GUEST: I found myself on, uh, Rush Street about 2:00 in the morning, uh, in, uh, 1980, in October.

We were there for a print convention.

And I was walking along and my buddy kind of was lagging behind me.

So I went back to him, and he was standing in a doorway, and it was pretty dark.

And there was this ragged older woman doing this drawing.

And I think he gave her, like, $20 or something.

We got back from the convention, he said, "Do you want this thing?"

I said, "Sure, I'll take it."

So I took it and I rolled it up and I put it in a tube in my closet.

When we got these tickets, I said, maybe this is something.

APPRAISER: So the artist is Lee Godie.

And she was homeless, but more by choice than by necessity-- she preferred the outdoors to indoors.

She was born in 1908 to a family of 11 children, Christian Scientists.

All the girls had to sleep together in the attic.

She was married twice, had four children.

Two of her children died, and that seemed to be such a traumatic event that she decided to reinvent herself.

Her second husband had a chicken farm in Washington State, and she had hoped that he was going to support her career as a nightclub singer.

But instead, she found herself on a chicken farm.

So she ran away.

And then she showed up in Chicago in the '70s as an artist.

And she used to spend a lot of time on the steps of the Art Institute, where she would sell her work and she would introduce herself to people as a French Impressionist.

And she would also say that she was better than Cézanne.

So she was quite a colorful character.

And she would sell her works on the street for between five and 20 dollars.

At a certain point, she started to speed up the process by tracing older works of art and then reselling the copies.

So she could make as much as $1,000 a day.

GUEST: Wow.

APPRAISER: But she would only get a, a ten dollar room at night if it were really, really cold.

She loved everything French.

So at one point, one of the curators from the Art Institute decided she would take her inside to show her the French Impressionist paintings.

And the artist was so worried that she was going to be overwhelmed and faint at the sight of these wonderful paintings that she decided to give herself strength by eating a piece of cheese that she had stored in her armpit.

This one was a self-portrait.

The medium is pen and ink.

And this orange appears to be a colored marker.

This is sort of standard artist paper, but she would also paint on pillowcases, discarded window shades, whatever she could find.

She got a lot of publicity.

There were articles about her in People magazine and Wall Street Journal.

Her daughter read an article in the Wall Street Journal about her mother-- she had no idea she was an artist.

And so they were reunited, and not too long afterwards, her mother started developing dementia.

So her daughter became her guardian.

And then she died in 1994.

I would say at auction, it might be worth about $2,000 now.

GUEST: Really?

Wow.

Jeff's going to be really surprised.

(chuckles) APPRAISER: Do you think he's going to reclaim his property?

GUEST: No way.

(chuckles) That's great.

Thank you.