IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Mark Hall-Patton (centre) poses for photos with fans outside the pawn shop featured on television’s Pawn Stars in Las Vegas. Hall-Patton, the curator of the Clark County Museum, appears regularly on the show authenticating items brought into the shop.
Mark Hall-Patton, expert on TV’s Pawn Stars,
is the real deal. By John M Glionna
The grey-bearded man in the red shirt and wide-brimmed Amish hat wades into the crowd outside the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, squinting into the noon-hour light. Suddenly, the fans are upon him. They know their quarry on a first-name basis.
“Hi, Mark,” a woman calls out. “Can we get a shot with you? My boyfriend’s daughter, she just loves you.” Another stranger touches his shoulder. “Mark, we’re huge fans,” says a goateed man, adding breezily, “We just got married last night.”
“Well, after 35 years, I heartily recommend it,” says Mark Hall-Patton, who had run an errand at the shop. For 10 minutes, cameras whir in the parking lot on Las Vegas Boulevard; people whisper in English, Spanish and Italian, their gaze shining as brightly upon the 59-year-old museum administrator as opening-night klieg lights.
They all want a moment with one of America’s unlikeliest celebrities. Since 2009, Hall-Patton has played a cameo role on Pawn Stars, the History Channel’s reality show whose quirky off-the-cuff bargaining scenes between opportunistic sellers and jaded buyers quickly made it one of cable TV’s most popular programmes. Now dubbed into 32 languages, the series has brought Hall-Patton international fame.
On camera, Hall-Patton is the learned authenticator in oversize square glasses who can tell the guy from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, whether that Civil War musket his grandmother kept in the attic since the Great Depression is the real deal or a knockoff.
“Mark is the only rock-star museum curator I know,” says Pawn Stars creator Rick Harrison, holding a cigarette in his office at the shop. “The guy knows so much stuff; he must have a Xerox machine inside his eyeballs. I’ve got a nickname for him: the Beard of Knowledge.”
Hall-Patton is a voracious reader with 20,000 history books spread around his house. Through his work at various US museums, he’s explored Native American collections and items that span the US’ 238-year history. He also has studied US utopias and fraternal societies, guns, printing, postcards and bridges. “When it comes to history, I’m an omnivore,” he says. “I’m all over the place.”
Those things he doesn’t know, he researches. Richard Kunst, a Roman Catholic priest from Minnesota with arguably the US’ largest collection of papal artefacts, speaks often with Hall-Patton. “The fact he seeks me out shows he does his homework,” Kunst said. “He wants to get to the source of things.”
Over five years, Hall-Patton has appeared in one-third of the series’ 300 or so shows. He’s praised by fans as an aesthetic purist who refuses to discuss an item’s rank value, choosing to concentrate on its specific provenance and place in history.
Although he realises Pawn Stars is entertainment, he says his reputation is at stake with every on-air proclamation. “I do my darnedest to be as accurate as possible, because I’m representing myself,” he says. “Whether I’m trying to determine whether something is real or not, or whether it was used this way or that, it’s important to be right.”
Among his fans, the museologist is best known for the agrarian hats he began wearing two decades ago — Amish originals purchased from the Pennsylvania hill country. Then there’s the flowing beard that ripples and jiggles as he talks, and that baritone that plumbs deep below his diaphragm to deliver his words.
Hall-Patton sightings are a daily occurrence. Fans stop him on the street and wave from passing cars. Women want to touch his beard. Children tug at his coat. He’s been told he’s the most popular TV character among the inmates at a Walla Walla, Washington, prison. Once, a hulking Mongol biker approached him in a crowded casino, making Hall-Patton flinch, before leaning down to say, “Hey, man, I like the show.”
The show’s main characters — Richard “The Old Man” Harrison, son Rick, grandson Corey and goofy pal Austin “Chumlee” Russell — guard their privacy against their crush of followers: They rarely appear in the pawnshop’s public area, conducting business and taping the show in the back.
As an educator, Hall-Patton sees the spotlight as helping bring his heightened appreciation of historical artefacts into millions of homes each week.
So many fans griped when Hall-Patton wasn’t at the Clark County Museum that officials ordered a life-size cardboard likeness of the Beard of Knowledge — Amish hat and all — that stands beaming in its lobby.
He never auditioned for Pawn Stars; the producers came to him after someone recommended him. One day at his office, he received a phone call asking whether he would go on camera and discuss the value of a West Point uniform. He suggested they get an antiques dealer, not a historian, but the caller insisted. After the pilot episode’s filming, Hall-Patton wondered, “Who on earth is going to watch this?”
Plenty of people, as it turned out. He returned to discuss such little-known objects as a set of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile launch keys, a 17th century Dutch coin scale and the ID card from an attorney general in the Truman administration. Depending on the shooting schedule, when the producers call with something to authenticate, he’ll have as long as a month or just a few hours.
His fastest work came with a Civil War-era LeMat revolver. He’d seen enough firearms from the period to know it was genuine. “With any object, I ask the same questions I would if it was brought into my museums: Is this thing real? And how do I know that?”
He says he’s been wrong only once — about a 1930s British guard’s uniform. After his research, Hall-Patton decided the pants were copies but the coat and bearskin hat were authentic. A viewer who knew the items later informed him the cap had been doctored. “The guy was right,” Hall-Patton said. — Los Angeles Times/MCT
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