I started digging for bottles at the age of ten years old. It was 1970 and my family just moved to a newly built neighborhood a couple of miles from the town of Kendallville, IN. Being the new kid on the block, I met a friend named Dennis E. His parents were antique collectors of a variety of old relics. They told us about the old city dump that was started in the 1890s til its discontinuance in 1950s. Both of us still green behind the ears would strap our shovels and a back pack containing a pair a gloves, a can or two of Mountain Dew and a peanut butter sandwich; hop onto our bikes and ride about three quarters of a mile to the old city dump site. This is where we would spend hours after school and weekends digging holes in the ground looking for glass treasures. Sweat dripping off our foreheads and our arms being so tried from man handling the shovel. Then all at once one of us would yell out "I got one" it's a Dr. Kilmer's wiping off the dirt to get a better look at the bottle. Or when one of us would yell out a couple of curse words because we would see a portion of a bottle and lose our patience and the shovel would strike the bottle and break it. As I think back about that it happened quite a bit. Thus the meaning of being green behind the ears.

The dump was adjacent to a lake. Dennis's father who I called Porky, told us when he was a kid, he would go and gather up bottles that he found on the ground and toss them in the water and try to shoot them with his 22 cal. rifle. The days we would take a break from digging we would launch a little johnboat in the water and look for bottles on the bottom of the lake. You could usually see about four to five feet deep. We would take a long stick and try putting the tip of it inside the neck of the bottle and lifting it out. This was not an easy as it sounds because if you missed you would have to wait for the sediments to settle and find the bottle all over again. There were many of times, we would lose our patience and just jump into the water and try to find it. From 1970 till 1975 we dug or fished out thousands of bottles. Most of them were common with a few scarce to rare pieces.

When my son Frank Jr. turned the age of ten in 1999, he started going with me on old farm dumps and privy digs. Watching the excitement on his face when he would dig up a bottle, that would be the highlight of my day. It did not take long for my son to get off the school bus and hop on his bike to head the a local farm dump with his shovel and a back pack with his gloves, a can of Mountain Dew and a peanut butter sandwich.

In 2011 my son and I created this web site www.bottlepickers.com to share our passion for collecting antique bottles. We hope other folks and their children out there will give it a try so they can see what they have been missing. Also many thanks to my daughter Crystal for all the hours she has invested in helping up build this web site and my wife Cheryl for putting up with my addiction. She sometimes wonders if my son and I need Antique Bottle Rehab.