Leslie Keno didn’t have time to return Chris Machmer’s phone messages right away. When he finally did, Chris said,“I think you’ll really be glad you returned my calls.”

Chris “continued with evident glee,” wrote Leslie and his twin brother Leigh, of “Antiques Road Show” fame, in their book Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture. “‘What would you say if I told you I knew where you could find Gen. John Cadwalader’s hairy-paw-foot armchair?’”

In 1769, General Cadwalader had renovated a Georgian townhouse on Second Street in Philadelphia and lavishly outfitted it with new rococo furnishings of superior quality. After his death, the furnishings had dispersed, and very few pieces have ever come to public sale.

To antiques dealers, a piece of Cadwalader furniture was the equivalent of the Holy Grail, or as Leigh Keno put it, “quite simply, one of the most important pieces of furniture in the world.”

If Chris Machmer were right, it would make headlines.

“He had an eye for it,” says his father, Dick.

Dick Machmer, a retired rural mail carrier and entrepreneur, and Rosemarie Machmer ’49 and ’74, a retired French and Spanish teacher, have collected American antiques and folk art for decades. Their low-key Berks County demeanor and modest home in Hamburg, Pa. belie the fact that they also have a national reputation as collector/dealers (who buy for pleasure, and eventually sell off some of their collection to make room for more) and own arguably one of the finest collections of furniture, carvings and Pennsylvania German fraktur in the country. They are also the authors of three books including Just for Nice: Carving and Whittling Magic of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

It seemed natural to Dick and Rosemarie that Chris would have both an eye and a fascination for antiques, and that he would begin to collect iron penny banks and shaving mugs as a youngster. And by the time of his premature death, at age 52 in 2003, Chris was a dealer with an outstanding reputation and nationally known for his expertise in Pennsylvania German antiques.

Chris took on his first antiques show – all on his own and with his own items for sale – at the Berks County dealers’ association show at the Kutztown Fairgrounds. He was 12. “We didn’t stay,” says his mother. “We wanted him to do it himself. Chris sold practically everything,” she says with pride – including an 18th century blanket chest painted red and yellow and a farm table. Chris was also the youngest person ever to have a booth at the prestigious Philadelphia Antiques Show.

By the time he got to Albright, he was already established in the antiques business. He majored in history, and briefly considered law school, but was more attracted by the lure of antiques. College friend David Hallowell ’74 remembers that after school Chris would go out to a sale site the day before the sale to see if he could make a deal. “I remember Chris telling us he’d paid $700 for a piece of pottery, a mug. One time I went to his house and he showed me some carved wooden birds that he said were special. I wouldn’t have known the difference! We were college kids. We weren’t interested in antiques. But Chris was.”

Eventually, Chris purchased a 1760 house in Annville, Pa. where he opened his business. He became president of the Antiques Dealers of Berks County. He and his then-wife Corinne, also an antiques dealer, exhibited at major national antique shows. His reputation grew. “In our travels, we met dealers in all corners of the world who knew him for his fairness and knowledge,” says his mother.

And as it turned out, Chris Machmer was right about the Cadwalader chair.

On that day in 1986 when Chris called Leslie Keno, who was working at Sotheby’s, he was representing a friend named Nate Wallace, the nephew of the owner of the well-worn armchair. The chair had been loaned to a local school, and when the school called in an expert to evaluate its loans and gifts, it had sparked some interest because its distinctive hairy-paw feet were similar to those of a Cadwalader table. However, curators at both the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Del. and the Philadelphia Museum of Art weren’t impressed, classifying it as Victorian and late English, respectively.

Then Wallace called Chris Machmer for advice. Chris walked into the unheated garage in Delaware where the chair was stored and knew instantly the chair was a miracle. He enlisted Pennsylvania furniture expert John J. Snyder Jr., to trace the provenance of the chair through several generations of Cadwalader family and friends to Wallace’s uncle. Snyder, remarkably, also unearthed Gen. Cadwalader’s original receipt for a very large easy chair from Thomas Affleck, the maker, as well as a Cadwalader household inventory that described the chair as upholstered in blue damask.

Later that year, the chair made headlines when it sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $2.75 million, the world record for a piece of antique furniture at that time.

Then, as his parents say, everybody knew Chris.

According to his friend Rick Purcell ’75, “the Machmers can call up Winterthur and get their attention. Chris had that kind of respect in the antique world. Quality was paramount. Chris’ reputation was unsurpassed. Chris and Dick had a sixth sense of antiques. Chris could look at things and just know what they were.”

But there were other things Chris Machmer loved besides antiques. He loved race cars, roller coasters, rock ‘n roll and parades. “The Damon Runyon of the Dutch Country,” wrote J. Garrison Stradling in “Recalling Chris Machmer” in the Maine Antique Digest, remembering Chris’ colorful tales of central Pennsylvania and the antiques business.

Every year Chris would buy season tickets to Hershey Park and take friends to ride the coaster and to play the games of chance. He’d give the stuffed critters he won to children at the end of the day. Every year he paid half of the cost of the Annville Fire Company’s annual parade.

And parked in the barn of his 1760 house was his pride and joy – the red and white dirt-track race car emblazoned “Machmer’s Antiques.”

Rosemarie Machmer says that he once told her that driving a race car was the only goal he never reached in his lifetime. Instead, he sponsored drivers – five of them.

“Chris was so generous to people. And never expected anything in return,” says Rosemarie. “When you went out to dinner, there was certain to be an argument about the check because Chris always insisted on picking it up.” He was always ready to help his friends financially, “never expecting to be paid back.”

“Once he trusted you, he’d trust you with his life,” says Purcell. “If I admired something in his home, and said ‘I love that,’ he’d say, ‘Take it, pay me later when you get to it.’”

“He was one of those ‘Reader’s Digest’ guys,” says Purcell fondly. “My ‘most unforgettable character.’”

But while his professional reputation and business were growing, Chris Machmer’s health was declining. Chris discovered he was diabetic, but he refused to take it too seriously. Kidney failure and congestive heart failure led to his sudden death in June 2003. He had been in the antiques business for a full 40 years.

“He would have loved the memorial luncheon afterward,” says Rosemarie. “It was his kind of fun to take people out to restaurants for meals and conversation.”

Five months later, the Conestoga Auction Company held a two-day sale of Chris’ estate. Nearly 600 bidders came from 21 states and four foreign countries, in what the Maine Antique Digest (March 2004) called “a tribute to Machmer, who handled many great things over the course of his career.” Chris’ collection included very desirable examples of Pennsylvania German fraktur, 18th and 19th century blanket chests, cast-iron mechanical banks and shaving mugs, a dozen of which sold for more than $1,000 each. According to the Maine Antique Digest, the star items of the auction were an extremely rare 1840 blue Sandwich glass inkwell and stand bought by a major American museum and a floral still life by Severin Rosen that sold for $165,000.

Dick and Rosemarie Machmer carried out Chris’ wish that a significant portion of his estate go to Albright College. A gift of $620,000 has established the Chris A. Machmer ’74 Endowed Scholarship, to be given to a student from Hamburg, regardless of need.

“Doing something for Albright, that was his idea,” says Dick Machmer. “Chris and I, we were aware that there is no money in Hamburg. There is nothing to hold young people here. We’re hoping to give someone an opportunity.”

“He always kept Albright in his heart,” says Purcell.