Nana Hits The Jackpot!

By DON KAPLAN - New York Post

Talk about a house warming gift from heaven.

Decades ago, when a husband and wife moved into their new home, a friend gave them a painting by the man's former college professor.

Fast-forward 40 or 50 odd years and the oil painting, still in the same family, is appraised during an Antiques Roadshow stop in Palm Springs, Calif., for a cool half-million bucks - the most valuable object ever discovered in the show's history.

"Clearly, the woman who brought this to us knew she had something special," said executive producer Marsha Bemko. "She just didn't know how special it was."

It turns out the painter of the 1937 piece - which depicts a quiet evening scene near Spokane's Grand Coulee Dam when it was being built - was Clyfford Still, a pioneer of the post-World War II abstract expressionist movement along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

The rare painting is among Still's earlier works, created just before he made the transition to his famous abstract style.

A Still painting created just 10 years later recently sold at auction for around $21 million.

"So, in fact, it may turn out that I'm being rather conservative when I say half a million," the appraiser, Alasdair Nichol, says to the painting's owner on the episode, the show's 13th season premiere, slated to air in early January on PBS.

When I heard this story, it reminded me of Lara Spencer (below) who hosted Antiques Roadshow in 2005. She is now the host of The Insider.

Lara and I both went to Penn State, and she and I were in the same "Comm 101 - Intro. to Journalism" class. The Beeyotch has my career, and I'll never forgive her for it!

Lara was one of those sorority girls you really wanted to hate, but just couldn't. She was friendly, outgoing, pretty, and actually nice. She was a friend-of-a-friend (who was also in that class) so Lara and I interacted often.

And even though our professor LOVED Lara, I KNOW I got better grades than she did...