Antique hunter discovers treasure that is Fountain Park

For years, I've tried to explain the joys of my family's annual pilgrimage to Fountain Park Chautauqua in rural Indiana, and failed. I tell people it's a circle of 73 rustic cabins and a 19th Century wooden hotel surrounding a lake - except there is no lake. No golf or tennis, either. No phones, TVs, Twitter or game systems. Just walnut and oak trees and families that have been gathering in the spot outside the hamlet of Remington for two weeks every summer since 1895.

In the center of the cabin circle are a food stand featuring homemade pies and farmer sodas (you know them as root beer floats), a candy stand with penny candies and such for the kids, an art colony where local artists and beginners put memories on canvas, a croquet court, shuffleboard, a grassy spot for the bocce-like game of "bowling on the green" and a tabernacle where bands, magicians and speakers follow the religious daily devotions with family shows at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Explore it yourself at fountain-park.org.

During this year's idyllic retreat, I meet Karl Gates of Palatine, a 70-year-old retired teacher and antique appraiser who has become one of the most popular entertainers at Fountain Park since his first show in 2005.

Gates gets it.

"I thought this place was going to disappear while I was here," quips Gates, making a reference to Brigadoon, the mythical Scottish village that appears out of the mist and heather on the hill just one day every 100 years.

The nights before and after his shows, Gates spends in the old Fountain Park Hotel, where a 15-day stay including three meals a day will run you $400. Gates sleeps in a room where the wood walls aren't thick enough to muffle a cough from the room next door. A bed pan is available for guests who don't want to make the trip to the bathroom down the hall.

"I love it," says Gates, who is married with three grown kids. "I was playing Rummikub until midnight with three ladies who were 70 to 90."

The Hoosier heartland has been good to Gates.

"Indiana has given me the greatest treasures I have found," says Gates, who began taking his antique-appraisal show on the road nearly a decade before PBS made "Antiques Roadshow" into a hit TV show.

Near the end of one of Gates' shows in Merrillville, Ind., a woman approached him with a small item.

"She said, 'It's been in our family since 1912,' and she handed me Captain Smith's snuff box from the Titanic," recalls Gates, whose appraisal of $600,000 was far beyond the woman's dreams.

At a home in Chesterton, Ind., Gates told a family the crystal skull they thought hailed from pre-Columbian times and was worth millions actually was a 19th Century work worth maybe $100,000. In that same house, Gates appraised a mirror that had belonged to Marie Antoinette at half-a-million dollars.

At Fountain Park, the treasures brought on stage are more modest. My friend, Beth, is thrilled to discover her old battery-operated Fred Flintstone toy from the 1960s could fetch $100. That is five bucks more than my mom's 1930s pin of a girl walking a dog, but my mom's delight comes from hearing Gates declare the jewelry she inherited from her sister "neat."

"What people really want is the story," explains Gates, who sounds like the English and art teacher he was as he mixes history and popular culture into each appraisal. "I'm happy to say that people enjoy my programs. If it (an item) is worth something, so much the better."

Gates (karlgates.com) teaches antiques classes through the park districts in Arlington Heights and elsewhere. While he tells crowds that Beanie Babies and other items marketed as collectibles "are not worth the money you paid for them," Gates notes that online sites now set the prices and there are "a lot of crazy people out there."

Having bought his first antiques (a $20 pair of 18th Century candlesticks now worth $300) when he was 18, Gates gives this simple advice:

"Don't ever throw anything away," Gates says. "Hallelujah for everything that's gone because it makes what is left more valuable."

That concept is why I think the most valuable antique in Indiana is Fountain Park Chautauqua.