Collecting From the Trash Heap of History

By Terelle Jerricks

With our mass consumer culture, accumulating massive amounts of stuff and disposing massive amounts of stuff, often times the only thing that marks a person's existence a hundred years after he's gone is the refuse he leaves behind. Of course, the only people interested in these recovered objects are historians with a keen interest in being able to hold tangible evidence of time periods that they've only read or heard about. Members of the South Bay Historic Bottle Club like David Hall and David Garcia are no different in that regard.

David Hall showing off his collection. (Terelle Jerricks, Random Lengths News

David Garcia considers himself a newbie amongst the “old timers” in the South Bay Historic Bottle Club, particularly when he measures the length of time the others had been collecting.

“Early on, I always had something that looked good in a window.”

Sunlight beaming through colored bottles was also Hall's motivation for collecting bottles and ultimately building a back lit showcase for his collection. Hall has a bedroom in his Wilmington home decked out with lit display cases filled with old bottles going as far back as the days of California's Gold Rush in the 1850s. The bottles once held seltzers, malts, liquors, and medicines, most of them having a purple, bluish, or greenish tint.

Garcia has accumulated a trove of old bottles from Seaside Pharmacy (first opened in 1889), from a period when they sold purified water. In those days, up through he early 20th Century, saloons didn't sell water. Both Garcia and Hall found whiskey bottles from the Peppertree Saloon which once sat at 6th and Beacon streets. Today, the Peppertree's location is marked by an old cast iron water fountain, one of the original fountains that dotted San Pedro, financed by local San Pedrans wanting to encourage temperance.

A lot of the finds come from old trash dumps and outhouse holes that have been paved over with concrete. Hall's collection has come from around the world, with a special collection of local items that ranges from San Pedro to Long Beach to Redondo Beach. Among his Wilmington finds are some milk bottles and a few whiskey bottles from a Wilmington bar in the waning days of the 19th century. He has not been able to corroborate the existence of the bar using materials in the Wilmington Historical society as of yet.

David Garcia. (Terelle Jerricks, Random Lengths News /
April 21, 2011)

 

Hall built his collection by going to bottle shows, antique shops, flee markets, and fellow collectors across the country.

“The fun of collecting is in the hunt of the find. You want to spend a nice day to see what you can find, while today's collectors would spend the day searching the Internet. It's like a fix. It might be a find, or a phone call from someone that found what you were looking for.”

At the same time it's about the friends you make that are of like interest. Just the previous weekend, Hall visited a new friend in Thousand Oaks who collected old preserve jars and ink bottle. “I've heard from other collectors that it's about one percent glass and 99 percent people. Even though you're all there to add to your collection, it's about the people too.”

Hall and Garcia were both members of the Los Angeles Historic Bottle Club before Hall founded the South Bay Historic Bottle Club with three others. The lengthy drive to Arcadia, the excessive talking about old and new business, never to get to the fun part sharing each other's finds, led them to create their own club closer to home.

“It's so structured with old business and new business and they'd be there for an hour and a half and we wonder, 'when do we get to talk about our glass?' Then we hear, 'oh its getting late, it's time to go home,” Hall explained.

“I realized people just wanted to have fun.”

Hall's union, United Steel Workers Local 675, allowed the group to use their Carson hall as a meeting place without charge, making it unnecessary to collect dues. While they do have officers, they tend to take on the feel of ceremonial titles rather than official ones. All the meetings are geared toward sharing each other's latest finds.

Hall counts as his greatest find to date a brown whiskey bottle from the place and era of Wyatt Earp, around the time of the legendary shoot out at the O.K. Corral.

“You can't do this without being some sort of historian,” Garcia said. I got bottles that date back to the Gold Rush. I have bottles that go back to the Civil War. I even have bottles from when Wild Bill was doing his version of law enforcement in the 1870s,” Garcia said.

His love of history and his collections led him to join the San Pedro Bay Historical Society and hopefully bring in some vitality into the institution.

Hall has done some light research on many of the finds he's collected over the years, combining a combination of Internet research and digging through old phone books in local historical societies from Wilmington to the Huntington Library.

Hall admits being known as “weird” for their obsession for collecting. When asked how his families deal with their interest, Hall noted a quip his girlfriend made: “Only one collector per household, please.”

“In my early days of collecting, my mom accepted it. My brother and sister thought I was crazy. But everybody has their passions,” Hall said.