Auctioneer Jerry Priddy’s childhood fascination with the Red Baron turned into a lifelong passion for all things Richthofen.
Now 76, Priddy owns what he describes as the largest known collection of memorabilia belonging to Manfred von Richthofen, also known as the Red Baron. The collection is displayed in the basement of Priddy’s home, Denver’s historic Richthofen Castle, which was built by the Red Baron’s uncle Walter von Richthofen.
Manfred von Richthofen was the highest-scoring fighter pilot of World War I. In 20 months of combat, he shot down 80 aircraft. Von Richthofen was shot down and killed in April 1918.
“The Red Baron was one of my heroes,” Priddy said. “I’ve had a fascination with airplanes ever since I was a kid growing up in Kearney, Neb., and they came through barnstorming.”
But now that Jerry and Esther Priddy’s four children are grown with families of their own, it’s time to sell it all.
Asking price for the 15,000-square- foot castle: $3.5 million.
The furniture, minus sundry personal items: $2 million.
“I can’t wait for a townhouse,” Esther Priddy said.
And the collection of Red Baron artifacts, quietly shown this month to The Denver Post? Jerry Priddy is asking $2.5 million and says he has an offer from an undisclosed buyer.
He says the deal could close within a month.
Priddy hoped to see the collection stay intact in Colorado. To that end, he offered it for $1.5 million to the Lafayette Foundation, a World War I historical group based out of Platte Valley Airport in Fort Lupton. But the group hasn’t been able to raise the money.
“It’s pricey, but it’s priceless,” said Andy Parks, who runs the foundation’s museum. “It is not known among many historians that many of the materials and items you saw exist. They were thought to be lost to history.”
Parks fears another buyer will cherry-pick pieces to keep – and sell the rest to buyers throughout the world, never to be seen together again.
He hoped to incorporate Priddy’s collection into the museum honoring World War I flying aces that he and his father, the late James Parks, established.
That also would have meant that Colorado would house one of the largest collections of World War I memorabilia in the world and round out the foundation’s collection, which includes an assortment of planes, including three featured in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie “The Aviator,” uniforms and other memorabilia from World War I fighter pilots.
“The person we’re missing the majority of materials on is Richt hofen, and Jerry has that,” Parks said. “It’s a very significant collection. That it’s in the home makes it a much more interesting visit.”
Priddy’s collection includes the fighter pilot’s leather bomber jacket still scented with castor oil, a number of his uniforms and eight of the trophy cups he had made after his first 60 victories.
Priddy even has a reproduction of the Red Baron’s Fokker triplane in his front yard.
When the Priddys bought the castle in 1984, it had been stripped of its fixtures, the ceilings were crumbling and the walls were caving in.
“The house had been vandalized three times before we bought it,” Esther Priddy said. “Nothing came with the house.”
Much of the furniture the Priddys are selling is original to the castle.
The Priddys, who own Estate Auction on East Evans Avenue, bought the items in 1977 from the estate of a friend of Walter von Richthofen’s. The couple, who first attempted to buy the castle in 1970, stored the furniture off-site until they succeeded in buying the castle years later.
“We were looking for a large home – an old home with some history,” Esther Priddy said.
Richthofen Castle, in the heart of the Montclair neighborhood on East 12th Avenue, was built between 1878 and 1887.
Its grounds once sprawled from Quebec Street west to Holly Street and from Sixth Avenue Parkway north to East Colfax Avenue.
Montclair was the first attempt at a suburban Denver community, Colorado historian Tom Noel said.
“It’s the ultimate show home for Denver neighborhoods,” he said. “It was the first house here trying to coax people out of Capitol Hill.”
The castle’s 50-foot tower displays the Richthofen coat of arms. High on a western corner is a red sandstone sculpture of Frederick Barbarossa, a German medieval emperor, wearing a headdress made of a lion’s head.
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-820-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
