Loren Krytzer walked into the California auction room broke and unemployed, surviving on disability checks. Seventy-seven seconds later, he walked out a millionaire — all thanks to a blanket.
"Everybody loves a rags to riches story," laughs Krytzer.
His life changed forever when he discovered that a forgotten old family heirloom, a Navajo blanket from the 1800s that had been sitting in his closet for seven years, was actually worth $1.5 million. And just in time, too. He had been scraping by, living in a shack on the edge of California's Liona Valley, and had lost a leg after a near-fatal car accident.
The sale of the blanket "gave me a new lease on life," Krytzer tells CNBC Make It. "It truly did."
He inherited the blanket initially because no one in his family realized its value, either. When his grandmother died, he had gone to her house to collect the books she had promised him. "Everything was already pillaged through by my sister and my mother," he recalls.
The last bag in the house held two blankets passed down from his great-grandmother: a softer Hudson's Bay blanket and the Navajo blanket his grandmother once laid out on the porch when her cat was having kittens. Krytzer's sister grabbed the former, and the latter fell to the floor.
"I said, 'What are you going to do with that?' She said, 'I don't want that, that dirty old thing?' I picked it up … put it in my closet and there it sat for seven years," he said.
For Krytzer, those seven years proved to be grueling. Though he had built a thriving career as a freelance carpenter, a car accident in 2007 brought that to an end. After the crash, he spent the better part of a year in the hospital on dialysis. Nerve damage and microfractures in his left foot led to an infection and a worsening prognosis.
Disability eventually provided just enough money to move into a friend's shack in Leona Valley near Palmdale, Calif. Krytzer negotiated his rent down to $700, which left him about $200 a month to live on, along with whatever shared income came in from his then-girlfriend Lisa.
As dark as things seemed, a glimmer of hope came in 2011 when saw an episode of "Antiques Roadshow" in which an elderly Tucson, Ariz., man is shocked to learn that his First Phase Navajo blanket is actually worth around $500,000. The appraiser, Native American gallery owner and art collector Don Ellis, explains that the textiles were expensive even in their own era. They could cost as much as a high-status person back then made in four years.
After Moran sent the blanket out for testing, the story seemed to line up. The textile was one of the finest and rarest Navajo chief's blankets in the world, according to noted appraiser and specialist Joshua Baer, who was present at the auction six months later. Though Krytzer was told his verified Navajo blanket could fetch around $200,000, he needed money, and he was tempted by competing companies that offered to pay up front if he chose to pull out of his sale agreement with Moran just weeks before the auction date.
The auction took place on Tuesday, June 12, 2012. Moran had tempered Krytzer's expectations as he headed into the room with Lisa.
"I was thinking [I'd] fix up my car a little bit," Krytzer says. "I started praying, 'Please be enough to buy a house or something.'"
Joshua Baer, the art and blanket appraiser, was in the room on behalf of a potential buyer. He likened the event to "a Fraiser-Ali kind of thing."
The boxing metaphor was apt: The auction lasted only 77 seconds. A quick but fierce bidding war broke out between a phone buyer and Don Ellis, the very same Navajo blanket enthusiast who had appeared in the "Antiques Roadshow" episode that inspired Krytzer.
"I have a reputation for going after and being interested in the very, very best examples in my field," Ellis tells CNBC Make It.
The bids for Krytzer's blanket climbed from its opening price of $150,000 to $500,000 to $1 million before topping out at Ellis's final bid of $1.5 million.
"They had to bring over water and stuff to me and wipe sweat off my head," Krytzer recalls. "I started hyperventilating because I couldn't believe it. … Everything just went limp and I couldn't catch my breath."
The happy ending came as a relief for Moran, too, who had gambled and turned down private offers in order to bring the blanket to auction. After fees, Krytzer received $1.3 million for a blanket that had, only years before, served as the catch-cloth for a litter of kittens.
"I would call the 1-800 number for Wells Fargo … and it would say, 'Your balance is one-point' and I would play it [on speakerphone]," he laughs.
Still, in the immediate aftermath of the auction, Krytzer says he was a mess. He got calls from distant relatives asking for a cut and suffered from frequent anxiety attacks. His sister threatened to sue him before backing down.
"It was just hard to grasp," he says. "I mean, I worked hard my whole life. I was in construction, I never bought anything, I never saved, I always rented. I bought used cars cause that's all I could afford. I lived paycheck to paycheck my whole life."
After the auction he spent five days in a hotel alone to decompress
Before he was set to receive his payout, Moran called and asked Krytzer to come into the office for a quick lesson on "the time value of money."
"I paid our CPA for four hours to sit down with Loren," Moran recalls. "We've come too far and worked too hard to not do this. … I wanted so much to change his outlook and his journey ahead."
Most of the lesson took hold. Krytzer says he invested in stocks and some municipal bonds, as well as two houses: one $250,000 home he lives in with his now-wife Lisa, complete with a pool and a view of the valley, as well as a second property that he rents out.
"It's like, I never had money before, but OK, what do rich people have? When they have this money, what do they do?"
He also splurged on some luxuries, like the 2012 Dodge Challenger SRT8 he bought new and souped up from West Coast Customs, the mechanic shop made famous by MTV's "Pimp My Ride."
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