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S***-canning the Cans My daughter had an idea which she shared with her brothers and my wife and I. Simply, it was a way to de- clutter the house by picking a 31 day month and discarding one thing on the first of the month, two on the second, and so forth. If followed through to the 31st, one would have gotten rid of 496 old, out-dated, useless, and ill-fitting stuff. My wife and I entered into this project eagerly, because even though we are “empty nesters”, the house seems to have actually become smaller since the kids left. So, from my end, countless old neckties, pants with a 34 inch waist (all the special diets that were ever invented are never going to get me back to a 34 waist), jackets that haven’t seen the outside of a closet in years and other “valuable “ articles of clothing found their way into the garbage or took a trip to Goodwill. My workbench was not exempt. In a drawer I found 8, count ‘em, 8 sets of casters that over the years had been removed from broken desk chairs before they were thrown out and stored with the idea “Who knows? You never know when you might need a set of casters.” In 43 years of owning my house I have NEVER had a need for a set of casters, so out they went, along with about 1000 other bits of useless hardware, hinges, chains, etc. that had been neatly organized, labeled and saved for a future date when they might have some use, a date that so far has not arrived. Cans of paint, hardened tins of silver polish, containers of grout and the like all made their way to the garbage. My collections also felt the onslaught of the downsizing frenzy: fifty years worth of minor league baseball scorecards from such diverse teams as the Pittsfield Rangers, Charleston Rainbows, Newark Bears and Reading Phillies, and totaling over fifty different ballparks were burned in the fire pit, right before over 100 old railroad timetables were also fed to the conflagration. A seabag full of Marine Corps uniforms, including two sets of greens, two sets of dress blues, 2 sets of dress whites, 3 sets of “trops”, 2 sets of khakis, 3 sets of utilities, an overcoat, raincoat and all kinds of hats, belts, etc. were looked at with fond remembrance of a more youthful person, before they, too, went the way of the casters. The storage areas, attic, garage, and basement were starting to look much bigger, and this brings me to the beery aspect of this article, which after all, is supposed to be about beer. In the late 1960’s I started saving beer cans. Each time a new state was visited local cans always found their way back to New Jersey. Each time a brewery such as Iron City or Falstaff would issue set of collectible or commemorative cans, that beer would become my temporary favorite. 1976 was can collector’s utopia as practically every brewery issued special bicentennial cans. All these cans were proudly displayed on the walls of my three season screened in back porch. (Way too cold to sit out there in winter). But the back porch had to go when the house was enlarged, so the cans were all packed into boxes and shoved into a dark room in the cellar. Over the next 30 years more cans went in, in the vague hope that someday I’d have another place to display them. Over those same 30 years, which correspond almost exactly to the amount of time I’ve been married to my second bride, many questions were asked by her such as “Why do you keep saving those things”, and “What are you going to do with all that shit?”. I finally began to agree with her, told my kids to sell them on E- Bay, and said whatever they made was theirs. Not much interest, either by them or potential buyers. I kept telling my wife that SOMEBODY would want them, to which she’d reply “Only another nut like yourself”. So I made the agonizing decision to “shitcan” the cans, which now totaled about 1500. I took all of the cartons out to the deck, sat with a beer close at hand. and went through each box can by can and happily remembering where I had gotten them: a beautiful Fyfe and Drum can from a trip to Cooperstown, a can of Garden State beer purchased in San Francisco, a sixteen ouncer of Robin Hood Ale found in a liquor store in Sussex County and of course several leftover cans of Foecking Beer, obtained somewhere purely so that I would have the pleasure of asking guests if they perhaps would like a Foecking beer. One by one they were all pitched into the recycling can, which soon filled up, then the other garbage cans, then the leaf collection cans, and finally several garbage cans borrowed from my neighbors. The final total came to 11 garbage cans, even after many of the cans had been squashed. 1500 beer cans do take up room. The space in my cellar’s loss is the recycling center’s gain. On Monday morning the garbage men must have thought there was a hell of a party over the weekend. A pleasant surprise in sorting through all the cans was that I found 4 full ones: a can of Ballantine Beer brewed in Newark, meaning it was pre-1972, a can of Mardi Gras Beer from 1983, a can of Harley Davidson Beer, brewed by Pabst, from 1985 and an original Rheingold Chug-a- Mug, brewed in Orange. These were taken to the next Draught Board 15 meeting where the braver souls in attendance all had a taste. They weren’t as bad as we thought they might be. The room in the cellar is now empty and I’ve lost no sleep nor become distraught over the loss of my precious cans. (Probably because my collections of 200 beer trays, 300 openers, 2000 labels, 300 brewery brochures and 400 beer glasses are still intact). I’ll let my kids worry about that stuff when I’m gone. Cheers! Dan |
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Beer My Way.........
Beernexus.com proudly presents....DAN HODGE, beer reviewer, historian and raconteur
by Dan Hodge
