We Have Polk's Grocery List...

Summary

Armstrong & Getty On Demand: "We Have Polk's Grocery List..."

Release Date: June 16, 2025
Host: Jack Armstrong & Joe Getty
Produced By: iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to Lincoln Memorabilia Auctions

The episode kicks off with Jack Armstrong announcing a significant upcoming event in the world of historical memorabilia. He shares exciting news about impending auctions featuring rare Lincoln-related documents that are expected to fetch millions.

Jack Armstrong [00:32]: "Rare copies of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment are going to be auctioned off in Sotheby's upcoming books and manuscripts sale in New York City."

2. The Allure and Challenges of Collecting Historical Artifacts

Joe Getty and Jack Armstrong delve into the fascination surrounding memorabilia collecting. They discuss the allure of owning pieces signed by historical figures and the challenges that come with it, such as determining authenticity and the inherent cost.

Joe Getty [01:23]: "Never really... it's usually a cool picture and a really fancy frame and then what you're paying for is the little signature on something, a letter or whatever."

Jack echoes these sentiments, sharing his personal experiences with collectors' markets and the internal conflict between passion and practicality.

Jack Armstrong [02:09]: "I'm conflicted. I'm very conflicted."

3. High-Stakes Valuation and Market Trends

The conversation shifts to the valuation of historical documents, highlighting the staggering prices they command at auctions. The Emancipation Proclamation copy is anticipated to sell for at least $3 million, while the 13th Amendment could reach upwards of $8 million.

Jack Armstrong [05:09]: "The copy, which was signed a year later, is estimated to sell for at least $3 million... the handwritten amendment he signed on Vellum in 1865 ending slavery nationwide is expected to sell for at least $8 million."

They also touch upon the resurgence of interest among younger collectors, particularly Gen X and millennials, despite a general slump in the overall art market.

Jack Armstrong [06:43]: "Lincoln reigns supreme... The record so far for any Lincoln related document is a $3.8 million copy of the emancipation proclamation sold to an Anonymous Guy in 2010."

4. Personal Collections and the Dilemma of Use vs. Investment

Jack shares his personal collection, which includes unique items like a Keith Richards guitar pick and Jimmy Page's cigarette butt. He reflects on the minimal personal enjoyment derived from these items versus their investment value.

Jack Armstrong [08:05]: "I also have Jimmy Page's cigarette butt which I actually grabbed off the front of the stage."

Joe humorously questions the practicality of showcasing such memorabilia, prompting Jack to admit that these items rarely see the light of day.

Joe Getty [08:38]: "How often do you show them to people?"

Jack Armstrong [08:40]: "I'm really not."

5. The Historical Significance of Lincoln's Documents

The hosts provide a detailed backdrop of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, emphasizing their historical importance and the scarcity of surviving copies. They recount Lincoln's heartfelt statement upon signing the Proclamation and its subsequent reproductions sold to support the Union cause.

Jack Armstrong [06:27]: "Lincoln was already embroiled in the Civil War when he signed the original, freeing enslaved people on January, 1863."

They also touch upon the tragic loss of Lincoln's original manuscript in the 1871 Chicago fire, making the surviving printed copies even more invaluable.

Jack Armstrong [09:49]: "Lincoln's original handwritten manuscript of the proclamation was lost in the 1871 Chicago fire."

6. The Legacy of Historical Collectibles and Authentication Issues

The discussion broadens to the legacy of collecting historical items, with a focus on the difficulties in authenticating such memorabilia. They ponder the value of even the most mundane items associated with historical figures, like Lincoln's personal belongings.

Joe Getty [10:16]: "Everything Lincoln had or touched could be worth quite a bit of money. His socks, his pants, his hat."

Jack humorously contemplates the idea of possessing John Wilkes Booth memorabilia, highlighting the complexities and ethical considerations in collecting items associated with notorious figures.

Jack Armstrong [13:30]: "I would pee on it every day or something. Some expression of hatred."

7. Reflections on Historical Events and Personal Anecdotes

The hosts reminisce about visiting Ford's Theater and discuss the grim reality of Lincoln's assassination, underscoring the profound impact it had on American history.

Joe Getty [12:09]: "There was some info about that I was just at Ford's Theater not that long ago."

They also share light-hearted banter about their collections and the lengths they'd go to acquire rare items, blending humor with genuine admiration for historical artifacts.

Joe Getty [13:51]: "You can get John Wilkes Booth's hair for me, Kenny."

8. Conclusion: The Intersection of Passion and Practicality in Collecting

As the episode wraps up, both hosts reflect on the balance between their passion for historical memorabilia and the practical considerations of owning such items. They acknowledge the internal conflict between the desire to preserve history and the challenges of displaying and enjoying these treasures.

Jack Armstrong [11:23]: "I get all hot to trot thinking about this stuff... But then. Okay, then. But what good does it do me unless I tell people?"

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, and outros to focus solely on the content-rich discussions between Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty.

Transcript

[Jack Armstrong]

This is an Iheart podcast. Well, we have a grocery list signed by President Polk for $30 if you're interested. It's One More thing.

[Joe Getty]

Armstrong and Getty.

[Jack Armstrong]

One More Thing.

[Joe Getty]

Oh boy, that's funny.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. There's some auctions about to go on later in June for some unbelievable Lincoln related memorabilia for many millions of dollars.

[Joe Getty]

Sparrow Angrew's dry cleaning ticket. Have any interest in that?

[Jack Armstrong]

No, he initialed the tip amount. You see the S and the A? Yeah. So rare copies of both the Emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment are going to be auctioned off in Sotheby's upcoming books and manuscripts sale in New York City.

[Joe Getty]

How many times I've been in these stores. They're usually in Vegas, one of your fancy casinos where they. Where they sell memorabilia. Whether it's sports memorabilia, music or, you know, politics or whatever. Never really. It's usually a cool picture and a really fancy frame and then what you're paying for is the little signature on something, a letter or whatever. But I've come close to buying them many times, but I never had. I never have. Mostly because I don't have the slightest idea if the price is reasonable or not.

[Jack Armstrong]

Well, they almost got me once or twice to. Authorities believe alcohol was involved, but they didn't. And. And it's usually for the same. I end up thinking, all right, what would I do with this? Who would I show it to?

[Joe Getty]

Stick it under your pillow. Put your head. Sleep with your head on it every night.

[Jack Armstrong]

Well, and how much, you know, like after a year, how much joy would it bring me to have just an investment?

[Joe Getty]

I wouldn't do it.

[Jack Armstrong]

I would.

[Joe Getty]

I never looked at it as an investment. Is always the coolness of it. But.

[Jack Armstrong]

Right.

[Joe Getty]

How would it continue to be cool if I had. Okay, I got a signed copy of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln. That's a good one.

[Jack Armstrong]

That I would get.

[Joe Getty]

Would I enjoy looking at that. That every day hanging on my wall forever? Or at some point the phone worn off? I don't know.

[Jack Armstrong]

My friends and acquaintances are history freaks enough that that would be really cool. But then because I try not to be the slave to my more base urges, I find myself thinking, okay, so I'd be getting it to make myself look cool. And is that really a healthy use of right time money and that's a good one. I'm not sure that's a good. So I always end up in the same place.

[Joe Getty]

Although I will tell you with some stuff, it's just one degree removed from just showing somebody your bank Statement, this is how much money I have in my account. I mean, because the point is this was expensive and I have it.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah, well, yeah, partly, yeah, you're not wrong. I've mentioned several times that the one thing I've lusted after for years and have really gone back and forth on spending the money for is a first edition of Dickens A Christmas Carol. And because they're available and they're not so prohibitively expensive as to be insane, it's not like buying a copy of what you say the Gettysburg Address would be. But my, my beloved daughter Delaney, when she was in England, she went to the Dickens Museum and got me a reproduction of the first edition of A Christmas Carol with all the original art and stuff like that. Was absolutely lovely gift and very cool. And when I read A Christmas Carol this Christmas time, as I do every single year, I will be reading it from that edition, which I'm excited about. But anyway, so you got rare copies.

[Joe Getty]

Of both Christmas thing, right? So is that, is that the one where.

[Jack Armstrong]

Right in the fucking title.

[Joe Getty]

Yes, that's the one where the burglars break into the house and the kids parents had gone on vacation.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yes.

[Joe Getty]

Is that what that is?

[Jack Armstrong]

Exactly. And they sit up, the kid sets up various booby traps and I, I've never actually read to the end, but yeah, that's my understanding of it. Sorry. Too funny not to go along with.

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[Jack Armstrong]

So anyway, you got the. The EP and the 13th Amendment on sale on June 26th. The 1863 probably proclamation was originally signed by Lincoln, issued during the Civil War, declared all enslaved people in Confederate states would be free. The copy, which was signed a year later, is estimated to sell for at least $3 million. The handwritten amendment he signed on Vellum in 1865 ending slavery nationwide is expected to sell for at least $8 million. Wow. Price. That would triple its auction record. And the two single sheet papers represent the price. The priceiest examples of each document to enter the marketplace and should serve as a major test of collectors appetites for historic American artifacts. And they actually get into the market for this sort of thing, which I found pretty interesting. The overall art market is in a slump, but this category has enjoyed an influx of Gen X and millennial bidders ever since. A copy of the Constitution sold a billionaire Ken Griffin $43.2 million in 2021. Griffin famously outbid a consortium of cryptocurrency investors to win it.

[Joe Getty]

I have no idea how many original copies of the Constitution there are. Are there six or 60? Probably closer to six than 60 because you had to hand right the whole thing.

[Jack Armstrong]

They were originally like 32. Sue me if these numbers are wrong. And there are far fewer left now.

[Joe Getty]

Yeah, Katie.

[Katie]

There are only 13 known surviving original copies.

[Joe Getty]

Okay, good.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. So aficionados are also getting more enthusiastic as we approach our 250th anniversary. But Lincoln is super, super hot within the pantheon of historic signatures. Demand has fallen off in the past decade for President Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, for instance, and remains steady for George Washington and Ben Franklin. Something from Dr. Franklin would be very, very cool.

[Joe Getty]

Yeah, you can't be a guy who's got assigned Robert Lee something hanging on your wall anymore.

[Jack Armstrong]

Well, not north of Kentucky anyway. Lincoln has proved to be the most coveted name in the American rare documents arena. Lincoln reigns supreme, said this authority from Sotheby's. The record so far for any Lincoln related document is a $3.8 million copy of the emancipation property Clamation sold to an Anonymous Guy in 2010 that. Oh man. It stood out in part because it also belonged to Robert F. Kennedy senior, who bought it in early 1964 for 9,500 bucks when he was Attorney General. Oh wow, now 3.8 million.

[Joe Getty]

Don't you have a guitar pick from somebody famous or something?

[Jack Armstrong]

Keith Richards.

[Joe Getty]

Keith Richards guitar pick.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. I also have Jimmy Page's cigarette butt which I actually grabbed off the front of the stage.

[Joe Getty]

And where do you keep these artifacts? They're in your pocket.

[Katie]

Right now in his pocket.

[Jack Armstrong]

Right. They're in a little box in my music room in my house.

[Joe Getty]

How often do you show them to people? This gets to our earlier discussion. How often do you open them up and look at them? Look at that guitar pick. I'll be damned.

[Katie]

It's his opener.

[Jack Armstrong]

I think I've shown the guitar pick once or twice to guitar players. And the. I forgot I had the Jimmy Page cigarette butt until we just talked about it now. So it's been 20 years since I've shown it to anybody.

[Joe Getty]

Okay. So you're not getting that much enjoyment out of it.

[Jack Armstrong]

I'm really not. Of course. Let's keep in mind what I paid for both of them. Nothing and nothing true. So interesting. Well, here's some more interesting stuff. The upcoming version of the proclamation has a storied history of its own. This copy. Lincoln was already embroiled in the Civil War when he signed the original, freeing enslaved people on January, 1863. Great quote from Lincoln at the time. Quote. I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, later carved up and mortally wounded by the assassin team that killed Lincoln, later signed an additional 48 folio broadsides that were sold for $10 apiece to raise funds for the U.S. sanitary Commission, a private release relief agency that helped wounded Union soldiers and their families. So they signed 48 more of them and sold them for 10 bucks apiece. Lincoln's original handwritten written manuscript of the proclamation was lost in the 1871 Chicago fire.

[Joe Getty]

Oh, wow.

[Jack Armstrong]

So the printed copies have become very, very coveted. Only 27 are known to survive, 18 of which are now tucked away in institutions, and nine are on the loose. They're privately owned and occasionally come up for sale.

[Joe Getty]

If you're really famous, so many of your things could be worth something if they could be documented. I'm surprised that. I mean, everything Lincoln had or touched could be worth quite a bit of money. His socks, his pants, his hat.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah.

[Joe Getty]

His chair, his. Just everything.

[Jack Armstrong]

Hell, and famously, back in the day, people would write letters to Lincoln or Washington or whomever and ask for a lock of their hair. They would. Then they would accommodate people. If they wrote a nice letter, they would send them a lock of their hair. It was really common. And so once in a great while, you'll see what is allegedly Lincoln's hair come up frogs. I remember I was talking about that a few years ago that I really wanted to buy some Lincoln's Hair.

[Katie]

Oh, geez.

[Joe Getty]

And what would you like, taped it to your head and worn it around.

[Jack Armstrong]

Or shown it to friends together with Jimmy Page's cigarette butt. Both of which would have to be DNA tested for authenticity. Although I'm telling you, I saw Jimmy smoke the thing, throw down the cigarette butts, and I just grabbed one.

[Joe Getty]

Yeah. The provenance on all of these things is difficult.

[Jack Armstrong]

Although that means where they came from.

[Joe Getty]

Actually, and being able to document it. Yeah, but if. But if you believe it, it's true. Right? Doesn't even make any difference.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. It's funny. I get all hot to trot thinking about this stuff, like something really cool from Ben Franklin. Then I always come back to where we started this discussion. All right, what would I do with it? You know, what is partly an expression of my admiration and love for Abraham Lincoln, for instance? I would do that. But then. Okay, then. But what good does it do me unless I tell people? And then it's a showing off thing. I don't know. I'm conflicted. I'm very conflicted.

[Joe Getty]

I would wear Lincoln socks every day if I had them.

[Jack Armstrong]

I don't think they're probably in wearing shape at this point. I remember they sold squares of the bloody pillowcase. Right. If I remember correctly, at one point.

[Joe Getty]

There was some info about that I was just at Ford's Theater not that long ago.

[Jack Armstrong]

Oh, right.

[Joe Getty]

With my kids. And there was some info in there that actually. The house across the street, which I don't think I'd ever been in before. The house across the street where he actually died.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah, it was. It's. Katie, it is a very small room. It's like, under the level of the street. What do you call that? With, like. There's a skylighting window, as I recall, but it was very dismal and small and terrible and just kind of adds to the feeling of what a miserable waste assassination of Lincoln was. Wow.

[Joe Getty]

Well, the weird stuff on that thing like that, you know, a murder, like a week later. It's pretty weird and disgusting to be in the room where somebody was killed or died. But you wait long enough and it's, you know, everybody's just chattering and taking pictures and talking.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. Yeah. Has there been. I'm sure there have been multiple great books written about the amount of human suffering that. That was caused by the assassination of Lincoln because he couldn't oversee the early days of reconstruction, establish those policies.

[Joe Getty]

Yeah. I would read that while I was wearing Lincoln socks. That's what I would do if I had them.

[Jack Armstrong]

You know, Is there John Wilkes Booth memorabilia? No, probably not.

[Joe Getty]

That wouldn't be cool.

[Jack Armstrong]

I would pee on it every day or something. Some expression of hatred. That's how I would.

[Joe Getty]

That would be normal.

[Jack Armstrong]

Pee on it. I. I tape on Lincoln's hair onto my head and take my vengeance every day. You can get John Wilson hair for me, Kenny.

[Katie]

No, John Wils Booth.

[Joe Getty]

You can get his hair.

[Jack Armstrong]

Really? Yeah.

[Joe Getty]

What's I go for is.

[Katie]

$31,000.

[Joe Getty]

Okay.

[Katie]

And his wanted poster is also going for $23,000.

[Joe Getty]

They must be able to. They must have a really good way to authenticate that hair for it to go for that much money.

[Jack Armstrong]

Yeah. The poster for 23K. Put. Put in a bid for me.

[Joe Getty]

You considering it?

[Jack Armstrong]

I'm gonna buy that. I'll pay you back. Don't worry. I'm good.

[Katie]

Oh, okay. All right, cool.

[Jack Armstrong]

Front me. Would you just. Still payday?

[Katie]

Anytime.

[Joe Getty]

If you come up short, you'll sell off your cigarette butt.

[Jack Armstrong]

Right.

[Joe Getty]

Well, I guess that's it.

[Jack Armstrong]

This is an Iheart podcast.