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Wes Cowan, featured appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, led an Alumni College on collecting.
Wes Cowan, featured appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, led an Alumni College on collecting.

Reunion weekend brought droves of Hamilton College family to the campus on June 3-5, and a sense of the old met a bit of the new over the four-day event. Alumni were introduced to the campus' most recent additions, including the brand-new Science Center while revisiting some of their favorite, unchanged spots as well.

Among the many guests to accompany alumni to Reunion Weekend was Wes Cowan, an antiques dealer and auctioneer for the past 10 years, star of the PBS television series History Detectives, and featured appraiser on Antiques Roadshow, whose wife, Shelley (Gertzog) graduated from Kirkland College in 1975. On Friday, in the Fillius Events Barn, Cowan gave a talk titled "Collecting for Fun and Profit," on treasuring the old in the form of antique collecting and dealing, and provided advice to his audience on how to get started with this pastime.

The founder and owner of Cowan's Auctions, Inc., Cowan said that his company will sell approximately $8 million worth of antiques this year, and he opened his lecture by asking his guests what they collected, and telling them, "I assume most of you are collecting things because you like to, not for the money. There's an old saying, however: 'Once you are a collector, you will become a dealer.'"

The focus of the talk was to target people just getting started in the antiques collecting market. Cowan advised the collectors and future collectors before him to learn anything and everything they can possibly learn about a particular item, because, as he mentioned several times, "the educated collector is a smart collector."

One moment that created a bit of laughter among the guests, was when Cowan said "I like to make the distinction between accumulators and collectors," he said. Collectors are people who set about very methodically, pick a particular object and collect it. The collector has something important that an accumulator doesn't have: discipline."

In addition to describing particular items that his company has recently auctioned off, Cowan described the national antiques forecast. He said that even though the value of antiques is increasingly going downhill across the nation, he predicts that within the next 10 years, there will be great money in the antiques market. The baby-boomers and generations beyond will choose to sell their family's things, as they run out of space and interest for such items, and this in turn will set forth a new wave of products available in the national antiques market.

-- by Katherine Trainor

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