The Biggest Collection I Ever Bought

This collection was one of the greatest collections in the history of mini bottle collecting.  It started in 1978 when I received a letter from a woman telling me about her collection.  Her letter was in response to a magazine article she saw that contained an article about my collection.  She stated that she was getting older and was thinking about selling her collection.  I had never heard of her as a mini bottle collector so I asked her for the names of some of her favorite bottles.  When she replied with names like Old Camel and Buccaneer I got excited.  I asked her how many bottles she had and she replied about 8,000 or 9,000.  I told her I would like to come and visit her and she said that would be fine.  She lived in Rockport, IL and I lived in Los Angeles.  My Dad lived in Milwaukee.  So shortly after that conversation, I flew back to Milwaukee and picked up my Dad and off we went to Rockport.  When we got there, she took me upstairs to her bottle room and the first thing I saw were whiskies I never heard of.  Then I saw rums I never heard of, and gins and beers and figurals I had never seen.  I was so excited I couldn't stand it.  When we finally went back downstairs, she served us coffee and cookies and we began discussing her collection.  When I finally told her that I wanted to buy it, she said "Oh, I don;t think I want to sell it.  I would really miss my little babies."  I was shocked.  That was the whole reason I made the trip.  I was really disappointed when we left her home.

Four months later, she called me and told me she was ready to sell her collection and she was asking $25,000.  I countered with an offer of $20,000 and she declined.  Four months later she called and said she was willing to accept the $20,000 offer.  I declined her offer and came back with a $15,000 counter offer.  She declined.  About a year later I received a phone call from an attorney who handling her estate and had been advised that before her death, the woman had told the attorney that she had received a $20,000 offer on her collection from me.  The attorney was calling to tell me that the estate was willing to accept the $20,000 offer.  I explained to the attorney that the original $20,000 offer had been declined by her and that the most recent offer was $15,000.  The attorney blustered on about the value of the collection and the $15,000 offer was ridiculous.  When I asked him if he knew anything about minibottle collecting he replied that "no" he did not but that he knew about the value of things.  I then proceeded to start to explain to him that the boxes of bottles that were now in the basement of the old building where the law offices were located were probably starting to mildew and that the silverfish were probably starting to eat the glue on the back of labels and that once labels were destroyed the bottles would be worth nothing.  I could tell that he was a little concerned when I told him those things.  He then began to negotiate.  He said $19,000 and I said $16,000.  He then said $18,000 and I said $17,000.  He then said "Deal" and we had a deal.  I would come to his offices in Rockport and bring a cashiers check for $17,000 and take possesion of the collection.

That is when the fun started.  Where in the heck was I going to come up with $17,000?  I was a young guy with a wife and 5 children and a mortgage.  I went home and called my bank and asked them what kind of second mortgage I could get on my home and they gave me a number larger than what I needed.  Then came the hard part.  I had to discuss it with my wife before I could make a decision like that.  My wife had never been interested in my mini bottle collecting.  But like to good sport and bookkeeper that she is, after I explained that I thought this a once in a million opportunity and that I thought I could make a profit if I sold most of the collection, she agreed.

At about the same time, I heard about a new bottle club that was putting on a mini bottle show in Illinois.  The timing was perfect.  I flew back to Rockport the week of the bottle show in Hinsdale, Ill. and picked up the bottles.  I brought my good friend Linus Earl and his son Cliff because Linus asked if he could have first crack at the whiskies.  I said yes and off we went.  It took us two days to unpack the almost 100 boxes that the bottles were packed in.   Just to give you an idea of how good this collection was, Linus Earl was one of the top mini whiskey collectors in the world at that time.  He found 500 bottles of whiskey that he needed for his collection and half of those were bottles that he never heard of nor knew existed.  He was ecstatic.  He paid me $5 each and all of a sudden, I had $2500 of my investment back.  It actually turned out that she had 11,000 bottles in her collection and 8,000 or 9,000 as she thought.  I picked out 1,000 bottles for my self.  We had rented a U Haul truck and loaded up all the boxes and drove to Hinsdale.

When we got to the Ramada Inn, I decided to set up in my room rather than get a table in the show room because I was scared to death that someone might steal some of the bottles overnight and I would lose money, which I could not afford to do.  My good friend David Spaid was a big help to me by bringing in the top collectors of each type of spirit or figural type, one at a time, to see what they wanted to buy.  That led to a lot sales on Friday night and Saturday.  By the end of Saturday, I had sold $12,000 worth of bottles all together and still have one day to go.  I only needed to sell $5,000 more of the bottles and I would at least break even.  By 1:00PM on Sunday, I had not sold many of the remaining bottles and many of the collectors had already left for home.  I was getting nervous.  Then my old friend from New York approached me and asked me what I would take for the rest of the bottles.  I said $10,000 and he countered with $8,000.  He and two of his friends from New York were interested in the collection because they all collected different spirits and there were plenty of what each of them wanted.  I countered with an offer of $8,000 and they take possesion of the bottles right there at the show or $9,000 and I would cover the shipping to New York.  They chose the $8,000 and it was the wrong decision.  They each gave me a check for one third of the $8,000 but before I consumated the deal, I called my good friend Tony Natellin in New York to ask him if he knew the other two guys and if their checks were good.  Tony gave them the "thumbs up" and I consumated the deal.

Then the trouble began.  The fellows loaded up the bottles in our U-Haul and we took them to the airport and they had sky caps unload the bottles at the airline they were flying.  There were about 70 boxes left.  I am guessing that they bought about 8,000 bottles that day.  We then went to return the U-Haul truck and took a taxi back to the airport  It took us about two hours to do all of this.  By the time we got back to the airport. Lo and Behold, there were the guys still trying to find an airline that would take the boxes of bottles as freight.  As it turned, none of them would.  One of the guys owned a business in New York that had a truck and he ended up sending his truck and one of his employees on a round trip from New York to Chicago and back to bring the bottles home.  It cost them more than $1,000 to do this.

The final result......
$17,000 loan paid back in 10 days.  No interest paid.
$3,000 profit
1,100 great bottles added to my collection.
Many other collectors found bottles for their collections that were extremely hard to  find.

All in all, a real success story.

I am not encouraging anyone else to do something this crazy but sometimes you just get lucky.  And have a great wife!

See you next time.