RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, the way you look at it is you get enough known genuine exemplars that you can tell what's the variation, what's the range of variation within a person's signature.

And then you look at the question one.

And if it's within the range of variation you can generally say that person probably signed it.

[bluegrass music] [birds chirping] [tractor motor] [cicadas] [hawk call] [machinery hum] [train whistle] History is preserved and explained in a variety of ways.

One of the most unusual is through the collecting and selling of historical papers and signatures, a unique way to bring history tangibly alive and through an individual and personal way-- an opportunity to better or more directly connect with historical figures and events.

My guest today is Richard Schnake.

He's an attorney with a passion for these tangible representations of the past.

He'll provide examples of some of these types of items and an explanation of their popularity, value, and the appeal to people of collecting them.

[bluegrass music] NARRATOR: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

Welcome to OzarksWatch Video Magazine, I'm Dale Moore.

On this program, we have talked to you over the years about history, about collectibles, about all kinds of interesting things-- all things Ozarks.

Well, hang onto your hat because today you're in for a real treat.

Joining me on the program today is Richard Schnake.

Richard, great to have you on OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

Thank you, good to be here.

We're going to be talking today about a fascinating area that people hear about some, but they don't hear about a lot, and that's the whole idea of the signatures and important documents.

But before we do that, our legacy on OzarksWatch is to first start off by finding out all about you.

So tell us about you and where you're from and what you do.

I grew up in Mount Vernon.

DALE MOORE: We share that in common, by the way.

Yeah I went up to Washington University Law School and worked for a judge for the Missouri Supreme Court for 15 months and then came down here and started practicing law with Neale and Newman in Springfield in 1983, and I've been there ever since.

So 37 and a half years at Neale and Newman as of August 1st.

And I think some of the interesting things about you, too, is that you were a history major prior to going to law school, that was your undergraduate, so you've always had kind of an interest in history, which kind of will lead us to where we're going to get to later on today.

Tell me about your interest in history and why it's been so fascinating to you over the years.

I've always liked it.

When I went to SMS-- Missouri State, now-- DALE MOORE: Yeah.

--and I still call it SMS, I'm sorry-- DALE MOORE: I do too.

You know, I started out as an English major, but I knew I wanted to go to law school.

And the first semester, it just didn't click with me in some of the English classes, and I talked to my advisor, Dr. Alice Bartee, whose husband Wayne is still one of my great friends, is the-- was the chair of the history department.

DALE MOORE: Yep.

And history gave me an opportunity to read what I liked but also to have to dig in and do research and write and the things that helped prepare you to go to law school.

And so I became a history major, with a minor in journalism.

I worked for the newspaper at Mount Vernon for six years-- DALE MOORE: OK. --when I was in high school and college as a sportswriter.

The Lawrence County Record?

The Lawrence County Record.

We won all kinds of awards back then.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

It was a great paper.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

I think they had The Chieftain down there at one point in time, too.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, The Chieftain was the Democrat paper, and The Record was the Republican paper, and it was the very same one, except they changed the name at the top.

And if you were a Democrat you bought one, and if you were a Republican you bought the other.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: That's just the way it was.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: And then they combined them.

DALE MOORE: And I was going to say and there was a comics-- RICHARD SCHNAKE: And then it says on the masthead, Lawrence County Record and continuing the Lawrence Chieftain.

DALE MOORE: Oh, I didn't know that.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: So it still continues, but it's not called that anymore.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Well, let's get right to it.

So you're interested in historical documents.

How did that all start, and boy, what's happened?

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, you know, when I was in law school, I wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter, I wrote a letter to Gerald Ford asking for signed photos, and I got signed photos back.

Carter was actually the president-- what I didn't know was that his secretary Susan Clough signed his name as well as he did.

And so my Carter is signed by Susan Clough, but my forged genuine.

And I got interested in it, and one year for Christmas about 1986, my brother asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

I said, Oh, I'd like to have one Harry Truman's letters.

Had no idea where you buy these.

I was a big Truman fan even back then.

So he said, We'll find one and I'll buy it for you.

So I went down to the public library downtown on Central and found the New York City yellow pages, looked up autograph dealers, and found one in Boston.

I called and the lady said, Yeah we got several different Truman letters and gave me options, and I said, Well, I will take this one.

When I got it, they sent a catalog with it.

This is in the days before the internet, so these were published catalogs with descriptions-- it rarely had illustrations-- maybe a signature.

If it was an important letter, the whole letter might be illustrated, but mostly you went off the descriptions.

But I found out that if you've got enough money you can buy Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and all these people.

And I was absolutely hooked.

And so my interest you know, just piqued after that, and I started buying presidents and Supreme Court justices.

And now I focus my collection personally on Truman material.

So if I cherry pick a letter, it's a Truman letter.

So there's the collector side of it, and then there's the aficionado side-- the people that just want to collect them for the sake of collecting.

You're actually in the dealing business.

I'm a dealer.

I'm the president of the Professional Autograph Dealers Association.

DALE MOORE: Talk about that.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, PADA is a membership only group that has some of the best autograph dealers in the world.

We're talking about not just signatures but documents, letters, manuscripts, signed photos-- you know, we sell all of it.

We've got members in Europe and the United States, both, and they invited me in.

After a few years as a dealer, I got a letter from the Professional Autograph Dealers Association inviting me to become a member, which was a big deal to me because those were my heroes, some of those people, when I was buying stuff from them.

So how do you do that?

I mean, how do you-- do you have an example of something that you compare to the documents you're looking at, and that's how you authenticate that?

How do you actually do the real authentication process?

RICHARD SCHNAKE: It's more involved than that.

Most things now-- presidential things, Supreme Court things-- I can look at and tell you if it's genuine or not because I've seen those signatures, that handwriting, enough times over the years that it's easy.

If I get something that's offbeat, I have to research.

Recently, I did an authentication on a piece, and I rejected it-- an envelope, first day cover, with signatures of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.

DALE MOORE: Really?

Yeah.

Well, the way you look at it is you get enough known genuine exemplars that you can tell what's the variation, what's the range of variation within a person's signature.

And then you look at the question one.

And if it's within the range of variation, you can generally say that person probably signed it.

If it's outside the range of variation, I can say that person didn't sign it.

I can't 100% say, Yes, you know Neil Armstrong signed that, because I didn't see him sign it.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: But it's an educated guess, I guess I would say, authentication.

But we look at things like the paper, the ink-- is it right for the period?

You know, if you get a letter that's signed Abe Lincoln, it's fake.

He never signed the name Abe at all.

Most generally, he signed his first initial, unless he had to sign Abraham on official documents, all of his letters say A. Lincoln.

If you get a typewritten letter with somebody's signature on it before typewriters were invented?

That's a fake.

Give you a good example.

I authenticated a few years ago-- or unauthenticated, I guess-- some boxing photos that a fellow up around St. Louis bought.

One of them was Rocky Marciano, one was Jack Johnson, who was the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

Well, they looked funny to me when he sent me scans, but I said, Send them down because I have to look at them in hand to know for sure.

So I got the Jack Johnson photo and I flipped it over, and the photograph had an Epson watermark in the paper-- in the photo paper.

Now, Epson came into being in 1975, but Jack Johnson died in 1946.

So unless his hand stretched forth from the grave to sign that, it was fake.

That's not a matter of opinion.

That's a matter of fact.

DALE MOORE: You know, this raises an interesting question.

I mean, to go to that level of forgery-- I guess it's forgery is what that's called-- RICHARD SCHNAKE: Mhm.

To make money.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

There must be a lot of money-- potential money in this to be made to go to those extravagant lengths to try and do something like that.

Back in the '70s, a guy named Kujau forged a whole set of diaries by Adolf Hitler.

And it caused a big sensation in Germany, and there was a big magazine article-- I think Time Magazine even published an article about it.

And one of my colleagues in PADA guy named Ken Rendell, whose dealership in Boston is the one I called to begin with when I got my first Truman letter-- he went on one of the morning television shows and he took a bunch of references along with him to look at the thing, but he looked at it and immediately said it's fake.

Because think about it, when you sign your signature, you sign the capital letters one way.

When you write them in the standard writing, you don't sign it as stylized as you do your signature.

But every capital H in these diaries was a stylized H like Hitler wrote in his signature.

But he didn't do that.

He wrote the printed H when he was writing in normal handwriting.

And so it was obvious to Ken that it was fake.

You know, back in the 1800s, there was a guy named Joseph Cosey, another guy named Robert Spring, who forged fully handwritten letters by Washington and Benjamin Franklin, people like that, obviously to sell them.

And those even bring some good money on the market anymore, even though people know they're a fake because people want their exemplars in their files.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

You mentioned that your Truman collection is, I guess, the biggest collection that you have as far as your personal collection.

Why did you settle on Truman as the one you wanted to be the primary focus?

Oh gosh, he was such an amazing man.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

You know, he never got too big for his britches.

He said, I always knew where I came from and where I was going to go back to.

And sort of the model citizen government person, you know.

And he went back after the White House and lived 20 years in that Victorian mansion-- or mansion, it was a mansion when it was built by his wife's family in Kansas City-- it's a big Victorian house there on Delaware Street in Independence.

DALE MOORE: We did a program at his birthplace, and it was just fascinating to think about those humble kinds of beginnings and to wind up being the leader that he was.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: He had a way of saying things, too, that was all his own.

And I can tell when I look at a Truman letter, a White House letter, whether the staff drafted it or where the president did.

And you mentioned that the stationery-- that it's a green stationery that used to be used there-- It used to be until about 1975-- I think the Ford administration.

They changed it, but the official stationery of the president the United States was green with blue engraving at the top that said The White House Washington.

And they even had, in the olden days, they had what we call an integral leaf.

The second leaf-- it was a big sheet-- it was folded, and then you'd type on the front side but it had a second leaf on the back, and it has a watermark that says Whitings Woven Linen.

And if you see a presidential letter that's supposed to be on that and it doesn't have that watermark, that's a sign that it's a fake.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: But it was the most-- the ugliest green.

I mean, I don't know why they chose that.

I don't like it, but that's what it was up until about 1975.

You also have-- I know you collect other things, as well as photographs, for example.

Talk about some of the photographs that you have that are collectible kinds of photographs.

And there's signatures on them-- that's what makes them-- RICHARD SCHNAKE: Yeah.

I don't collect photos as such.

But I collect signed photographs, and if I see something that I think is a good buy-- or I'll buy it to sell.

But, for example, in my own collection I've got a photo of Truman that was signed in 1960, but it's of him taking the oath of office when Franklin Roosevelt died.

And there are only-- I think I found only three of those that have been sold at auction over the years.

DALE MOORE: Wow.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: So it's a pretty uncommon piece.

I also found one on eBay.

It's an 8 by 10 vertical, and it's mounted to a board.

It's a picture of Truman at his desk in the Oval Office, and when you flip it over, he's making notes in 1 through 10.

And what it is is his notes for his points that he was going to make at his acceptance speech at the 1948 Democratic Convention, when he came out and said, You know, the Republicans are for this and for this and for this, so I'm going to call Congress back into session and ask them to pass laws to do what their platform says.

DALE MOORE: Wow.

And of course they didn't do it.

Yeah.

What's the most-- and it's a hard question maybe-- but what's the most interesting piece of Truman memorabilia that you have in your collection, do you think, in your view?

RICHARD SCHNAKE: I've got some really good content letters.

And like I said, he wasn't afraid to say it in writing.

He was a 19th century guy in the 20th century.

He loved to write letters.

He used the telephone, but he'd rather write a letter.

I've got one dated 1947 talking about Russia, where he says there never was communism in Russia and there never will be.

He said it was an oligarchy supported by a million 100,000 police spies.

And there are more forced labor camps in Russia than there ever were in Germany.

And that was two years after we knew what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: But yet, he wasn't afraid to put it in writing.

And then I've got some things-- I try to look for letters that show the character of the guy.

And then I've got some really cool stuff that's just because I'm a Truman fan.

I've got Truman's high school graduation announcement from 1901 with a little hand signed card.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: You know, when I graduated high school, it was a printed signature, but Truman's was hand signed, and the signature is spot on with signatures on his composition books in the Truman Library from 1899 to 1900.

DALE MOORE: Do you ever get any calls from the Truman Library saying, Hey Richard, come on?

No, actually, but I call them-- or I email them-- and ask them questions once in a while.

Or I'll get a letter, and I want to know what's the background behind this because the value in historical documents lies in the content.

So you take a Truman letter that says Thanks for the birthday greetings, or My calendar's too full, I can't come and speak, and that's a $200 letter.

$300, maybe, if it's on White House stationery.

But you put that signature on a letter that talks about dropping the bomb on Japan, and it's a $30,000 letter, really easily.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: And so part of the thrill of the chase, for me, is to do the research behind the piece to figure out why did this person write this letter?

What's he talking about?

Or what's she talking about?

It is kind of a history detective sort of line, really.

Mhm.

Is there anything that you're looking for that you don't have in the Truman collection, or that you're keeping your eye out for that you know is out there and you don't have?

There are-- he wrote literally thousands of letters, or, I mean, tens of thousands of letters over his lifetime.

And you can find them all over eBay now.

And then there are some that are obviously fake, but people don't realize that they're fake.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

But I don't know, like I said, I look for content and things that show the character of the person.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

You know, but that's true for things I choose to buy to sell, too.

That's interesting, to think about things in terms of content because you know, I guess the distinction there is that an official thing would be talking maybe about an event or something, but the content might get into a personal greeting or, you know, gee, good buddy kind of a letter, maybe kind of a thing.

Is that the distinction?

Yes and no.

Because if it's a public letter-- I mean, an official letter but it's talking about some important event-- you know, if you get a letter by George Bush talking about triggering the invasion of Iraq, you know that's a lot more than talking about how George W. Bush owned the baseball team.

Yeah.

You know, so you look at those things.

And what sets the market price?

You've mentioned some incremental things, but is there something that sets that market price?

Well, I look at auction results.

We all do.

So I subscribe to two different services that report auction results.

So I can see what similar letters, similar signed photos, have brought at auction, and that pretty much sets the market.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And then, of course, the economy.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Because as the economy goes, so goes prices for collectibles, and that's true for autograph, stamps, coins, you name it.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

I don't want to get away without talking about some other things in your collection that we got a chance to look at before we went on.

You've got a George Washington piece.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Mhm.

George Washington, talk about that.

What I have is called a Free Frank, and it's the address leaf of a letter.

I mean, when Washington wrote letters, we didn't use envelopes, and so they would write on the inside leaf of a letter, fold it over, seal it with a wax seal, and then address the outside.

But Washington didn't have to put stamps on his letters because of who he was.

And so he could write free and sign his signature, and it would go through the mail that way.

And so mine is a Free Frank, and it's signed G. Washington.

You know, if you write your senator or congressman, you get back a letter from Billy Long or Roy Blunt.

It'll have a signature up-- printed signature-- up in the corner.

They don't sign them, you know, hand sign every letter that goes out.

But that's-- Yeah.

How long have you had the Washington piece?

I'm sorry?

DALE MOORE: How long have you had the Washington piece?

Oh, gosh, probably 25 years.

DALE MOORE: And are they-- I mean, I assume they're rare, but I mean, is that a high value piece, Washington's signature?

You can't buy a Washington signature.

I mean, it's harder to buy a signature than it is a document, unless somebody cuts it off.

Because his letters have been bought and taken up into collections or institutions.

But assuming you can get a Washington signature, you're talking $5,000 or $6,000.

A Washington letter-- a handwritten letter-- they didn't have typewriters back then, but in his hand as opposed to a secretarial letter-- you know, they start at $30,000 to 40,000 and go up, depending on what it says.

Interestingly, Alexander Hamilton, who was an aide to Washington during the Revolutionary War, wrote a lot of his letters, and so you'll find Washington letters that are in the hand of Alexander Hamilton.

DALE MOORE: Really?

Mhm.

DALE MOORE: Wow, that's fascinating.

You know, you also shared with me a letter from Dwight Eisenhower to Mamie.

Tell our viewers about that letter.

Fascinating story.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, it's a letter dated May 21, 1944, and the only handwritten letters that Eisenhower wrote during that period leading up to the D-day invasion were to his wife.

And this letter apologizes that he forgot about Mother's Day.

Ostensibly she was angry about it-- upset with him-- and he said, For some reason I was thinking it was a June Sunday.

But then he says, Recently I sat down to think of all the days coming up that would mean something and the first one I could think of is July 1st.

Now if your wife is mad at you for forgetting Mother's Day and you tell her you thought it was a June Sunday, why did you tell her the first day that was important it would be July 1st?

DALE MOORE: Right.

I mean, Eisenhower was way too smart for that.

So at the end of that section of the letter, there's a little squiggly line and he wrote "Just 4 conferences completed."

Another squiggly line, and went on and finished the letter.

Now, the D-day invasion was originally scheduled for Monday, June 5th.

And they knew the tides were going to be right on the 5th, 6th, and 7th.

And they had to worry about the weather, so they had it clear enough whether the planes could go over and bomb, so they had air cover for the flotilla that went across to invade.

At the time they scheduled it, there was the weather man for the D-day invasion, who was a British weather man, who answered to a British general, who answered Eisenhower-- I believe his book says that he found out on May 22 as to when the actual invasion day was going to be.

And he thought they had decided that the day before, which correspondingly is the date of my letter.

Now, there are a couple of different ways to look at it.

If you look at the fact that they had ships in northern England that had to come down to southern England and then go across the channel to France, they had to start before midnight to get down there early enough in the morning to cross the channel, because it's like 12 miles wide.

So they would have had to start on Sunday, June 4th, which is a June Sunday-- here's your four conferences completed.

There's a diary published by a man named Butcher, who was Eisenhower's naval aide, and it was a very copious diary, and he talks in several places about when the D-day invasion is going to be, and how they were planning it.

And in one place, his book says, "The weather will have to cooperate if the present D-day comma the 4th comma is to go off as planned."

Now he wasn't talking about the fourth D-day.

DALE MOORE: Right.

He's talking about June the 4th.

Just four conferences completed, June Sunday.

And the third way to look at it is, even if it's Monday, June 5th, he's writing to his wife, who's in Washington D.C., and that's five hours behind England and six hours behind the continent, it was still going to be Sunday June 4th when the invasion was launched where she lived.

DALE MOORE: Wow.

So any way you slice it, it looks to me like he's trying to send a signal as to when the D-day invasion is going to happen.

DALE MOORE: Right.

And the original envelope is typed.

And I showed this to you.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: But he signed it to censor his own mail.

All the mail had to be censored so that the Germans didn't pick up something.

But if you're a corporal in the mailroom, you're not going to open a four-star general's-- at that point, four-star-- Right.

--letter to his wife when he's already censored it himself.

So he knew that would get out.

DALE MOORE: Right.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: And when their son published those letters in the 1970s, he published all of those letters in a book called "Letters to Mamie," he took the line out that says "Just 4 conferences completed"-- didn't put an ellipsis in to show that something was deleted, he just took it out.

And I asked him about it, and he said, Oh no, my father would never have done anything like that.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And that his mother was a stickler for observance of all holidays, but she didn't care anything about what he was doing.

And I thought, Baloney.

The man commanded the greatest invasion force in the history of the world, and his wife didn't care anything about it?

I don't buy it.

But we know that Roosevelt ordered Eisenhower home on leave before they actually got into the final planning for the D-day invasion because he knew it'd be a long time before he could come back and see his wife.

So they had an ample opportunity to set the code.

DALE MOORE: What if he wasn't writing it to Mamie?

What if he was writing it to someone else?

That's-- that's an interesting question because, obviously, they had to communicate what the code was going to be.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

Or you have to figure it out.

And I would think that would be a tremendous breach of-- that might even be traitorous, depending on who you're telling, OK?

But if you're going to tell anybody, you're going to tell your wife.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: And she's not going to say anything about it.

And I asked John Eisenhower in a letter, Did your parents ever talk about this?

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

RICHARD SCHNAKE: And he said, Oh, no, no, no, I never heard anything about it.

My father would never have done anything like that.

Have you ever thought about writing a book about all of this?

I mean, you've collected so many interesting-- I mean, all the backstories-- I mean, have you ever thought about writing a book?

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Well, the answer is yes.

Now that would be about my fifth job, after practicing law, and being a husband and a dad, and when I get time, scan things and put them online on my website.

But I'm actually working on a Truman signature study that I just love to work on, and I get to do it, like, maybe twice, three times a year.

I'll have an hour or so I can sit down and do something, or I see a letter and I'll work it in.

Because I'm not only including examples of Truman signatures as they change over time-- so, for collectors-- but I'm writing the manuscript based on or written around the text of Truman's letters and his diary entries.

And like I said, he had such a unique way of saying things that was all his own that I think, if I can ever get it done, people will really enjoy it.

Yeah.

We've only got a couple of minutes.

It's gone by so fast.

I guess I'd like to close by asking you-- so if somebody wanted to start doing this as a collector, what would be the best thing to do to get started to do that?

RICHARD SCHNAKE: Find a dealer who knows what he or she is talking about, and figure out what you want to collect.

And lots of collectors, when they start out-- you don't really know until you get into it what you like, what you don't like, and you see catalogs.

And beginning collectors tend to frame everything and hang it on the wall, which is great-- they're beautiful display things-- but wall space is-- DALE MOORE: The value.

Yeah, you run out of wall space really fast.

And the more you become a serious collector, the more important the documents you want to buy.

DALE MOORE: Yeah.

And then you don't want to hang a $30,000 Washington or Lincoln letter on the wall.

You know, a fire theft-- it's gone.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

But there are lots of wannabes out there on eBay and some of these websites out there that don't know what they're talking about, especially the auction sites.

There are these what I call third party authentication companies that will charge you to authenticate pieces.

There's one that authenticated a fully handwritten Truman letter-- it was in an auction, I notified the auction house that it was bad because it's a preprinted form letter that Truman sent out to scads of people who wrote to him after he left office in 1953.

And there was another one that authenticated the signature of James Earl Jones-- or James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King-- and I saw it, it was in a little plastic thing slabbed, and they had their sticker on there-- James Earl Jones, the black actor.

You know, probably they got the wrong color and probably the wrong attitude about Dr. King.

DALE MOORE: Yeah, yeah.

Richard Schnake, thank you so much.

What a great conversation.

Oh it's fun, I appreciate it.

DALE MOORE: It's been fantastic.

Stay tuned, I'll be right back.

[bluegrass music] NARRATOR: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you enjoyed today's show, and I'd like to thank my guest, Richard Schnake, for sharing his insight about collecting historical papers and signatures, and for helping keep our past interesting and alive for many individuals.

Join us again next time for OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

[bluegrass music]