GUEST: In about 1946 or 7, my father was an engineer in a paper mill that got a trainload of scrap paper from Washington. A whole bunch of them were these things, which my father spotted as ships' logs of warships. And he's got out of the bin, which was ready for emulsification, the ones for December 1941. And this one, for example, includes December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day.
APPRAISER: So he was really supposed to destroy these, wasn't he?
GUEST: He was supposed to destroy them, but, uh, he skimmed the lot.
APPRAISER: (chuckles) Well, I'm glad he didn't. What you've brought to us today was both deck logs for the USS Trever. And I'll just read a little excerpt of, from the log. "Went to battle stations, Japanese conducting air raid on Pearl Harbor. Opened with .50-caliber machine gun at close targets."
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: The Trever was a destroyer minesweeper, and it was nestled in amongst some destroyers right, right during the air raid. So you couldn't really have a more amazing real-time description of what was happening, written in the hand of someone who was there at the epicenter of the, of the Second World War. Conservatively, at auction, I would think $2,000 or $3,000 for the set.
GUEST: Wow.
