Man starts crying on Antiques Roadshow after being told he’s about to become a very rich man
A man was in tears after he discovered that an old blanket he'd had slung over the back of a chair was worth a lot of money on Antiques Roadshow.
There's all sorts of things you see on the programme, including Pokémon cards which are apparently old enough to now qualify as antiques.
While sometimes people bring on their seemingly priceless heirlooms and discover they're actually more valueless than anything, sometimes people just get stunned at the value of items they have lying around.
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One guest, Ted Kuntz, appeared on PBS' version of Antiques Roadshow in 2001 and ended up crying when he was told what he'd brought on.
Show expert Donald Ellis could barely contain his excitement as he explained the twisted history of a blanket which the man had brought on.
Kuntz said that the blanket had been thrown 'over the back of a chair' for some time, and he had no idea if it was worth any significant amount of money.
Ellis said: "Did you notice when you showed this to me I kind of stopped breathing a little bit?
"Do you have a sense at all of what you're looking at here? Are you a wealthy man? Well sir, I'm still a little nervous here.
"On a really bad day, this textile would be worth $350,000 (£275,000). On a good day it's about half a million dollars."
Holy crap.
An astonished Kuntz he 'had no idea' and all this time the blanked 'was laying on the back of a chair'.
"Sir, you have a national treasure. When you walked in with this I just about died. Congratulations," Ellis said of the incredibly valuable piece of cloth, but how could one blanket some bloke had lying around be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Sadly the reason is rather dark and depressing, as the blanket was a Navajo Ute blanket dating from around the 1850s.
Kuntz claimed that the blanket had been given to his grandmother's foster father by American frontiersman Kit Carson, though that wasn't the direct reason it was so valuable.
Ellis said: "The value of this that I'm giving is not using the Kit Carson provenance.
"Provenance is difficult to ascertain. If we could do research on this and we could prove without a reasonable doubt that Kit Carson did actually own this, the value would increase again."
Kit Carson was a famous frontiersman in his lifetime, but he also participated in brutal action against Native Americans.
In the early 1860s while the American Civil War was raging, Carson was ordered to round up the Mescalero Apaches.
His commanding officer at one point issued the order to kill all men and take all women and children prisoner.
Afterwards, Carson oversaw the systematic rounding up of Navajo communities in their ancestral lands around what is now Arizona.
Carson carried out a scorched earth campaign, burning homes and fields in an attempt to starve the indigenous community into submission.
The Navajo community eventually surrendered and Carson then put them on a forced 300-mile march from Arizona to the reservation in New Mexico, on which around 200 died.
The march has since become known as 'The Long Walk of the Navajo', and is considered to have been an act of ethnic cleansing.
The Navajo Ute blanket which had come into the possession of Kuntz ended up being sold for around $450,000 (£353,000) to an anonymous buyer, who donated it to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Additional words by Kit Roberts.
Topics: TV and Film, US News, History
Joe Harker