Steve Matta wrote:

> I was flipping channels and watched a few minutes of the Antique Road
> Show.  The segment featured a bird box in excellent condition.  The
> "expert" said that the lid on the box with a picture of a character
> presumed to be Rasputin...

I think I learned everything I needed to know about the Antique Road
Show the time they did a segment on an antique drum-and-bell box some
lady had brought in.

The box -- make not identified, but it looked rather like a Ducommon
Girod to me -- was not in good condition.  It was impossible to tell
the condition of the cylinder on TV, of course, but there were at least
five broken teeth in the comb, which seemed to imply the box had
suffered a run at some time in its history.  That can usually be con-
firmed by examining the cylinder for bent pins and looking for broken
tooth tips, but TV resolution was not good enough for that.

Still, the box was very far from unrecoverable -- but the "expert" went
on to say that the box would be worth _less_ if she had it fixed!

Then they played it.  It broke my heart -- the drums and bells were
switched off (it's not uncommon for them to be enough out of alignment
for them to be playing a different track than the rest of the comb --
which will make the drum and bells sound at very weird points in the
music) but the buzzes of broken and missing dampers were clearly
audible as was the burr of a worn governor.  I could not distinguish
the tune at all, which made me suspect lots of missing tooth tips and
therefore missing notes.

Whatever possessed that man to tell her the box would be worth less if
it were "fixed"?  Obviously it would be worth less if some clock maker
were to try to "fix" it as if it were a clock and not a musical
instrument, or if some amateur were to try to fix it, but to imply that
a proper restoration should not be done or that it would not improve
the box and the price one could get for it seemed criminally
irresponsible to me.  I take everything they say with a large grain
of salt, now.  I wonder what they would say about my restored
drum-and-bell box.

Note to Nancy Fratti: Lar is now 18 months old.  His vocabulary is
about a half a dozen words, but he knows where the music boxes are and
he knows how to point -- and the day does not go by when he doesn't ask
to hear the drum-and-bell box, the Regina, or the Kalliope at least
once.  The look of delight on his face as he watches the drum-and-bell
box do its thing is worth every penny I put into it.

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Larry Smith
My opinions only.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing
it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. -- Groucho Marx