The Silver Spring Penguin

Courtesy of Flickr user Johnny Dollar. Reposted with permission.

On Monday, the Public Broadcasting System announced that “The Antiques Roadshow” will be rolling through Washington, DC, this August. For the uninitiated, the program brings tchotchke collectors out of the woodworks to have their stuff appraised by professional antique dealers. Some of it is crap, some of it is big money, all of it is entertaining.

So what would “Roadshow” pros think of the tiki mugs above?

First, a little provenance (French for “the 411″). Flickr user and tiki-mug owner Johnny Dollar received a set of at least six such mugs from his brother and sister-in-law in 2009. Apparently, his sister-in-law’s parents collected them from an area tiki bar back in the day, he told The Penguin.

The thing is, Dollar isn’t completely sure the mugs came from Silver Spring’s Luau Hut, a tiki bar that once occupied the currently foam green (formerly mustard yellow) long house at 8407 Ramsey Ave. Instead, the mugs could have come from The Hula Hut, another tiki bar once located in Wheaton, he admitted.

There was also another Luau Hut lounge just south of Dupont Circle in The District, though Dollar indicated that the mugs’ original owner likely scored them from a Maryland restaurant.

“Based on the the evidence that the Luau Hut had a much longer existence and seemed to use both branded and non-branded tiki mugs, I have made the educated guess that they were from [Silver Spring's] Luau Hut,” Dollar emailed The Penguin.

Given the mugs’ provenance and their potential significance to downtown Silver Spring’s history, how much would they be worth?

According to the Luau Hut’s undated pictorial menu, the Tiki Tumbler — “an exotic mixture of fine rums and tropical fruits” served in a take-home mug — came to $2. Six of those rang up to $12, not adjusting for inflation.

Photograph copyright (c) 2009 by Flickr user Johnny Dollar. Reposted with permission.