GUEST: In 1948, my husband and I went to this little antique shop in Atlanta.

We, uh, found Ralph.

APPRAISER: Y-- now, you call him Ralph?

GUEST: (chuckles) APPRAISER: You've not-- why you call him Ra-Ralph?

GUEST: Well, it looks a lot like a friend of ours.

APPRAISER: Does Ralph know that you call him Ralph?

GUEST: No.

(laughs) APPRAISER: No?

Ralph do-- that's good.

That's a good thing.

GUEST: We never told him.

(chuckles) APPRAISER: Okay, well, what have you found out about it, and what would you like to know?

GUEST: Well, in the front it says K-I-S-E-R Bill.

And I thought it said "kiss her, Bill."

And then somebody else looked at it and said, "No.

I think that's Kaiser Bill.

APPRAISER: Yep, Kaiser Bill misspelled here as K-I-S-E-R Bill would have referred to Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, during and just after World War I. America actually entered World War I in 1917, and so Kaiser Bill would not have been very popular with Americans.

We can narrow down the date of the manufacture of this jug to 1917 to 1918.

We know from the handwriting, from the way that that inscription was done, we know whose handwriting it was.

I believe that it was made in Atlanta by a guy named Davis Pennington Brown.

GUEST: Uh-huh.

APPRAISER: And Davis Pennington Brown is from a family of famous potters that all went to Arden, North Carolina.

But during 1915, 1920, Davis Pennington Brown, the most famous of the Brown brothers, the potters in Georgia... GUEST: Uh huh.

APPRAISER: ...was doing jugs like this; this is actually white clay.

It's covered with this coat of Albany slip, which is this brown clay that they wash all over it.

And then salt is shoveled into the kiln and it vitrifies and coats everything and gives it that orange peel kind of look to the surface.

A lot of things about this jug confirm it as Davis Pennington Brown, and among them, the C-shape of the ears, the fact that the teeth are made of clay instead of porcelain, like he used in Arden, North Carolina later on, and that the handwriting is really in his own hand.

So all those things support an attribution to Davis Pennington Brown.

It's just a classic example.

It's a larger size than most of em.

Also, the condition is amazing.

How much did you pay for it?

GUEST: $25.

APPRAISER: Paid $25.

I feel that in a, in a retail setting, this could easily be priced at $6,000.

GUEST: Uh-huh, well that's... APPRAISER: Yeah.

GUEST: That, I guess, that was better than interest on $25.

(chuckling) APPRAISER: I’d- I'd say, I'd say yeah, uh, that's pretty.

I- I'm not sure what $25 was worth back in 1948, but that's not bad.

GUEST: (chuckling): Yeah.