Back Home by Chris Hardie
I’d never considered myself part of the trendsetter crowd, but circumstance and timing put my brother Kevin and I into that mix more than 50 years ago when we started a beer can collection.
The circumstance happened to be the opening of the town of Franklin dump in the early 1970s. The family agreed to sell 5.92 acres of land to the town in 1973 for the creation of the dump. The location was about a quarter-mile away from our house. Some trees were cleared, a road was built and the landfill opened.
The dump was open Saturday mornings from 8 to noon. There was no sorting of trash; people simply brought their containers of refuse to the landfill where it was dumped into an open trench. The landfill supervisor – Clifford Herbert – would start a fire before he left for the day. Anything that was flammable would burn and the remnants would eventually be buried.
But not all of those remnants stayed in the landfill. Having a dump close by for two country kids is like dropping a T-bone next to a pack of hungry lions. It is a temptation we could not resist. It became a Saturday morning routine for Kevin and I – sometimes joined by our cousins and friends – to sneak into the dump and scrounge for treasures.
We would often go in before closing, crawling under the barbed-wire fence and hiding among the fallen trees that had been bulldozed. As soon as Clifford left in his vehicle and locked the gate, we would descend upon that day’s treasure trove.
Legally, we were trespassing and we could have been seriously injured. But that was the furthest thought from our mind when we embarked upon our own primitive test lab of sorts. The strength of jars and bottles were put to test as we hurled them against harder objects in the ditch. An old toilet proved to be a lot tougher than it looks.
We scavenged remnants of an old wood stove and other interesting bits and pieces like colorful bottles, kitchen equipment and other cool items that were relocated to our nearby hilltop fort.
But our primary focus was to look for beer cans. The first few visits covered the usual labels – Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Style, Blatz and Budweiser. In the early 1970s most of them were still made out of steel.
Another nearby source for cans was the ditch on a nearby farm that Dad had just purchased from a longtime bachelor farmer. I knew nothing about his farming proclivity, but he sure liked his beer, based on the mountains of cans that were in the ditch. Before the town opened its landfill, almost all farms had a ravine or gully that was the back 40 dump.
According to the Brewery Collectible Clubs of America, the early 1970s marked the beginning of the beer can collecting craze. By the end of 1971, the then Beer Can Collectors of America had 304 members, which soared to more than 12,000 by 1978.
Our thirst for beer cans didn’t end at the town dump. We would plead with our mother to buy different beer cans that were coming out in abundance at the time.
“For a while, the industry capitalized on the fad by pumping out specially-designed commemorative cans whose only reason for being was that collectors would snap them up,” the BCCA’s website says. “As a result most of these commemorative cans are still incredibly abundant and virtually worthless, most notably the ubiquitous Billy Beer.”
Yes, we had Billy Beer, a novelty lager introduced in July 1977 and endorsed by Billy Carter, the colorful younger brother of then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter. We also ended up with many of those abundant and worthless cans.
Dad was the victim of our hobby, as he had to drink the contents of the abundant cans that were not produced for their taste. We told him that the cans should be opened from the bottom with a can opener because the cans with unopened pull tabs were worth more, but he kept forgetting.
The beer cans were placed on bookshelves that lined the wall of our bedroom. One night a summer thunderstorm brought a gust of wind that blew through the bedroom, knocking down many of the cans and sending them tumbling across my sleeping brother.
He slept through it.
Whether by default or through some bargain with Kevin, I ended up with the can collection, which numbered about 150. I added a few in the early 1990s from antique stores, but never collected the older cone tops. The collection has remained in boxes, made every move with us and has never again been on display.
Recently I discovered that longtime friend and former high school teacher Randy Ebert of Melrose is also a collector. I retrieved the collection and we gathered to tip a few brews and to view the contents of the dusty boxes.
Some of the steel ones showed some additional rust from being stored in damp places over the years. But there were a few cans he didn’t have or hadn’t heard of.
It was a trip down memory lane as we pulled the cans out, one by one. I remembered the dump scavenges, turning over hundreds of cans in the ditch and some of the comments Dad made about the flavors of the beers.
“This one tastes like saturated camel piss,” he winced. Of course, I wondered how he knew what the particular animal waste tasted like in the first place. But his beer of choice was Blatz. I know. Keep your comments to yourself.
Randy set aside a few cans he didn’t have in his collection. He does now, along with more than 100 duplicates.
The collection that started from others’ outcasts has found a new home.
