I don’t remember the exact year, maybe it was 1979 or 1980, and I was still in grade school. There was a kid in my class who was a year older (we were in an “Open Program” class, with multiple grades), and one day he asked me if I would be interested in collecting beer cans and bottles. I didn’t know anyone else who did collect beer cans or bottles, but I was open to the idea. We met up at a nearby lake, where teenagers (?) or young adults would park their cars, drink beer, and then toss their empties in the wooded ditch alongside the road. How or why my friend knew this, I don’t know, but the key was to wander down into the ditch and simply look for cans or bottles of interest – they were everywhere. This side of the lake is adjacent to a bird sanctuary, so the ditch was kind of a “no man’s land,” as there was no reason to go down in there, as far as anyone from the parks system coming around to clean things up.
So, one day after school, we just went down into the ditch and started picking up cans and bottles, we must have had a bag or something to carry them in, and I brought home about 10-15 different cans and bottles. I think I just announced to my parents that I was going to start a collection, and while they didn’t seem to have any problem with a grade school kid having empty beer cans around, my dad was concerned about the glass bottles possibly breaking, so he said the only caveat was restricting the collection to cans only.
Looking back, the funny thing was, my dad seemed to embrace the idea of this collection, and got involved himself. He built shelves and installed them on the walls of our furnace room in the basement, so that I could display my collection, as you can see below.
I’m sure I went back to the lakeside ditch a few more times, but went looking in other locations as well. But my collection certainly took off in the 1980s, as my dad traveled throughout the United States for business, and he would often look for and buy some obscure brands of beer that were specific to the particular location where he was, such as Hudepohl in Cincinnati, or Iron City in Pittsburgh.
There’s plenty of reasons for collecting – the pursuit of different brands, the visual aspects of the cans, going to beer can conventions and trading with other people (more on that later), but I also remember buying a book around the time that I started collecting, titled “Beer Can Collecting” by Lew Cady. There was a story about a guy named Kenny Jerue who collected beer cans, growing an impressive collection, until one day – as the story goes – he “fell in love with a Cadillac … he loved it more than anything, even more than his beer can collection.” So he sold his beer can collection and used the money to buy the Cadillac!
Now, I don’t know about you, but as a young boy, the idea of rummaging through a ditch and collecting cans with the idea that eventually they could be traded for a Cadillac, that’s pretty powerful stuff! I think it’s probably true with any type of collection – you hope that it becomes something valuable, in addition to something you enjoy.