The “Dan, I'm calling you from the dump” Caper
Brad Flinders and Dan Scoglietti
As I do every week, I visit Realtors all over Northern New Mexico in search for new loans (My wife and I own a mortgage company in Taos). I stopped in and talked with a new realtor who I had just met a couple of weeks ago. He is ex-Army so we ended up talking for about an hour...where we'd been stationed, which were our favorite assignments, etc, etc. I brought up the fact that I collected beer cans and that I am always in search of old dumps that had old cans. He said immediately that he knew the location of an old dump and had even taken a bottle collector to dig there. The bottle collector said that this dump was from the 30's and 40's based on what they had found. The realtor drew me a map and I couldn't get out of his office fast enough to check it out. I was still in my work clothes so I could only do a cursory look. What I found on the surface were ABC OI's and Acme Old English Brand IRTP cans from the 30's. I was standing in the dump when I called Dan Scoglietti as he has shared many of his finds with me. This was on Friday and Dan managed a Kitchen Pass to come up Saturday morning. Dan was right on schedule...we made the drive from my house to the dump and did a quick survey to see where to start digging. There were thousands of rusty cans …oil, beer, food and all kinds of automotive cans. Also there were a few old car bodies, old stoves, barbed wire, sheet metal and other assorted rusty scrap metal that would get in our way. We saw where the bottle diggers had been and fortunately they hadn't made much of a dent. We decided to dig down right in the middle of the dump, which proved to be a 2 hour mistake. During this time I did find, a 1930's New Mexico Highway 64 shield sign that when cleaned up will be awesome. I also found a 1948 New Mexico License Plate that will clean up nicely. Dan found his mandatory Black Acme can so with that we knew we'd do well...but not in that spot. We found tons of oil cans and a nice selection of car parts but very few salvageable beer cans. I decided to dig where the bottle diggers had been as that was where I first saw the ABC OI and the Acme Ale. Fortunately the bottle diggers had dug about a foot down...I went deeper to about 3 feet and found a vein of awesome cans. There were several of the ABC O/I's and Acme Englishtown Brand Ale FTs from Los Angeles in this spot that had incredible color (not pictured in the USBC). We'd hit the motherlode!! Where Dan was digging he found a couple of the IRTP Meister Brau FT cans which was a new one for us in New Mexico. As well as those 2 brands we found incredibly Clean Pabst OI's with the red Opener and tons of Bud OI's. The amazing thing on a great deal of these cans were the very shiny lids , almost could pass for an indoor can. We also found a couple of mystery Crowntainers (which turned out to be Eblings and Southern Select) and hi profile cones. We'd filled up 2 kitty litter containers with cans and decided it was time to take our loot to the car for a short break. Back at the dump Dan took over my claim and found his own vein of ABC's and Acmes. We dug another 30 minutes or so and decided it was time head back to the car and hit the road as we had another area to check out. We stopped by the realtor's office and thanked him profusely. We showed him samples of what we'd found and he is going to now check with the locals and find us more dumps. We offered him a case of beer or bottle of Jack Daniels but he doesn't drink. We'll have to find some way to pay him back.
Definitely a return trip is being planned in the near future.
The “CAN IT GET ANY BETTER?” Caper part 1
It's not often that you find a dump that has everything going for it …age, brands and condition. Jupiter has to be in alignment with Mars and the Sun for those three to occur all at once. How many times do we find great brands with the right age but poor condition or great condition cans, decent brands but not the right age? Before finding this dump, Brad and I had traveled the back roads and forests of New Mexico for the past 4 years and have always found 2 of the 3 but not the trifecta. In fact, the dump we found before this (a tip from Rollert and Murphy) had Silver State cone tops but horrible condition with soda flats from the fifties in great condition. I remember leaving Brads that day telling him we are on the verge of finding something big. It's the law of averages, keep going out and looking and sooner or later, we are going to find something good.
Well as Brad had mentioned in the previous article, it's apparent we hit the trifecta. The last trip we had found ABC OIs, 2-sided pre-war Acme ales, and a boatload of a Pabst and Bud OIs, most in great shape. I knew we had only scratched the surface of this dump but what else would it produce? more of the same or new brands? How many times do you go back to a dump and do better than your initial visit? I guess the answer depends on the size of the dump. This dump is very deceiving in size and once you start digging it much larger than it appeared to be!
We couldn't wait to get back and as it turned out we both had open schedules for the next Saturday, so off we went. Talk about a long drive up to Taos from Albuquerque, the anticipation was killing me (and keeping me waaiiiiiiiiitttttttting!) but I made it up to Brads around 730am. It was a short 20-minute drive and soon we were digging in the dump. We started off in the area we left off and it was slim pickings at first. A few more of the same cans but onesy, twosy and the condition was lacking. It was almost the same script from the last time, a great deal of digging but not much to show for it. Lots of metal, like old stoves and engine blocks to move around. Probably two hours had gone by and it was a lot like work. Brad was really working up a sweat, so much that when he took his hat off , I thought we were getting rained on! It wasn't until Brad picked a new area off to the left that the gravy train started rolling again. More ABC OIs and Acme ales and too many Bud and Pabst OIs , so many of them that if they weren't at least grade 3 un-cleaned, we tossed them aside. This time we found some pre-war wood-grained Acme ales. We had found some of them on the previous trip but they were all surface cans thus barely readable. Also we unearthed more of the Acme ales similar to USBC 28-20 from LA but with the word “brand” under Englishtown. A tough can but not that tough that it didn't make the USBC, somehow photographing that can, slipped through the cracks. We were working a ledge that had an old car suspension spring that was really hard to dig out but there were cans all around it. There was an ABC that had awesome color trapped near it, it took a good 15 minutes to dig it out only to find that the back of the can was blown out. Off to the other side produced some IRTP Meister Brau and Fox Deluxe cans. We use cat litter buckets to carry out the cans and they can hold about a case each of cans. Once we had the buckets full after about 3-4 hours digging we figured it was time to call it a day. We knew another return trip was due and since so close to Brads house we could come back at any time. We got back to the car and started to wrap each can in newspaper for the journey home. It was at that time Brad is looking at an Acme ale and says ,”huh San Francisco”. It didn't register with me. That afternoon, I'm cleaning the cans , particularly Acme ales and it is indeed from San Francisco, WOW now that is one tough variant. I had the Los Angeles version for about 10 years but had only seen the SF version once and had been looking for it for a very long time. How many times do you go out and dig a can on your most wanted list! I call Brad and he says, “well I told you that at the dump!” As it turned out, that can was the best of all the Acme ales we had found, a look for some more SF variants turned up 2 more!
So the answer to my question is, it can get better if you throw Pluto into the mix!
The “CAN IT GET ANY BETTER?” Caper part 2
Ed and I hit the same dump on the way back from Denver from Canvention, Ed wants to tell that story, trip #3, to that dump so I'll write on trip #4 with just Brad and I. Ed couldn't make trip #4 because he had to go back home to Boise that weekend. It was about 3 weeks since either of us had been back to the honey-hole and we couldn't wait to see what would turn up next. This trip was going to have to be a short one because we had a business meeting that afternoon that Brad was going to be presenting. Again, I was at Brads by 800am and digging in the dump literally minutes later.
Unlike last time where it took us the usual 2 hours of digging to find the good veins of cans, I popped out a decent Cream Top within minutes of digging, from then on I knew it was going to be a good day! The dump gods knew we had a tight schedule so they let us start finding the cans right away. We started digging about 6 feet apart and the plan was to meet in the middle. After about 6 inches of digging, Brad encountered a cow skeleton which kept him busy, while I had starting pulling out a dozen or more of the Acme woodgrain ales. Once he got past the bones, Brad was coming up empty, so he decided to change course and instead of digging toward me, he started digging away from me. Then his luck changed and Brad stated, “now I could die a happy man”, he had finally unearthed a Cream Top, a can he has coveted since he had moved to Taos some years ago. Now he can say he personally dug one. He was digging underneath an area where we had throw our debris from a previous trip, this time he was a foot or two deeper. There were cans where we thought we had hit bottom but we were obviously wrong. About that time, I found 2 black Acme steingirls beers, now I knew things were going to get better! He started finding more of the same, lots of Buds and Pabst OIs. Then he handed me a can and said, ”whats this?” I looked at him and knew it was a Black Eagle but before I can tell him, he blurted it out. I called him some kind of four-letter word and told him to find me one. Two minutes later he hands me another one and says how's this!!?? I'm absolutely floored, I had found Black Eagles before but the condition sucked and none were worth taking home, these at least were very readable. Then he uncovered a very decent looking Black Eagle, trouble was, it was entombed, and took every bit of 20 minutes to dig it out but well worth it. He was into a vein of Black Eagles and not all were that good but we took everyone home with us.
After a while Brad told me to get in the hole and dig some more cans out. We pulled out another 10 or 15 cans and knew it was getting close to quitting time. I then caught my finger on some kind of jagged metal sticking out of the hole and opened it up pretty good. Still kept digging but at some point, I noticed it wouldn't stop bleeding, another indication, it was time to leave. Again the two-bucket rule came into effect and we packed it out of there.
One strange thing about the cans in this dump is how on some of these lids were perfect (some indoor cans didn't have lids this nice) but the seams and rims were covered with barnacle type rust. Painted areas of the cans seem to hold off the barnacles. It was the cans with any kind of metallic, like the Acme ales or Black Eagles that the barnacles seemed to attached themselves to the labels of the cans. I'll call that the Apache syndrome, as in Apache cones….metallic cans do not hold up well in dumps (sorry for stating the obvious).
We aren't even half way done with this dump and one has to wonder, what will we uncover next?? I would be extremely happy with more of the same but I have a good feeling we will find something new as we had in each trip to this dump.