99 bottles of beer beer on the wall? Make it 600 cans - and counting

Roxye Rea-Arellano, Greeley Tribune

Monday, August 13, 2007

GREELEY - Sitting in Jerry Otto's garage are four floor-to-ceiling shelves. They don't hold pictures of family members or knickknacks.

They hold some of his most valuable possessions: beer cans.

Otto has been collecting beer cans since before he was able to drink. He started his collection in 1975, at the age of 15, after watching his friend, Ed Hamilton of Iowa, collect cans for his own stash.

"He had about 6,000 cans," Otto, 47, said. "He gave me my first few beer cans." Empty ones, of course.

"It's fascinating how the technology has evolved," he said.

"Brewers weren't sure how they'd work, but they didn't break, were returnable and more compact. It's neat to find the evolution of it."

Today, Otto has collected around 1,500 vintage cans, but after moving across the U.S., his collection has dwindled to about 600 of his favorites.

He has various types of beer cans dating back to a 1935 can from Al Capone's brewery in Chicago. Otto has several train beer, flat-top, cone-top, paper-label, pull-top, aluminum-top cans and others. More than 95 percent of the cans in his collection don't have UPC, or Universal Product Code, numbers on them.

Otto remembers when he and his friend would visit illegal dumps to find cans. The old dumps, many times in fields or hidden areas, were where people would hang out and drink.

Otto has some amazing memories attached to a few of his cans.

"There are some that stick out more than others," he said. "I remember this one church family found an old can in between the walls of an old house and gave it to me."

His oldest can, made in 1935, gives a step-by-step instruction on how to open the can using a church key, a large metal tool with a sharp point that presses a triangular hole into the can. The cone-top cans were made in the early years, when bottling companies didn't want to convert to flat- top cans. Later on, a church key was given with the cans. The pull tabs of today were not introduced until about 1962.

For Otto, the saying, "Once a collector, always a collector," holds true. At one time, he also collected coins. But sometimes good things have to come at a slower pace.

"I'm a collector," he said standing in his garage, surrounded by his treasures. "My wife's a 'Get rid of it.' "