GUEST: My parents' first landlord, Joel and Dorothy Pick... Joel owned Club Madrid, which was... I don't want to say a speakeasy, but it was a club. It catered to professional football players, it catered to gangsters-- Al Capone was there. It had some black-market booze at the time. It also had some gambling. Hattie McDaniel, who was part of the "Gone with the Wind" cast, she got her start there, singing, as well. But my parents' first landlord, they owned the club, and so what happened was, as gangsters and people who would come through there need a little bit of money, they'd come up to Joel Pick and ask for them to purchase their particular... whether it was jewelry or whatever. And so Joel bought this set for his wife, Dorothy. And then, as my mom and Dorothy's relationship grew in friendship and whatnot, shortly before Dorothy died, she gave this set to my mother.
APPRAISER: And what year would you say this is, about?
GUEST: I'm guessing 1920s, 1930s, somewhere in that area.
APPRAISER: The jewelry does, in fact, date from that period.
GUEST: Excellent.
APPRAISER: Your story's starting to hold water, as we say.
GUEST: Oh, thank goodness. (laughs)
APPRAISER: So it's a set. And what's nice, first of all, is that you have everything here. You have the necklace, the earrings, the bracelet, and the ring. So many times in families, or the way things go with jewelry, it gets split up, so it's nice to see everything intact. The whole set is 18-karat yellow gold. What I love about it is that it's American made. I looked all over this for a hallmark.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: Or for a stamp to tell us who made it, but there isn't one. It has approximately a little more than three ounces of gold in it.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: A rough estimate on the amethyst, about 200 carats.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: Now, they're Brazilian, South American amethysts They're not the greatest color on the planet. It's a pretty hue of purple, and it works for this piece. And you can see we have this nice little border with a twisted wire-- it's all hand-twisted. And then over here, they put the little seed pearls.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: So the pearls being white really offers us a lot of contrast and makes that amethyst pop. You can see more twisted wire over here on the joining links. All, again, twisted by hand and then wrapped around the sections. And it's repeated again on the earrings and on the bracelet. What I also find interesting, though, is this. and this is a little personal for me. On the side of the ring, you'll see these leaves. Now, I grew up seeing things like this that my grandfather made, and that my father made. And when I was kid and I used to go into the shop, they had a big old foot press.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And they used to have me punch out these leaves when I had nothing to do.
GUEST: Oh, cool.
APPRAISER: Right? And these would've been stamped out, so what that leads me to believe is that this was, in fact, probably made at least in the United States, but most probably New York. I would say that at auction, this would be $4,000 to $6,000.
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: Really.
GUEST: Wow, that's excellent, it really is.
