GUEST: I went to a local auction in my neighborhood. I was bidding on what I thought was just a single postcard for Valentine's Day, Victorian era, and nobody bid against me, so I won for one dollar. And I picked up the postcard, and they're, like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, you won the whole box." So I got a shoebox full of somebody's life, and there was these postcards in it. And when I saw Fred Rogers, I thought, "That's the superhero of public television. That's got to be something very special." And when I started to read the correspondence, it's by him, in his hand, and he's writing to what I think is some family, and he's, um, asking about how they're doing, and, "Hey, do you think there's any market in the Cleveland area for my new show?" So I thought, "Wow."
APPRAISER: Well, I guess I can't help but say this, but it must have been a wonderful day in the neighborhood when, when... (laughs) ...when you bought that box of material. Mr. Rogers is obviously so iconic. One of the things that's really, really nice about these postcards is, they're in the mid-'60s. He started in television, children's television, in the '50s. He actually went to Canada, and in the early '60s, had the MisteRogers show. And he finally came back from Canada, and went to WQED in Pittsburgh in 1966 and started Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In this, he mentions ETV. They were a small network of Eastern public television stations to share shows. What he's saying in one of the letters that I particularly like, he was saying, "Okay, we have a few stations that have picked the show up in the Eastern educational, but do you think maybe Cleveland would pick it up?"
GUEST: (chuckles)
APPRAISER: Because they were obviously in Ohio. "I'd really like to see the show get expanded." And then, a few years later, 1970, is when public television, PBS, picked up the show, and that's when it started to really skyrocket. First of all, they're all signed, and this one is signed "Misterogers," "your friend." Now, the picture is wonderful, and it's what caught my eye. There's nothing written on the back of this. You got your money back.
GUEST: (laughs): My dollar?
APPRAISER: The dollar, the… You got your dollar back with this picture.
GUEST: Okay, fair.
APPRAISER: But… There are pictures on the other side of these. But two of 'em are the same, one's slightly different. Mr. Rogers signatures, especially where he's talking about his early career, talking about the problems of the show– thinking about the idea that, if they didn't pick it up, what we would have missed, the three letters, I would say, conservatively, on a retail value, is $1,500 to $2,500, Conservatively, as a package. And they're just so much fun, I, I mean, what can you say?
GUEST: (laughs)
