The unnamed shopper, who bought a stack of records from the family of a late Motown musician, made the discovery once he got home.
“I was going through them and out of an album fell this passport,” the man said on the US version of the Antiques Roadshow earlier this week. “It literally fell into my hands.”
The man had gone to the family's house to pick up some items they wanted to donate to the Motown Museum, where he used to work. He initially declined to purchase their old albums but went back to buy them at a weekend estate sale soon after instead.
Pop culture memorabilia expert Laura Woolley encouraged the man to insure the passport for no less than $20,000, to which he responded: “Are you kidding me?”
“The thing I’m in love with is how young he is here," Woolley said on the show. “This is dated 1964, which is great, and it is after he was signed as a solo artist with Motown and added the ‘e’ to the end of his name.
"It’s not a really common thing to see Marvin Gaye memorabilia and passport collecting is a really vibrant world because there's usually only a few of them throughout your life."
The expired US passport was issued in October 1964, the same year that Gaye, then 25, released ‘How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)’. Gaye’s authentic signature can be seen, along with his birth date of 2 April 1939.
The singer was shot and killed by his father during an argument in 1984, after revolutionising the music scene with hits such as “Let’s Get It On”, “Sexual Healing” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”.
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