DENVER - When you talk to Gary Stover, he sounds more like a detective than an antique dealer, but the two lines of work have a lot in common.
In this case, the mystery Stover has been working to solve for more than six months: Does he have one of President Harry S. Truman's poker tables?
Stover has a booth at the Brass Armadillo antique store in Wheat Ridge. One day a man named Richard Gurley walked into the store and said he had a piece to show.
Gurley's son was a construction worker who was assigned to clean out and throw away items in the basement of a home in Denver's Cheesman Park used as an assisted care facility. He found a table that looked old and unusual, and decided to take it home. Eventually his father discovered two small plaques on the table that read "Harry S. Truman President U.S.A." and "Blair House Washington D.C."
But is the table authentic? Stover puts the odds at 85 percent and is trying to sell the item for $30,000.
"They don't always have absolute, 100-percent authentication," Stover told 9NEWS in a phone interview.
As for the $30,000 asking price, "It's just a guess on my part this is what the piece should bring."
If he had absolute proof that President Truman used it, its value would probably be about $50,000.
There's good circumstantial evidence of the table's origin. President Truman lived in the Blair House in Washington while the White House underwent a massive renovation from 1948 to 1952.
His affinity for poker became well-known after he left office, although, like many presidential pastimes, it was kept quiet during his years in office.
The most famous Truman poker table is currently on display at the Winter White House, now a museum in Key West, Fl., where Truman vacationed while he was president. Navy personnel constructed the large poker table specifically for Truman's use.
The table Stover has in Denver is much smaller and folds up. But it has a label identifying it as coming from "Marquette Mfg. Co. Ludington, Mich." which was a furniture manufacturing company in the 1940s when Stover believes the piece was made.
Stover reached out to the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum in Independence, Mo. The staff there looked for pictures or any other authentication of the piece but concluded that they could neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the table.
When 9NEWS contacted the library, museum curator Clay Bauske responded by saying efforts to confirm the existence of the table at the Blair House during the Truman administration have been unsuccessful. "We cannot rule out the possibility that it may have been used in the Blair House," Bauske wrote. "But that cannot be positively confirmed until we are able to locate documentation to that effect (photographs, inventory records, letters, other documents, etc.)."
If President Truman did use this table to play poker, how did it get to Denver? The most tantalizing connection is with Truman's Secretary of Agriculture, Charles F. Brannan, who come back to Denver to live after Truman left office in 1953. As far as Stover can tell, Brannan never lived at the Cheesman Park home, but he did live close by, and it's possible that Truman gave Brannan the table, who then gave it to another friend in Denver at some point.
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