Brent Heighton is our newest member and was turned on to bottle collecting when he watched Scott dig his yard! I think that is where Scott dug that $10,000 historic flask! Just kidding, Brent . . . you never know!

    The crowd was so big that there was no official meeting stuff going on, but we had a great time of fellowship. Some bottle deals were made and a lot of old stories shared.

     At my table, I witnessed Sergeant Ted Kinney purchase a beautiful, rare, emerald green drug store bottle from Lowell, MI, for --- for lots of bucks! John Pastor had his usual assortment of beautiful and rare bottles on display.

     Brent Heighton, had some very interesting metal items that he came across in his
search for old bottles. One of them seemed quite apropo for us privy diggers. It was
a printing press advertising plate, most likely used by a newspaper. I have a few of these that have been found metal detecting. They are usually copper, and to read them, you need to make an impression with them, or hold them up to a mirror.

      Those of you who were at the meeting know that Jack Short, professional photographer, was on hand taking pictures. Jack burned me a CD of the pizza party meeting pictures, and one is of Brent's advertising piece. Jack was able to use his photo shop program to reverse the image so that I can read most of it. Get a load of this cool find! It says:

GET RID OF THAT OUTDOOR PRIVY!

It is uncomfortable, inconvenient in winter, and an ill smelling place in the summer-- and a menace to health! Why not install a RO-SAN INDOOR CLOSET?

Right in your house, your office, your summer cottage. Set it anywhere! Absolutely odor free!

 Of all of the ironies here, the one that comes to my mind is that this advertising piece, demanding that the public get rid of their privys, was itself got rid of in a privy! A very neat find, Brent!

I took a bottle as a partial trade in a metal detector deal. I looked up the value with the customer, and agreed to allow him somewhat less. It is a half-gallon canning jar in a greenish aqua color with a ground lip. It has a glass lid and a tin screw down collar that presses the lid against a heavy rubber gasket. The only embossing says "THE QUEEN" and on the base it reads, "Pat. Nov.2 1869. The bottle was found in an old barn and it is a real sparkler. I expected to get some more information at the meeting, but I don't think we have the canning jar collectors in this club like they do in the Grand Rapids club.

Also at the meeting, I picked up an unusual inkwell complete with two pens from Ed Nickerson. See, I told you Ed would be there with some inexpensive goodies to pedal! This inkwell is unusual to say the least. To fill it, you unscrew a round black-glass lid. This is the reservoir, which is about the size of a tennis ball. It looks like you fill this with ink, then you turn the black glass base upside down and screw it onto the lid, as if it were the lid! Of course, then you flip it back over and dip the pin into a small opening at the base. How anyone could fill this thing without making a mess is beyond me! It is an art deco style and I am guessing from the 1920's.

We missed some of you, and I hope it wasn't because you went to the library! I think we did a pretty good job at getting the word out. 

Well, tis the season for digging! I hope to see you at the next meeting with your latest finds and stories!

     Our president tells me to give each of you an advanced warning about our December meeting. For some reason, the Library has someone else using the Van Deusen Room that month, so we will be meeting in a board room on the first floor. We will have some signs made up to direct you or maybe Chuck can leave a trail of quarters that will lead from the front door to the room.

    Earlier this year, I somehow lost my cell phone. I had many different Nextel two- way beeper numbers in it and one of them was for our activities director, Scott Hendrickson. No big problem, I thought.

    The Nextel store in Plainwell is rented from my mother and stepfather --- these guys will fix me up! Wrong! If I ran my business the way the cell-phone companies do, I would have been gone a long time ago!

   These cell phone places do not sell cell phones, the phone is a tool that lets you access what they do sell, which is a service plan.

    So, I go into the Nextel store and tell them that I lost my phone and want to purchase another one. That's when they tell me that they don't sell phones! I cannot believe it! Even if their refusal to help me, "their customer" made me mad enough to switch to another service, they still will not sell me a phone! What I can buy is a one year service contract (which I already have) and they will provide the phone for free or let my buy an upgrade.

    Well, I said all that to say, that I don't know what our feature bottle will be this month! So I think that I'll make something up and face the music from Scooter when I see him. Here's an idea that we haven't tried and maybe I'll learn why at the meeting.

     Let's try a couple different themes-- bloopers and Thanksgiving bottles. By "bloopers" I mean misspelled and / or crude bottles. For years I thought that Thomas Eclectric Oil was a misspelling, but later I found that it wasn't. I do have a William Radam's Lungus Destroyer, which was supposed to be a "Fungus" Destroyer, but was actually water!

    Another form of bloopers that would be cool to see is crude bottles. You have all seen them, the neck droops or is off center, or the base is so bad that the bottle won't stand up. I wish I could remember which bottle it was; I know I sold it on e-bay, I shouldn't tell you this because I have to admit it sounds impossible, but I swear it is true. I had bottle and I think it was a canning jar with a fly in the glass!

   I knew you wouldn't believe me! It sure is a head- scratcher, I mean, how is it possible? I also have a canning jar with tiny seeds in the glass.

     I have an article written by a college student who, in 1980, located a trench that was a cullet dump used by the Olive Glass Works ( later brought out by the Whitney Glass Works) located in Glassboro, New Jersey. Olive Glassworks was started in 1781 and was a short distance from Glassboro State College.

    Cullets were waste materials from the bottle works. Sometimes the glass blower would overinflate a bottle which meant its walls would be too thin and vulnerable to breakage. Sometimes he would under- inflate a bottle and its volume would be short. Other times the neck was deformed when the blowpipe was removed.

    Of course, we all know that a air bubbles also can threaten the product by weakening the glass. Usually this flawed glass was broken and remelted, but tons more of it was used as landfill. Some of the bottles that the writer found only looked like bottles, actually they were solid blocks of glass with no openings. These solid bottles were mold warmers.

    Blowing glass into a 'cold mold' could cause the glass to stick to the mold, or shatter due to the extreme temperature changes. As I mentioned, many of the hot, solid, gathers of glass were used as mold warmers. One of his finds was a solid blob of un-blown glass that was placed in a mold that wasn't completely closed! This left what looks like a thin angel wing on the side of the bottle-shaped mold warmer. The embossing on this bottle, which looks like a druggist bottle, is like an old, large, monogrammed letter S. It really looks familiar to me. I'll try to find the magazine that this article is in and bring it to the meeting. Maybe some of our pros can shed some light on it.