“Tell me this isn’t someone’s collection,” I said incredulously to the auction-goer browsing next to me. Spilling out of a ripped plastic bag was a stash of rusty soda cans.
They looked like they had been swimming in water for a long long time. The auction-goer remembered some of the labels from his past, and I was familiar with several of them: Shasta, Mountain Dew and Orange Crush.
There were others I had never heard of before: Graf’s and Howdy. Some others had tops that reminded me of old motor-oil cans, but they were so rusted that I couldn’t read the labels.
Who would collect soda cans, I kept wondering. And if this was a collection, the owner didn’t value it very well because most of these cans were in awful condition.
I moved on, not really interested in what looked like garbage, but I kept coming back, intrigued. The cans looked like they had been hidden away in a dark spot in someone’s home, expected to be tossed on trash day but somehow forgotten. The likely scenario was that the person who collected them had died and the family had decided to dump them among items to be auctioned from the estate.
I come across collections from time to time that baffle me, and this was one of them. The last time, they were swizzle sticks, and I learned that a number of people do collect them. One thing I’m learning at auctions is that just about everything is collectible and just about everybody collects something.
Curious about the cans, I Googled and found a long list of links for collecting soda cans and tops, the history of soda cans, people selling collections and people wanting to buy cans.
The rusted cans with the oil-can tops? They’re called cone-top cans and were the original soda cans. The cone tops at auction may have been the prize, but they were in such bad shape that they were worthless – at least from what I could determine from a website on collecting. The site offered a system for grading soda cans, and the lot at the auction would have been rated a 3 to 5, with 5 being the “throw them away as trash” category.
The first company to can sodas was the Clicquot Club, according to the Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising website. The company in 1938 put its soda in cone-top cans made by Continental Can Company around the same time as a Dr. Phillips fruit juice was also being sold in cans.
I still don’t get soda-can collecting, but I do understand after seeing some clean and interesting ones on the web. Who knew that there had been so many different types of sodas sold.
I had never heard of Graf’s. It was based in Wisconsin and apparently much better known in the Midwest. Howdy, I learned, was made by man who eventually came up with the lemon-lime concoction called 7UP.
Neither did I know that the tops of cans came in different styles. I found the site of one collector who a couple years ago was selling “586 flat tops, 110 cone tops, 105 juice tops, 23 zip tops and 4500+ tab tops” to make room for an exclusive collection of beer cans.
Soda-can collecting is apparently a huge hobby. Connoisseurs have their own clubs and museums operated by people who are collectors.
The online Can Museum, organized by two collectors from the Netherlands and United States, allows you to submit photos of your own cans (according to the site, it has a listing of 30,000 cans). At the Soda Museum, you can buy cans for $3 to $5, along with other paraphernalia (the museum part isn’t there yet). The National Pop Can Collectors Association urges you to be a member. The Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising is full of historical information about cans and collecting.
I wasn’t around when the soda cans were sold at auction, but I doubt that they produced hefty bidding. Perhaps, there were a few people who knew their value and dug much deeper into the plastic bag than me and pulled out some gems. From what I could see, though, they’d have to dig pretty deep to come up with something that rated a 1 and would be worth the trouble.
