The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore was certainly crowded with unusual creatures this week, but many of them were made out of wood, metal, cotton, or sewn onto heirloom quilts.
The Zoo was the final filming location for WGBH’s Antiques Roadshow, now in its 29th season. Each season contains 15 regular episodes and 3 special edition episodes. The show visits five cities per season, and each city yields enough content to produce three episodes of Antiques Roadshow. Baltimore is the fifth and last stop on the tour. Over the years, the show has been to every state except Maine and Wyoming.
This is the first time Antiques Roadshow has ever filmed at a zoo. They’ve been filming at outdoor venues since 2016, but never at a zoo. The Maryland Zoo is the third oldest zoo in the country, so it is a bit of an antique in its own right.
Tom Williams, senior managing director of communications for Maryland Public Television (MPT) and Erin Callanan, director of external communications at WGBH in Boston, television home of Antiques Roadshow, escorted this reporter around the site to get a behind-the-scenes look at the experience. Williams said there are 30-40 MPT staffers and around 80 volunteers working around the Maryland Zoo to help the operations and tapings run smoothly for Antiques Roadshow.
People bringing in items to be appraised have received their tickets via lottery. Antiques Roadshow partners with local PBS stations to get the word out, both about ticket availability and recruiting volunteers. There were 10,000 entries into the lottery for the Baltimore tour stop, and only 2,000 tickets are distributed per venue.
Each ticket admits two people, and each person may bring two items for appraisal. Callanan estimated they appraise 7,500 – 8,000 items per event.
At the Baltimore event, there were 65 appraisers volunteering their time. The appraisers all pay their own expenses, travel and otherwise, which is a significant investment given many of them live far from wherever the five tour stops may be. At the Maryland Zoo tour stop, only three of the appraisers were from Baltimore.
Entry to the event is timed, to prevent overcrowding and allow for some rest time for the appraisers. Once inside the venue, ticketholders enter the “Triage” tent, wherein appraisers determine into which category the item for appraisal falls. There are 23 categories, like jewelry, collectibles, posters and prints, toys and games, and more. The attendee then receives a stamped card with the category or categories and are guided to those locations.
Once at the appraisal area, they wait in line for their turn to have their item(s) appraised. If the appraiser believes there is something unusual about the value of the item(s), the piece itself, and/or the story behind the item, they call for a producer (called a “picker”) to evaluate if it is something they want to film for the show. If the producer decides to film, a film crew is notified, and the attendee is sent to a greenroom for getting prepared with make-up, air conditioning, and some refreshments before being taped.
At this point, however, the attendee has not been told yet the value of their item. They will only learn the value during filming, so that their reactions are sincere and not rehearsed. So, when viewers are watching Antiques Roadshow, they are truly seeing the people hear the value of their items for the first time on camera.
Those on camera are a rarity, though.
Marsha Bemko, executive producer of Antiques Roadshow, explained that while most of the 2,000-3,000 guests showing up won’t be taped for the show, they are having an “event experience.”
“We want people to have a really good fun event experience, the ultimate goal of walking away and understanding what you own,” Bemko said. “Because that’s what we’re here for, to help you understand what you own. If you get really lucky, maybe it’s valuable. And most of us don’t own things that are extremely valuable. Those things are always extremely rare.”
Tracey, a bird veterinarian from North Carolina (reporters are only permitted to use first names and states of Antiques Roadshow guests), brought four antique brass birdcages on two brass stands for appraisal. She and her father, who had accompanied her, was waiting for a producer/picker to arrive to see if they wanted to film her for a segment.
Tracey told Fishbowl that the birdcages are from the late 1800s and early 1900s, so they were carefully packed and shipped ahead of time to a UPS location in Baltimore one week ahead of time to be here when she arrived. She had learned in January or February that she had won a ticket in the lottery. She arranged for two days off from work, flew up from North Carolina the day of the event and would fly back the next day.
Tracey’s mother began collecting bird cages before she knew Tracey would become a bird veterinarian.
“When I graduated from grad school 29 years ago from North Carolina State University, she gifted me the collection,” Tracey said. “And so, I have many more than this. I have about thirty. They are a memory of her and the time that she and I spent going to antique stores, looking for these cages.”
The cages were all manufactured in the United States by the Hendrix company in Connecticut, marketed for canaries.
“It’d be a single canary in each of these cages,” Tracey said. “Back in the Victorian and then early to mid-1900s canaries were the most popular pet bird in homes. So, they were even gifted as wedding gifts to families. We had Martha Stewart borrow my cages 20 years ago!”
Home base for Antiques Roadshow is WGBH Boston, Massachusetts, so Bemko told Fishbowl that they plan their tour season to begin in the west to east, so that by the end of the tapings they are close to home.
The first thing Roadshow asks a venue is what dates they have available, and then if they’re willing to accommodate an operation like Antiques Roadshow. Bemko says not every venue that interests them agrees to have them.
“The best thing for us is for someone to see how well this event is run,” Bemko said. “How much we respect the spaces we’re in. What good exposure it is for the people who are coming to be exposed to your venue.”
They want everyone involved to have a good experience, from volunteers to staffers, from appraisers to the guests bringing their items to be evaluated.
“We want to have a really pleasant day for everybody who’s coming, and they walk away, and they say, ‘I had a good experience Antiques Roadshow,’ whether you were taped or not,’” Bemko said. “And anybody who wants to tape today can, because we have the feedback booth. And we will capture hours of footage from the feedback booth where people tell us about their day. So, if you didn’t get selected to be produced or to be taped, then you can have your opportunity there to be taped.”
Footage from the feedback booth is played during the credits, which are played at the bottom at the end, so that they don’t take up extra time.
Bemko says they work with around 150 expert appraisers around the country and assign around 70-75 to each city in which they film. They pay their own way and give more than a million dollars’ worth of services every year to the show. Some long-time veterans sign up for all five cities, others sign up for one or two depending on how much time and money they’re able to invest in the tour.
Paul Winicki is the founder of Radcliffe Jewelers and has been an appraiser with Antiques Roadshow for 18 seasons. As a veteran, he has encountered his share of interesting people and pieces that have come across his path because of the show. He tells the story of a mother and daughter in Texas who had a box of Grandma’s costume jewelry.
There was one watch, though, the daughter really liked and wanted to take to college, and the mother wanted to make sure it wasn’t worth more than $200. The mother told Winicki, “I’m afraid she’s gonna get drunk and lose it!”
Winicki asked her what the story was. “She said, ‘Well, Grandma died or Mumsy died in 1965. And all the kids for a couple of generations used this jewelry as dress ups.’ And she said, ‘My daughter now wants this watch. But we don’t want to let her if it’s worth over 200 dollars. If it’s less than that. I’ll let her have it. But I know it’s not coming back from SMU if she takes it,'” Winicki recalled.
Winicki told Fishbowl, “As soon as I picked it up, I felt it and I knew it was platinum. And it was a covered watch. And I opened it up and it said, Jaeger-LeCoultre. And it had 30 carats in diamonds. It was worth about $85,000. It was in a pile of junk jewelry from obviously a Mumsy who was fairly wealthy in her day.”
Winicki said it would have made a great TV segment, but it was at the end of the day and filming had wrapped up, so it never made the show.
He tells another story about an Antiques Roadshow event down south wherein a group of people brought him five pocket watches, four of them worth very little, but one was an E. Howard from Boston worth around $15,000. He asked if any of them or their ancestors were ever wealthy. They weren’t. Were any of their families ever in the northern part of the east coast? No, they said.
“Now, I didn’t say but I should have said, ‘Who in your family is a criminal, because this is obviously stolen!’” Winicki said. “Because in the 1880s, that would have cost probably what two or three row houses in Baltimore City would have cost. So, no one down south that was poor as dirt would have ever had that watch legitimately. But it was in the family. And I asked if they wanted to be on TV. And they all looked at each other and said, ‘No, no, just tell us the value!’ and they were out the door.”
Craig Flinner is another Baltimore appraiser on Antiques Roadshow. He’s got a gallery in Hampden and has been on the show since 2007. This season he did two of the five cities on the tour.
Flinner had what he thought was an interesting find that he hoped the show’s pickers would film, though they did not decide to use the piece or the story.
“The thing that I liked the most today was a woman who had these three circus posters by sort of smaller, obscure circus company,” Flinner said. “She had these three posters for their tour in England and Ireland in the early 50s. And she had them nicely restored, which was good. And they came from her mom.”
He continued, “And she’s going through them, in this one with these circus acrobats. And there’s these two women standing, and then one woman standing on their shoulders. And then she’s holding a woman above her. And then she goes, ‘Now the one standing on the two’s shoulders, that’s my mom.’”
“She was a circus acrobat as a young woman,” Flinner said. “So, I thought that was super cool. I mean, the poster was fun, but the fact that it was like, ‘That’s my mom!’ I thought that was great!”
The producers didn’t go for it, and the woman with the posters didn’t mind. Flinner said the posters themselves weren’t extremely valuable, but he’s never had a situation where someone pointed to a painting or poster and said, “That’s my mom.”
Flinner enjoyed having the Antiques Roadshow event outdoors at places like the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore for several reasons. Despite how brutally hot the day happened to be, the vibe is much more interesting than inside a convention center or sound stage setting. It shows up better on TV, and the background is something interesting to behold.
“With the old show, I knew I was in Spokane or Fort Worth or whatever, but …they set up the same set,” Flinner said. The set always looked fine and professional, but he points out, “You really had no feeling that you’re in New Orleans or Chicago or whatever. Now, this is to me more interesting.” Everyone watching from the area knows they’re at the Maryland Zoo, which gives the hometown crowd an even bigger feeling of investment and pride in the show being filmed there.
If Bemko’s goal for the Antiques Roadshow experience is for everyone involved to have a pleasant time, an interesting interaction, and to walk away learning something new about something they own, the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore expedition was a great success.
Episodes of Antiques Roadshow can be viewed on the free PBS app.
