GUEST: This print, my husband got it at a garage sale about 40 years ago, and it was never my favorite thing.
APPRAISER: Uh-huh.
GUEST: And it's been sitting in the spare bedroom behind the dresser.
APPRAISER: I see.
GUEST: For a lot of years. We made a deal. I kept wanting to get rid of it. He kept wanting to say, "No, keep it." I said, "I'll come to the Roadshow and let them tell me it's worth nothing, then I can get rid of it."
APPRAISER: Well, what would you say about it? Give it a critique.
GUEST: Well, we thought maybe it came from a hunting lodge. It looks manly-- you know, the frame and everything. I saw it had Currier & Ives on it. We really did hang onto it, but I didn't know.
APPRAISER: Well, this is a print, which as it says here is, "A Four-Oared Shell Race." You've got two boats, four men to a shell, racing down a river. This is a race between Harvard and Yale, two of the greatest competitors in American sports. It was lithographed, printed in black and white, and the color is done by hand with watercolors. Look at the detail. Here's a steamboat filled with people looking at the race going on, people on the shore. It's so vibracious, and I've never seen one. I've been in business 40 years working with this, and I'd never seen this as an original print. And it's clean, you took great care of it.
GUEST: Behind the dresser works every time.
APPRAISER: No matter how much you denigrated it... (laughing) You took great care of it. It's clean. Do you have any memory of what you paid for this when you bought it?
GUEST: He bought it, and knowing him, it probably wasn't over $10 or $20. You know, he liked the frame and just the manliness of it.
APPRAISER: Basically, because of the schools involved, because of the fact that this is a Currier & Ives of a large folio, a print like this should sell for about $3,500. This would be a fair retail value for such a thing.
GUEST: I think I'm going to have to hang it.
APPRAISER: Your husband gets to have a laugh on that, wouldn't you say?
GUEST: (laughing): Yeah, he will.
