator freezer,” Prester said as she rolled the lamp along on a metal cart. “I received a call later from a person who informed me that my name was found in Marian’s freezer, and that she had died at age 94 and willed the lamp to me!”
    Jeff Neill of Toronto, Kan., carried two large paintings into the convention hall that resembled a big-city airport with its long queues of patient people bearing all sorts of antiques in their tired arms.
    A portrait of Neill’s great-grandmother, Martha Skelly Neill, holding a small child (his grandfather Will Neill) on her lap was appraised at under $500. The sentimental value of the story behind the painted photograph was priceless, however.
    “I traveled to Ayrshire, Scotland, where the portrait was made in 1856 or 1857 to learn more about her from an entry in a church registry,” Neill said.  “In the picture, you see that she is wearing two rings. She was an immigrant from Ireland who left there because of an argument with a priest! She had joined some mystical Protestant society. One of the rings she wears is her wedding ring, but the other ring indicates she was ‘married to Jesus.’”
    The second portrait that Neill submitted for appraisal was of a handsome young Civil War officer, “a Yankee,” Neill said, “who was painted by an itinerant artist in Washington County south of Pittsburg.
    “This painting was given to my mom in the late '40s by some of our ‘shirttail’ relatives, and I suppose we are related to the officer,” added Neill, who formerly taught at Wichita State University.
    A painting that Gerry Lundy of McPherson submitted for appraisal fared better, with an estimated value of $3,000 to $5,000 attributed to it by several appraisers. In the portrait, a lovely young woman lies languidly on a pillow, clasping a rose to her breast.
    The painting once hung in the office of August A. Busch Jr., who became president of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Co. in 1946, creating a national network of nine breweries and increasing beer sales from three to 34 million barrels.
    “Leonard Kehr, an architect who worked for Busch, told him that the portrait of this woman was not appropriate for a manager’s office,” Lundy said. “So Busch gave the portrait to Leonard. My father received it from his great-aunt, who cared for Leonard and his wife until they died.”
    The exact value of this portrait will not be determined until the name of the artist is ascertained. The painting is signed with the initials “C.C.R.,” unfamiliar to the appraisers, who suggested that the painting was probably European in origin.
    "Antiques Roadshow" airs on PBS at 7 p.m. on Mondays in southwest Kansas.