19th Century bottle Digging.Digging up the past to preserve it for the future.
Digging/collecting Antique Bottles/privy digging/dump digging
BOTTLES IN THE BLOOD the good old days
I wrote this story in remembrance to my brother Steve.6/14/63 - 3/28/98
This story was published in Antique Bottle & Glass Collector magazine.
Enjoy
Steve and I with corn cob pipes.
My grandmother Anna was always there to help me if I had a question about bottles.She was like a walking bottle info/price guide.If it wasn't for her I may not have continued this Passion for bottles this far in life.She was co owner of a antique shop in the Pocono's called The Barn Store.I remember going up with her on weekends to help around the shop.Later in the day she would take me to the local milk bottle dump to do a little digging.Often she would try and tell me about the value of a bottle,where it came from etc.But that info would go in one ear and out of the other,because all I wanted to do was dig for bottles! I was only fifteen, I didn't care to much about what anything was worth .Today I still feel the same way.Don't get me wrong, to find a bottle that is worth money is a good feeling.But to sell that bottle,and know I may never see another like it, is a bad feeling.A good friend and privy digger Charlie Cook, from New Orleans once told me,
(What a bottle is worth, just lets you know how good your doing.) I like to live by those words.
My digging carer actually started in a place called Ambler Pa.A little town twenty miles out side of Philadelphia.Growing up I did what most young boys do, a little fishing, building forts and exploring the world around our little town.But I had a obsession that none of my family or friends ever had.That obsession was digging old bottles.The kids I grew up with did not have an ounce of interest in old bottles.Well I shouldn't say that,they did have an interest in smashing them with rocks! I remember getting mad at my friend Tommy P, when he took aim with a large rusted bolt he found in a 30s dump,and shattered a nice local blown crown top with a slug plate to pieces.Back in those days a bottle like that was equal to a puce eagle flask,in excitement value anyway.No one really had that bottle glow like I did,and to this day, only the true bottle digger knows what I am talking about when I say the "glow".
Looking back, times were tough for a young bottle digger, I was getting kind of lonely with no one to share the thrill of a new found dump or even finding a lone cork top lying in the woods.But that was about to change,I had a idea to recruit my younger brother Steve as a bottle digging apprentice.He was only eleven,but being my brother he had to have a little bottle blood in him somewhere.Steve and I would do a lot together when we were kids,ride bikes,go down to the creek to catch craw fish,hang out in our forts in the woods etc.But it seemed I was the only member of my family that was bitten by the bottle bug,Steve would have to be shown, to understand the excitement I felt when I pulled a bottle from a dump of forgotten glass.
I think the first time my brother was introduced to bottle digging was on a weekend my grandmother took us both to the Barn store.I would go to the barn every other weekend,Steve always wanted to stay home and play with his friends.But this time he decided to go with me.When I went up alone,I would always help my grand mom and her friend Glady's around the store,and afterwords go bottle digging.But since Steve was with me this time, she took us to the milk bottle dump bright and early,and told me I did not have to work around the barn store that day.
The dump my grand mom took us to wasn't that old,it dated to the early1930s.But to a Young bottle digger like me it was a gold mine!You could say I was raised on milk bottles.But practically anything excited me back then.I was a still a bottle digger in the rough,Steve was even rougher.
It wasn't to hard to find a whole bottle in this dump, and as I recall, most of the milks were embossed.Steve's first bottle was a milk embossed Promise land Pa, a local bottle.This bottle wasn't just laying on the surface either,he had to dig long and hard to get it free.When he finely got it out,I noticed a slight glow about him,and what that glow told me was, I just might have a digging partner but I wasn't sure yet.
I had four milks to Steve's one,but I was a pro by this time,at least I thought I was.
Steve was on the other side of a junk mound when I heard him yelling its a SKULL! its a SKULL!.at first I thought it was a animal skull or something.But when I looked over the hill of old tin,metal and dirt,I saw Steve with a little brown bottle in his hand.It was a dark amber Tinct Iodine poison with a skull embossed on it.With that find Steve was lit up like a candle,he had the glow and I had a partner.I must say I was a bit jealous at that point,but I never let Steve know that.He was very proud of that little bottle,and it was the first poison he ever found so I let him have his glory.
From that day forward,when ever I was going to the Barn Store, Steve begged my grand mom to take him along.because he knew that meant he would be digging the milk bottle dump,and the possibility of finding another cool bottle.
Going to the mountains was just the start of our digging adventures.We really started to look long and hard for dumps in our home town and towns surrounding our area. Since we were young, and school was about ready to let out for the summer we had all the time we needed to find bottle dumps.One of our hang outs was the railroad tracks.The train tracks were right behind our house on Main st.in Ambler Pa.It was easy to access them, all we had to do was hop a fence and we were there.We knew it was dangerous but something always made it ok to do.Probably being kids and feeling indestructible was one of the main reasons.
One day while we were walking down the tracks toward Fort Washington.A train was coming from behind us.The first thing Steve would say, was DUCK ! that meant get off the tracks fast! and hide somewhere.We both ran to a small patch of woods not far from the tracks.We always hid from trains,fearing the engineer would see us and call the train police,they never did.But we kept hiding anyway.
One weekend while walking the tracks, ducking from a freight train paid off in more ways then one.Steve ran into the woods first,I was right on his heels.We were both kneeling down looking through the brush, waiting for the train to pass,when all of the sudden I felt a sharp pain in my knee.I was concentrating on the train and failed to notice that we were smack dab in the middle of a old dump. From the way it looked there was a lot of busted glass on top.But what was just beneath that broken stuff, made us scream like school girls.I picked up half of a smooth bottle,I didn't know what a slick meant back in those days.Needless to say I was still excited. It was a BIM broken bottle.That meant a older dump! A lot older then the 1930s milk bottle dump.This one was at least 1900.If the seems stopped on a bottle, we knew it was a good dump.We were pontils in the rough,but we were slowly getting polished.Gaining knowledge as we went along.But we still liked digging bottles more then learning about bottles.
As we both dug down into this hill of busted glass,I found a bottle that excited me almost as much, as when Steve found the skull poison.It was a bottle with a giraffe head and neck on it.It read Tonsline For Sore Throats.That bottle was a good find in those days.I still have that bottle in my collection today.
It is very hard to remember all of the bottles we dug as young dump diggers.But the memories of the digs are as clear as a bell.I recall another hang out we had.It was called Tommy's Dam.It was a place my friends and I went to swim,fish and to escape our parents wrath when we got into trouble.Sometimes Steve and I would go to the Dam after a hard rain,the fast running creek would bring down shards of old glass from un known dumps far up stream.We never found a whole bottle,but the excitement and the possibility of finding one intact kept us looking.
One afternoon while walking the creek bank at Tommy's Dam,I realized we were pretty far from our starting point.We ended up about stones throw away from the South Ambler Dump.All of us kids just called it the "dump".When I say the dump,I don't mean a bottle dump.This was a huge mountain of waste from factory's over the years.My mom always told us to stay away from it.But my dad grew up very close to the dump, he used to tell us story's about my uncle Steve and him doing the same thing we do,playing on the white hill.So telling us not to go there was like telling us we had to stop digging bottles.It was never going to happen.
That day while we were approaching the base of the dump,Steve had an idea to search on the dump hills a little,instead of the creek bank.Soon we were about thirty yards apart looking for a sign of anything that might be an old bottle.I got side tracked,I saw a huge bull frog and decided to try and catch it.While I was preoccupied with the croker,I looked over at Steve,he was waving something in the air.The frog was to fast,so off I went to see what he had.As I was running toward him, I herd Steve saying,"it says something!" I could see the excitement on his face as I got closer.He tried to hide what he had in his hand and spring it on me,like he always did.Finely when he showed it to me, I was just as pumped up as he was.It was a square paneled light blue bottle,that read,Keasbey & Mattison Co Ambler PA.
That bottle was the start of a long stretch of searching on the South Ambler Dump for bottles.It turned out that the Keasbey & Mattison factory operating in the late 1800s, and was located on, or very close to the area where the dump was.We never really found out where the main bottle dumping spot was for the K&M factory.The way we found all of our bottles, was to walk and explore, and cover a lot of ground each time we visited the Dump.
Over the years we would go on to find hundreds of blue Bromo Caffeine,and Keasbey & mattison bottles.Its sad to say I only have two of the bottles from those early digging days.I am not sure if the K&M bottle that I have today, is the same one Steve found first at the bottom of the dump,but I like to believe it is.
Steve and I encountered numerous dump digging adventures growing up,The ones that I am writing about are the most memorable to me.Witch brings to mind, the Penn Lynn dump.
One weekend in October,I was invited by Billy S a classmate of mine,to join his father and him on a coon hound run.Billy's dad raised blue tick hounds.There specialty was to track raccoons.These dogs competed with other dogs in a race against each other.The run consisted of an old dried out raccoon skin that was drug by a rope through the woods and fields in a erratic pattern to throw the dogs off course.They would release the dogs at the start of the drag.Witch ever dog got to the tree with the skin it first,won.
I thought the whole dog running thing was pretty interesting,until I wandered off and went into the woods to take a nature brake.I could hear the dogs howling getting further and further away.Just as I was ready to walk out of the woods and try and catch up,I noticed a light on the ground.the light turned out to be the sun reflecting off of a small pile of broken glass.The next thing I knew,I was kneeling down on an old rusted piece of tin,digging like I just found a mountain of diamonds.The area of glass and junk turned out to be massive! Part of the dump was 1930s stuff busted pyro milks,carnival glass and lots of Ball Mason jars.If I walked thirty feet to the right of the dump I saw items like busted warranted flasks, Black cat stove polish bottles and one bottle I still have today, a Dr Alexander's Lung Healer.I was in bottle heaven! I couldn't wait to tell Steve.
I lost all track of time,I was still poking around the piles of glass,when I herd my name in the distance.Ricky........Ricky! I totally forgot about Billy,his dad and the coon hounds! I guess Billy's dad wasn't to happy,he thought I was lost.To bad his coon hounds couldn't sniff out a bottle addict,I would have been found in no time.After that episode,I was never invited to run the dogs again.That was ok with me, we had a bottle dump to dig!
As soon as I got home I told Steve about the killer dump I just found,we both couldn't wait to start digging there.I started planing the adventure right away.The trip to the dump location was about a mile from our house.Walking a mile or more to dig bottles was nothing to us.Taking a lot of back roads,cutting through back yards,or even walking the train tracks if we had to made it a lot shorter to our destination.
The next day was a Sunday,a day of rest,but not for us.We started out early and made it to the site about 9:00 am.As we walked through the fields where Billy and his dad ran the coon hounds,I told Steve about about the episode of me getting "lost" we both had a good laugh.But that laughter would soon turn into shouts of excitement,because the dump was just ahead.
When we finely arrived,Steve couldn't believe his eyes,this dump is humongous! he shouted.I was so excited, I remember doing a little dance on one of the mounds of glass and singing a weird song.We often did that when we found a bottle dump,especially if it turned out to be a real good one like this.
It was time to brake out the digging tools.Our tools consisted of a big kitchen fork an old folding camp shovel and a broken rake.We had a big burlap sack to put the bottles in for the trip home.
When the digging finely began,it wasn't long before the bottles started to show up.One of the first items to come out was a Dundee Marmalade crock,I asked Steve what date do you think this was made? He had no clue.We were not that focused on the dates of things back then,as long as the seams stopped on the bottles and the crocks had age cracks it was a keeper.The seam method was taught to us by our grand mother,it is one thing we remembered, out of all of her bottle history talks.
This dump was really loaded with bottles,it seemed like it was untouched by anyone for a long long time,possibly since they started to dump here many years ago.We didn't have to dig to far down to get a whole bottle.
As we worked on our own areas of the dump, the bottle piles began to build, there was everything from clorox to crocks to cokes and a lot of smooth bottles,thats what we called slicks back then,no embossing meant smooth.
I had a idea to change digging spots in the dump.Steve went deeper into the woods I tried near the edge closer to the field.My new spot was still producing the same old stuff,with an occasional stove polish and some Rx meds.Not that I wasn't excited,but after a while seeing the same bottles over and over got a little ho hum.
Steve yelled over,anything good yet? Just as I was ready to holler back nothing different,an odd piece of glass showed up in the hole I was in.It wasn't a bottle,it was to odd of a shape to be a bottle.With a little coxing I popped it out.It turned out to be a little glass tank,and it was whole! I yelled over to Steve your not going to believe this! When he saw it his jaw dropped.The first words out of his mouth were,lets find another one! He went back to his spot and I continued in mine.We were so excited with that find, our digging became erratic and fast in hopes to find another one.Being the young and inexperienced bottle diggers that we were,accounted for a lot of broken bottles that could have been avoided.That day wasn't any different.
I herd Steve say,oh crap I broke a green one! I said a green what? When I went to Steve's spot to see what it was he busted, I was freaking out! it was a dark green aqua blob top.At that point in time,we didn't know what a blob top was,but we knew it was a good bottle to dig.I remember my grand mom saying something about blob tops, but like I said, in one ear out the other.All that mattered to us is that it was a good sign for better things to come.Steve was mad at himself for braking it,I think I remember being mad at him also.But kids will be kids,and that was short lived.
After all the talk about busting the cool blob bottle,I asked him where he found it,he pointed to a deep hole by his feet.I deiced to get on my knees and have a closer look in the hole.What I saw shocked the shoes off of me! In the walls of that hole were a bunch of the same green bottles.We took turns trying to dig them loose with out braking any this time.When we finished the nerve wracking feat,there were five green C.R Cox Norristown blob beers sitting on the ground.Both of us did the bottle dance this time.It looked like Steve found the older part of this dump.Only one of those C.R Cox blobs survived my childhood years,I still have that bottle sitting on my shelf today.
That was a crazy end to the first day at the Pennlynn dump.We almost had a burlap sack filled with assorted bottles.But there was no way we were going to carry that sack the mile and a half we had to travel home,we were to tired.So we decided to hide the bag of bottles under some brush and dead wood,and get our dad to come back the next day to pick up the payload with his truck.
That night was a long one,we kept thinking about our dug treasure.Would someone find them and take them? would other kids brake them? Steve said we should have took the glass tank,I said the same thing about the green bottles.But it was to late now we would have to wait until the morning.
Soon we drifted off to sleep,and before we knew it we were in my dads trusty old Chevy F150 heading to the Pennlynn dump to pick up our sack of goodies!
We stayed in this pattern for a long time,finding to many bottles to carry home and electing my dad to be the pick up man.He didn't mind doing it for us,as a matter of fact he enjoyed our bottle hobby,but my mom had other ides about our obsession.
On one digging trip,Steve and I thought the best place to clean all of our dirty finds was in the bathtub.After all, we did have a lot of bottles and the bath tub was BIG.I can honestly say this only happened one time,my mom seemed to think it was best for all of us,not to bath in shards of glass and dump dirt.Don't get me wrong my mom liked the bottles,but hated the mess.That's sort of how my wife feels today.Thats why I use the sink.
As our young lives rolled along we continued to dig all that we could.But as we got older Steve and I changed paths and slowly got away from bottle digging.As the old saying goes some things never change,but some have to.Other things were coning into our lives, girls,new friends etc,and we no longer had time to dig that dump of dreams.But bottles were always in the blood for me.Even though I stopped digging for a long period of time,I would still have the urge to look over a creek bank,pick up a broken slick in the woods or just hold a bottle we dug and remember the good times we had as young diggers in the rough.
I would go on to dig bottles with just as much passion as an adult,and I continue to do so to this day.
I lost my brother Steve to a heart condition in 1999,he was thirty four when he passed away.I will always remember the good times with Steve, and how life seemed to be one big endless bottle dump.I love ya man.
Today as a adult,I wish I could dig as much as we did as kids,but being all grown up, I have to settle for weekends.
I often think about the good ole days digging with Steve, going form dump to dump as free spirits. I truly believe he is with me when I pull a good bottle from a privy or dump.That brings to mind a strange but wonderful thing that happened to me last year while I was at work.
For some reason that day I was thinking about the poison bottle Steve found on his first outing at the milk bottle dump.As a adult,Steve used to collect anything that had to do with skulls.Its a big swing from collecting bottles but thats what he liked.He lived with my dad until he passed,so maybe the bottle was still in the house. That day at work I decided to call my father and ask him if he knew where the skull bottle was.I described it and asked him to call me back if he found it.I got the call fifteen minutes later.He said there is no bottle that looks like that in the cabinet.The glass front cabinet is where Steve kept all of his beer mugs and skull collectibles.
I chalked it up as a lost or sold bottle.I really wanted that one to add to collection.I said to my self I guess the memories will have to do.After I got off the phone with my dad, I started to drive my work truck to get something to eat for lunch.
On my way out of the park, I saw a friend of mine walking down the path toward my truck.His name was Victor,he was an old Italian man in his eighty's, who walked every day in the park where I work.I often talked to him about bottles and our digs.That day when I stopped to talk to him,he began to tell me of a big dump down the street from the park.He said he remembers it as a kid.The first thought that pooped into my mind was a 1930s dump.When people usually tell me about a dump they know of,more often then not, it is a newer one.I deiced to just go and check it out anyway.What did I have to loose.I remembered the old days,and how excited Steve and I were when we found dumps of that age.With that in mind, I thanked Victor,grabbed a sandwich and headed to the bridge where he said the dump was.
When I got there, I had no idea where this thing was,but I knew what to look for to guide me there.I went down a big hill that lead to the Jordan creek.I found my self just walking along the creek bank aimlessly not seeing any signs of broken glass,and thinking maybe he was mistaken on the location.After all, he was in his late eighty's.
But then my thoughts quickly changed, I saw some white ash, and I knew there was a dump around here some where.I walked another ten feet and turned toward a big over grown hill.There in the ashy bank, I saw a little bottle.It looked to be unembossed and amber in color.I plucked it from the bank,turned it over and got chills from my toes to my head in a matter of seconds.It was a amber Tinct Iodine poison!!The same bottle my brother Steve found on our first bottle dig together with my grand mom.Now, finding that bottle any other time would be considered a nice but common find.On that day,and by the way it all unfolded,from the call to my dad, to meeting up with ole Victor.That little brown bottle is priceless.
I believe Steve wanted me to find it,and he guided me to the exact spot where it lay,until that day.
I have that little bottle nestled in between a few of my good iron pontil cobalt eight sided sodas.It is not a common bottle any more.
It represents "Bottles in the Blood"
The dump my grand mom took us to wasn't that old,it dated to the early1930s.But to a Young bottle digger like me it was a gold mine!You could say I was raised on milk bottles.But practically anything excited me back then.I was a still a bottle digger in the rough,Steve was even rougher.
It wasn't to hard to find a whole bottle in this dump, and as I recall, most of the milks were embossed.Steve's first bottle was a milk embossed Promise land Pa, a local bottle.This bottle wasn't just laying on the surface either,he had to dig long and hard to get it free.When he finely got it out,I noticed a slight glow about him,and what that glow told me was, I just might have a digging partner but I wasn't sure yet.
I had four milks to Steve's one,but I was a pro by this time,at least I thought I was.
Steve was on the other side of a junk mound when I heard him yelling its a SKULL! its a SKULL!.at first I thought it was a animal skull or something.But when I looked over the hill of old tin,metal and dirt,I saw Steve with a little brown bottle in his hand.It was a dark amber Tinct Iodine poison with a skull embossed on it.With that find Steve was lit up like a candle,he had the glow and I had a partner.I must say I was a bit jealous at that point,but I never let Steve know that.He was very proud of that little bottle,and it was the first poison he ever found so I let him have his glory.
From that day forward,when ever I was going to the Barn Store, Steve begged my grand mom to take him along.because he knew that meant he would be digging the milk bottle dump,and the possibility of finding another cool bottle.
Going to the mountains was just the start of our digging adventures.We really started to look long and hard for dumps in our home town and towns surrounding our area. Since we were young, and school was about ready to let out for the summer we had all the time we needed to find bottle dumps.One of our hang outs was the railroad tracks.The train tracks were right behind our house on Main st.in Ambler Pa.It was easy to access them, all we had to do was hop a fence and we were there.We knew it was dangerous but something always made it ok to do.Probably being kids and feeling indestructible was one of the main reasons.
One day while we were walking down the tracks toward Fort Washington.A train was coming from behind us.The first thing Steve would say, was DUCK ! that meant get off the tracks fast! and hide somewhere.We both ran to a small patch of woods not far from the tracks.We always hid from trains,fearing the engineer would see us and call the train police,they never did.But we kept hiding anyway.
One weekend while walking the tracks, ducking from a freight train paid off in more ways then one.Steve ran into the woods first,I was right on his heels.We were both kneeling down looking through the brush, waiting for the train to pass,when all of the sudden I felt a sharp pain in my knee.I was concentrating on the train and failed to notice that we were smack dab in the middle of a old dump. From the way it looked there was a lot of busted glass on top.But what was just beneath that broken stuff, made us scream like school girls.I picked up half of a smooth bottle,I didn't know what a slick meant back in those days.Needless to say I was still excited. It was a BIM broken bottle.That meant a older dump! A lot older then the 1930s milk bottle dump.This one was at least 1900.If the seems stopped on a bottle, we knew it was a good dump.We were pontils in the rough,but we were slowly getting polished.Gaining knowledge as we went along.But we still liked digging bottles more then learning about bottles.
As we both dug down into this hill of busted glass,I found a bottle that excited me almost as much, as when Steve found the skull poison.It was a bottle with a giraffe head and neck on it.It read Tonsline For Sore Throats.That bottle was a good find in those days.I still have that bottle in my collection today.
It is very hard to remember all of the bottles we dug as young dump diggers.But the memories of the digs are as clear as a bell.I recall another hang out we had.It was called Tommy's Dam.It was a place my friends and I went to swim,fish and to escape our parents wrath when we got into trouble.Sometimes Steve and I would go to the Dam after a hard rain,the fast running creek would bring down shards of old glass from un known dumps far up stream.We never found a whole bottle,but the excitement and the possibility of finding one intact kept us looking.
One afternoon while walking the creek bank at Tommy's Dam,I realized we were pretty far from our starting point.We ended up about stones throw away from the South Ambler Dump.All of us kids just called it the "dump".When I say the dump,I don't mean a bottle dump.This was a huge mountain of waste from factory's over the years.My mom always told us to stay away from it.But my dad grew up very close to the dump, he used to tell us story's about my uncle Steve and him doing the same thing we do,playing on the white hill.So telling us not to go there was like telling us we had to stop digging bottles.It was never going to happen.
That day while we were approaching the base of the dump,Steve had an idea to search on the dump hills a little,instead of the creek bank.Soon we were about thirty yards apart looking for a sign of anything that might be an old bottle.I got side tracked,I saw a huge bull frog and decided to try and catch it.While I was preoccupied with the croker,I looked over at Steve,he was waving something in the air.The frog was to fast,so off I went to see what he had.As I was running toward him, I herd Steve saying,"it says something!" I could see the excitement on his face as I got closer.He tried to hide what he had in his hand and spring it on me,like he always did.Finely when he showed it to me, I was just as pumped up as he was.It was a square paneled light blue bottle,that read,Keasbey & Mattison Co Ambler PA.
That bottle was the start of a long stretch of searching on the South Ambler Dump for bottles.It turned out that the Keasbey & Mattison factory operating in the late 1800s, and was located on, or very close to the area where the dump was.We never really found out where the main bottle dumping spot was for the K&M factory.The way we found all of our bottles, was to walk and explore, and cover a lot of ground each time we visited the Dump.
Over the years we would go on to find hundreds of blue Bromo Caffeine,and Keasbey & mattison bottles.Its sad to say I only have two of the bottles from those early digging days.I am not sure if the K&M bottle that I have today, is the same one Steve found first at the bottom of the dump,but I like to believe it is.
Steve and I encountered numerous dump digging adventures growing up,The ones that I am writing about are the most memorable to me.Witch brings to mind, the Penn Lynn dump.
One weekend in October,I was invited by Billy S a classmate of mine,to join his father and him on a coon hound run.Billy's dad raised blue tick hounds.There specialty was to track raccoons.These dogs competed with other dogs in a race against each other.The run consisted of an old dried out raccoon skin that was drug by a rope through the woods and fields in a erratic pattern to throw the dogs off course.They would release the dogs at the start of the drag.Witch ever dog got to the tree with the skin it first,won.
I thought the whole dog running thing was pretty interesting,until I wandered off and went into the woods to take a nature brake.I could hear the dogs howling getting further and further away.Just as I was ready to walk out of the woods and try and catch up,I noticed a light on the ground.the light turned out to be the sun reflecting off of a small pile of broken glass.The next thing I knew,I was kneeling down on an old rusted piece of tin,digging like I just found a mountain of diamonds.The area of glass and junk turned out to be massive! Part of the dump was 1930s stuff busted pyro milks,carnival glass and lots of Ball Mason jars.If I walked thirty feet to the right of the dump I saw items like busted warranted flasks, Black cat stove polish bottles and one bottle I still have today, a Dr Alexander's Lung Healer.I was in bottle heaven! I couldn't wait to tell Steve.
I lost all track of time,I was still poking around the piles of glass,when I herd my name in the distance.Ricky........Ricky! I totally forgot about Billy,his dad and the coon hounds! I guess Billy's dad wasn't to happy,he thought I was lost.To bad his coon hounds couldn't sniff out a bottle addict,I would have been found in no time.After that episode,I was never invited to run the dogs again.That was ok with me, we had a bottle dump to dig!
As soon as I got home I told Steve about the killer dump I just found,we both couldn't wait to start digging there.I started planing the adventure right away.The trip to the dump location was about a mile from our house.Walking a mile or more to dig bottles was nothing to us.Taking a lot of back roads,cutting through back yards,or even walking the train tracks if we had to made it a lot shorter to our destination.
The next day was a Sunday,a day of rest,but not for us.We started out early and made it to the site about 9:00 am.As we walked through the fields where Billy and his dad ran the coon hounds,I told Steve about about the episode of me getting "lost" we both had a good laugh.But that laughter would soon turn into shouts of excitement,because the dump was just ahead.
When we finely arrived,Steve couldn't believe his eyes,this dump is humongous! he shouted.I was so excited, I remember doing a little dance on one of the mounds of glass and singing a weird song.We often did that when we found a bottle dump,especially if it turned out to be a real good one like this.
It was time to brake out the digging tools.Our tools consisted of a big kitchen fork an old folding camp shovel and a broken rake.We had a big burlap sack to put the bottles in for the trip home.
When the digging finely began,it wasn't long before the bottles started to show up.One of the first items to come out was a Dundee Marmalade crock,I asked Steve what date do you think this was made? He had no clue.We were not that focused on the dates of things back then,as long as the seams stopped on the bottles and the crocks had age cracks it was a keeper.The seam method was taught to us by our grand mother,it is one thing we remembered, out of all of her bottle history talks.
This dump was really loaded with bottles,it seemed like it was untouched by anyone for a long long time,possibly since they started to dump here many years ago.We didn't have to dig to far down to get a whole bottle.
As we worked on our own areas of the dump, the bottle piles began to build, there was everything from clorox to crocks to cokes and a lot of smooth bottles,thats what we called slicks back then,no embossing meant smooth.
I had a idea to change digging spots in the dump.Steve went deeper into the woods I tried near the edge closer to the field.My new spot was still producing the same old stuff,with an occasional stove polish and some Rx meds.Not that I wasn't excited,but after a while seeing the same bottles over and over got a little ho hum.
Steve yelled over,anything good yet? Just as I was ready to holler back nothing different,an odd piece of glass showed up in the hole I was in.It wasn't a bottle,it was to odd of a shape to be a bottle.With a little coxing I popped it out.It turned out to be a little glass tank,and it was whole! I yelled over to Steve your not going to believe this! When he saw it his jaw dropped.The first words out of his mouth were,lets find another one! He went back to his spot and I continued in mine.We were so excited with that find, our digging became erratic and fast in hopes to find another one.Being the young and inexperienced bottle diggers that we were,accounted for a lot of broken bottles that could have been avoided.That day wasn't any different.
I herd Steve say,oh crap I broke a green one! I said a green what? When I went to Steve's spot to see what it was he busted, I was freaking out! it was a dark green aqua blob top.At that point in time,we didn't know what a blob top was,but we knew it was a good bottle to dig.I remember my grand mom saying something about blob tops, but like I said, in one ear out the other.All that mattered to us is that it was a good sign for better things to come.Steve was mad at himself for braking it,I think I remember being mad at him also.But kids will be kids,and that was short lived.
After all the talk about busting the cool blob bottle,I asked him where he found it,he pointed to a deep hole by his feet.I deiced to get on my knees and have a closer look in the hole.What I saw shocked the shoes off of me! In the walls of that hole were a bunch of the same green bottles.We took turns trying to dig them loose with out braking any this time.When we finished the nerve wracking feat,there were five green C.R Cox Norristown blob beers sitting on the ground.Both of us did the bottle dance this time.It looked like Steve found the older part of this dump.Only one of those C.R Cox blobs survived my childhood years,I still have that bottle sitting on my shelf today.
That was a crazy end to the first day at the Pennlynn dump.We almost had a burlap sack filled with assorted bottles.But there was no way we were going to carry that sack the mile and a half we had to travel home,we were to tired.So we decided to hide the bag of bottles under some brush and dead wood,and get our dad to come back the next day to pick up the payload with his truck.
That night was a long one,we kept thinking about our dug treasure.Would someone find them and take them? would other kids brake them? Steve said we should have took the glass tank,I said the same thing about the green bottles.But it was to late now we would have to wait until the morning.
Soon we drifted off to sleep,and before we knew it we were in my dads trusty old Chevy F150 heading to the Pennlynn dump to pick up our sack of goodies!
We stayed in this pattern for a long time,finding to many bottles to carry home and electing my dad to be the pick up man.He didn't mind doing it for us,as a matter of fact he enjoyed our bottle hobby,but my mom had other ides about our obsession.
On one digging trip,Steve and I thought the best place to clean all of our dirty finds was in the bathtub.After all, we did have a lot of bottles and the bath tub was BIG.I can honestly say this only happened one time,my mom seemed to think it was best for all of us,not to bath in shards of glass and dump dirt.Don't get me wrong my mom liked the bottles,but hated the mess.That's sort of how my wife feels today.Thats why I use the sink.
As our young lives rolled along we continued to dig all that we could.But as we got older Steve and I changed paths and slowly got away from bottle digging.As the old saying goes some things never change,but some have to.Other things were coning into our lives, girls,new friends etc,and we no longer had time to dig that dump of dreams.But bottles were always in the blood for me.Even though I stopped digging for a long period of time,I would still have the urge to look over a creek bank,pick up a broken slick in the woods or just hold a bottle we dug and remember the good times we had as young diggers in the rough.
I would go on to dig bottles with just as much passion as an adult,and I continue to do so to this day.
I lost my brother Steve to a heart condition in 1999,he was thirty four when he passed away.I will always remember the good times with Steve, and how life seemed to be one big endless bottle dump.I love ya man.
Today as a adult,I wish I could dig as much as we did as kids,but being all grown up, I have to settle for weekends.
I often think about the good ole days digging with Steve, going form dump to dump as free spirits. I truly believe he is with me when I pull a good bottle from a privy or dump.That brings to mind a strange but wonderful thing that happened to me last year while I was at work.
For some reason that day I was thinking about the poison bottle Steve found on his first outing at the milk bottle dump.As a adult,Steve used to collect anything that had to do with skulls.Its a big swing from collecting bottles but thats what he liked.He lived with my dad until he passed,so maybe the bottle was still in the house. That day at work I decided to call my father and ask him if he knew where the skull bottle was.I described it and asked him to call me back if he found it.I got the call fifteen minutes later.He said there is no bottle that looks like that in the cabinet.The glass front cabinet is where Steve kept all of his beer mugs and skull collectibles.
I chalked it up as a lost or sold bottle.I really wanted that one to add to collection.I said to my self I guess the memories will have to do.After I got off the phone with my dad, I started to drive my work truck to get something to eat for lunch.
On my way out of the park, I saw a friend of mine walking down the path toward my truck.His name was Victor,he was an old Italian man in his eighty's, who walked every day in the park where I work.I often talked to him about bottles and our digs.That day when I stopped to talk to him,he began to tell me of a big dump down the street from the park.He said he remembers it as a kid.The first thought that pooped into my mind was a 1930s dump.When people usually tell me about a dump they know of,more often then not, it is a newer one.I deiced to just go and check it out anyway.What did I have to loose.I remembered the old days,and how excited Steve and I were when we found dumps of that age.With that in mind, I thanked Victor,grabbed a sandwich and headed to the bridge where he said the dump was.
When I got there, I had no idea where this thing was,but I knew what to look for to guide me there.I went down a big hill that lead to the Jordan creek.I found my self just walking along the creek bank aimlessly not seeing any signs of broken glass,and thinking maybe he was mistaken on the location.After all, he was in his late eighty's.
But then my thoughts quickly changed, I saw some white ash, and I knew there was a dump around here some where.I walked another ten feet and turned toward a big over grown hill.There in the ashy bank, I saw a little bottle.It looked to be unembossed and amber in color.I plucked it from the bank,turned it over and got chills from my toes to my head in a matter of seconds.It was a amber Tinct Iodine poison!!The same bottle my brother Steve found on our first bottle dig together with my grand mom.Now, finding that bottle any other time would be considered a nice but common find.On that day,and by the way it all unfolded,from the call to my dad, to meeting up with ole Victor.That little brown bottle is priceless.
I believe Steve wanted me to find it,and he guided me to the exact spot where it lay,until that day.
I have that little bottle nestled in between a few of my good iron pontil cobalt eight sided sodas.It is not a common bottle any more.
It represents "Bottles in the Blood"
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