APPRAISER: You got this box in the mail in 1957.
GUEST: '57, uh-huh.
APPRAISER: And you were a little disappointed.
GUEST: I was disappointed because it was third-place in a contest that I had entered, a Roy Rogers contest. And the first prize was a pony. Second prize was a one-week trip to the Double R Bar Ranch.
APPRAISER: That would have been fun.
GUEST: And this was the third place. And I wanted the pony, so I was disappointed, but my mom did a great job of keeping everything.
APPRAISER: That's what's amazing, that all this has survived. Now, what was the contest again?
GUEST: It was a Baker's Instant Chocolate contest on why I liked it in ten words or less, and I said, "It's easy to mix and the flavor is delicious." And I was ten years old at the time, and I won.
APPRAISER: You got a great prize.
GUEST: I did.
APPRAISER: If you'd gotten the pony, we wouldn't be here today.
GUEST: Exactly.
APPRAISER: Obviously, it's the Roy Rogers cap gun set in the original box, and of course, you know how much we like original boxes. But what also makes this kind of fun is that we have this presentation letter signed by Roy Rogers himself, the king of the cowboys.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And these are a special edition, apparently. Gold-plated.
GUEST: They're 14-karat-gold-plated, mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Well, if I was a Roy Rogers collector, this would have to be one of the king points of my whole collection. So I think you did all right, considering a pony or a weekend at the ranch. It's pretty hard to put a value on something like this. I don't know how thick the gold-plating is on this leather, but it's really quite a fun thing to see. I've seen Roy Rogers gun sets in this box. A run-of-the-mill one is $500, $600. Sometimes a really fancy one could be in the $1,500 range. So, I mean, that's really pretty nice. I'm just wondering if that pony would be still worth $4,000 to $5,000 today.
GUEST: (gasps) Really?
APPRAISER: That would be my thought.
GUEST: Oh, wow! I never would have dreamed, ever.
