Lancet Jades
02-16-2004, 10:11 PM
99 bottles of beer on the wall and then some
A dollar purchase leads to wide collection of beer memorabilia
<IMG height=1 width=130 src?Common Images 2x2.gif?>http://www.idahostatesman.com/Daily/20040216/266541-131053.jpgPhotos by Joe Jaszewski / The Idaho StatesmanBoise´s Leon Gustafson has been collecting brewery and other memorabilia for 25 years. About 30 percent of his collection is on display in his basement den. The rest nearly fills his garage.http://www.idahostatesman.com/Daily/20040216/266541-131054.jpgOne of Leon Gustafson´s many neon signs from now-defunct breweries reads Volk Pilsner, a brewery in Great Falls, Mont.
If it exists, people will collect it. I´ve known people who collected string, ceramic owls, guitar picks, even a guy who collected junk and turned it into gigantic birdhouses. But I´d never seen a collection like Leon Gustafson´s.
Gustafson collects brewery memorabilia. He´s 52 and has been at it for 25 years. His collection is so big that most of it won´t fit in his Boise home. His basement, attic, shop and garage are brimming with brewery bric-a-brac. And it all started with one beer bottle.
“I was in a secondhand store in Kalispell, Mont., and saw a Topper beer bottle they were selling for a dollar,” he said. “I bought it, took it home and put it on a shelf. A few weeks later, I bought another one, and one thing led to another.”
He´s sold most of his bottle collection — he´s down to about 300 now — but bottles were just the start. He has beer cans, beer signs, beer calendars, beer posters, beer trays, beer steins, beer-bottle caps and openers, beer ashtrays and matchbooks … it seems endless.
He has a beer hairbrush, a beer wristwatch, a beer billfold. Breweries used to distribute products like that to promote their product.
He has beer-bottle salt and pepper shakers, a beer belt buckle, beer foam scrapers.
“People would pass them around,” he said. “They aren´t legal anymore because they weren´t sanitary.”
He likes beer memorabilia better than he likes beer.
“I´m not a teetotaler, I´m not much of a drinker. I had a beer on Thanksgiving. On Christmas, I had a glass of wine.”
Gustafson and his wife, Linda, moved to Boise from Montana five years ago. Many of his beer oddments are from Montana breweries — Butte Beer, Glacier Beer, Old Faithful, Big Sky, Great Falls Select, and others. Local breweries used to be common in many states. Idaho had 100 of them. Nampa was locally famous for Overland Beer, Boise for Bohemian Beer.
Gustafson has a Bohemian Club can that took me all the way back to when I was too young to drink beer. But I remember the brewery, which was downtown on Idaho Street and smelled sweetly of malt. I remember the Bohemian slogan, “Hey Joe, Six Bos to go!” The brewery closed in the 60s, and Boise hasn´t smelled as good since.
Some of the beer trappings gracing Gustafson´s walls are the work of skilled artists. Old, rare and elaborately framed posters plugging Anheuser-Busch products look as if they´d be more at home in a museum in St. Louis than a basement in Boise. The room where he keeps them is softly illuminated with the neon glow of antique beer signs.
“I had to buy 350 of them at an estate sale to get this one,” he said, pointing to a green-and-orange Volk Pilsner sign. “My wife was real impressed when I got a loan from my credit union to buy beer signs. But I sold a lot of them and had my money back in two weeks.”
Linda Gustafson is diplomatic about her husband´s hobby.
“Let´s put it this way,” she said. “It keeps him busy.”
A former heavy equipment operator who was injured on the job, Gustafson spends time each day perusing ebay for brewery treasures.
He searches for them when he travels, and as a member of the American Breweriana Association and the Beer Can Collectors of America, he knows collectors across the country.
It´s paid off.
How else would he have gotten a Frankenstein beer mug?
A poster of Franklin Roosevelt downing a beer?
A Stutz picnic? (Picnics were half-gallon, pre-Prohibition bottles. “Regular” bottles were 24 ounces. In those days, a beer was beer.)
It took two hours just for a quick look at the brewery memorabilia in his basement. And that, he said, was “only about 30 percent of it. Someday I´ll have an auction and sell it all, but for now I´m just enjoying it.”
Then he said something that revealed the true extent of his passion.
“… I just like collecting things. I also have about 200 oil cans.” Edition Date: 02-16-2004
A dollar purchase leads to wide collection of beer memorabilia
<IMG height=1 width=130 src?Common Images 2x2.gif?>http://www.idahostatesman.com/Daily/20040216/266541-131053.jpgPhotos by Joe Jaszewski / The Idaho StatesmanBoise´s Leon Gustafson has been collecting brewery and other memorabilia for 25 years. About 30 percent of his collection is on display in his basement den. The rest nearly fills his garage.http://www.idahostatesman.com/Daily/20040216/266541-131054.jpgOne of Leon Gustafson´s many neon signs from now-defunct breweries reads Volk Pilsner, a brewery in Great Falls, Mont.
If it exists, people will collect it. I´ve known people who collected string, ceramic owls, guitar picks, even a guy who collected junk and turned it into gigantic birdhouses. But I´d never seen a collection like Leon Gustafson´s.
Gustafson collects brewery memorabilia. He´s 52 and has been at it for 25 years. His collection is so big that most of it won´t fit in his Boise home. His basement, attic, shop and garage are brimming with brewery bric-a-brac. And it all started with one beer bottle.
“I was in a secondhand store in Kalispell, Mont., and saw a Topper beer bottle they were selling for a dollar,” he said. “I bought it, took it home and put it on a shelf. A few weeks later, I bought another one, and one thing led to another.”
He´s sold most of his bottle collection — he´s down to about 300 now — but bottles were just the start. He has beer cans, beer signs, beer calendars, beer posters, beer trays, beer steins, beer-bottle caps and openers, beer ashtrays and matchbooks … it seems endless.
He has a beer hairbrush, a beer wristwatch, a beer billfold. Breweries used to distribute products like that to promote their product.
He has beer-bottle salt and pepper shakers, a beer belt buckle, beer foam scrapers.
“People would pass them around,” he said. “They aren´t legal anymore because they weren´t sanitary.”
He likes beer memorabilia better than he likes beer.
“I´m not a teetotaler, I´m not much of a drinker. I had a beer on Thanksgiving. On Christmas, I had a glass of wine.”
Gustafson and his wife, Linda, moved to Boise from Montana five years ago. Many of his beer oddments are from Montana breweries — Butte Beer, Glacier Beer, Old Faithful, Big Sky, Great Falls Select, and others. Local breweries used to be common in many states. Idaho had 100 of them. Nampa was locally famous for Overland Beer, Boise for Bohemian Beer.
Gustafson has a Bohemian Club can that took me all the way back to when I was too young to drink beer. But I remember the brewery, which was downtown on Idaho Street and smelled sweetly of malt. I remember the Bohemian slogan, “Hey Joe, Six Bos to go!” The brewery closed in the 60s, and Boise hasn´t smelled as good since.
Some of the beer trappings gracing Gustafson´s walls are the work of skilled artists. Old, rare and elaborately framed posters plugging Anheuser-Busch products look as if they´d be more at home in a museum in St. Louis than a basement in Boise. The room where he keeps them is softly illuminated with the neon glow of antique beer signs.
“I had to buy 350 of them at an estate sale to get this one,” he said, pointing to a green-and-orange Volk Pilsner sign. “My wife was real impressed when I got a loan from my credit union to buy beer signs. But I sold a lot of them and had my money back in two weeks.”
Linda Gustafson is diplomatic about her husband´s hobby.
“Let´s put it this way,” she said. “It keeps him busy.”
A former heavy equipment operator who was injured on the job, Gustafson spends time each day perusing ebay for brewery treasures.
He searches for them when he travels, and as a member of the American Breweriana Association and the Beer Can Collectors of America, he knows collectors across the country.
It´s paid off.
How else would he have gotten a Frankenstein beer mug?
A poster of Franklin Roosevelt downing a beer?
A Stutz picnic? (Picnics were half-gallon, pre-Prohibition bottles. “Regular” bottles were 24 ounces. In those days, a beer was beer.)
It took two hours just for a quick look at the brewery memorabilia in his basement. And that, he said, was “only about 30 percent of it. Someday I´ll have an auction and sell it all, but for now I´m just enjoying it.”
Then he said something that revealed the true extent of his passion.
“… I just like collecting things. I also have about 200 oil cans.” Edition Date: 02-16-2004