Father's Day Finds - Great Treasures That Have Come Our Way

Not all found on Father's Day, of course, as we have to take a break sometime. But close enough.

You know that feeling you get when you walk in on something nice, perfect color and nicked in a nice way that lets you know it has been around awhile and lived an exciting life - and no one else knows what it is?

For that minute it's yours and you move to it as if you're in a dream, heart pounding, the light glinting off the surfaces in just the right way as the maker's hand begins to reveal more and more of itself the nearer you get.

Here was one of those, a nice plains Indian hatchet pipe, found in a local house one afternoon. We were just taking it easy, moving through the house and having fun, staying away from the shriekers and the shovers looking to shell out fifty cents for something they could sell at the flea market. A man ahead of us picked it up, snorted at it derisively and snorted again when he looked at the price tag.

"Reproduction," he said, moving off to the Depression Glass.

And then it was in our hand, warm and full, the haft just perfect and shaped 150 years ago, rocker engraving on the hatchet blade, everything just the way it should be. Paying at the door and looking up in time to see an Imperial German regimantal banner, hanging in a foyer wall.

"I'll take that, too," you say, heart thumping - and you know it's going to be a great day. Happy Father's Day!

"You Are About To Embark On A Great Crusade..."

Remembering all those who slogged ashore on this day 65 years ago - and those who still rest there.

Video of Antique Thieves In Action, Do You Know Them?

Police in Boston released surveillance video of two men they say are responsible for a break-in at a South Boston condo building over the Memorial Day weekend - and helping themselves to jewelry, antiques, and artwork.

The victims said they had been away for the weekend. No signs of forced entry were detected. A $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the recovery of the stolen items.

If you know these guys, it may be time to "drop a dime" to the police.

Archeology Ace "Chip" Stanish Says Ninety Five Percent of Ebay's Antiquities Offerings Are Fake

You want a KKK pocket knife or a bogus Tiffany ring - Ebay's the place for you.

Charles "Chip" Stanish, director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, says archaeologists were initially "terrified" that Ebay's arrival in the online antiquities market would send demand for ancient objects sky-high and more looters into sacred spaces in search of fodder.

But that didn't happen, not because of Ebay's self-policing (which most admit is pretty poor) but rather because most of the fraudsters selling there quickly realized they didn't need the real deal - they only needed the cheap knockoffs already proliferating on the tourist market.

In the May/June issue of Archaeology magazine Stanish goes on to say:"Now, 95 percent of the stuff you're looking at on eBay is not real."

An Ebay spokesman says that if fake antiquities were as rampant as Stanish says, buyers would complain and eBay would police the problem, but that it's not a problem they "hear about."

Hmmm.

Millvina Dean, Last Survivor of the "Titanic," Dies at 97

What an amazing start to a young life. Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage.

She was 97 and had been in poor health for some time, followers say.

The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Ms. Dean was only 9 weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, setting off what was then considered the greatest maritime disaster in history.

She survived with her mother, Georgetta, and 2-year-old brother when they, like many other survivors, were picked up by the liner Carpathia and taken to New York.

Her father, Bertram Dean, was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who died in the sinking. A brother survived the sinking and was later reunited with his family. He died in 1997.

Plucky and profound, Ms. Dean attributed her father's death the night of the sinking to the fact that the family had been travelling in steerage and were not given the same chances for survival as more advantaged passengers - though many of them perished, as well.

A mail sack believed to have been the one the crew of the Titanic used to lower her into a lifeboat and safety was later found to have come into the family well after the sinking and could not have come from the ship. Nevertheless, it later sold for $2,000 as Ms. Dean auctioned her possessions to pay for her care.

"Just think," she once said. "If it had been from the ship it would have been worth a hundred thousand pounds."

Actors who portrayed passengers aboard the ill-fated ship in a hit movie about the sinking later contributed to a fund created to help Ms. Dean in her later years.