How I Chose My Specialty

As I mentioned before, I had reached a point in my collection that I had no more room in the house to display my bottles.  So, I had to make a choice of what type of spirit to specialize in.  After I bought the collection from the friend of my father's dentist, I saw that it contained mostly Scotch Whisky mini's.  I also had about 100 scotch mini's that I had bought myself in stores.  Did I mention that in the early 60's, only 16 states were selling mini bottles.  Fortunately, Wisconsin was one of them.  Which really helped me add to my collection.  I made the decision to collect mini scotch bottles.  At that point I had about 500 scotch whiskey miniature.  Most of my collection up to that point consisted of liqueurs, cordials, wines, brandies and cognacs, whiskies, rums, gins and other miscellaneous bottles, but most liqueurs and cordials.  And all this time, about 4 years into collecting, I thought that my neighbors in Pacific Beach, my dentist's friend and I were the only three crazy people in the world who collected mini liquor bottles. 

I went on thinking that until 1969 when I moved to Los Angeles.  Since they did not sell mini's in California anymore(since 1942) I had to go to flea markets and antique stores to hunt for mini bottles.  On one trip to an antique store in Torrance, the dealer said to me "Oh, another one of you looking for those little bottles."  I was amazed.  I said "really?"  I asked if he by any chance knew the name of the other crazy guy.  He said "Yes, he left his card here someplace.  Oh, here it is."   The name on the card was David Spaid.  David lived in Torrance and had also been collecting mini bottles for several years.  I called him and he came over to my house and looked at my collection and told me a lot of information about collecting mini liquor bottles. He opened up a whole new world for me.  He told me about many other collectors, about newsletters about Bob Snyder's books.  I was amazed.  There were several other collectors living in Southern California at the time and very soon after my meeting with David, we started having monthly meetings of collectors and within a year, we started the Lilliputian Bottle Club in Southern California.  My mini scotch collection grew to about 3,300 different mini scotch bottles.  It was one of the biggest mini scotch collections in the country at the time.  I finally sold my scotch collection in 1988 to a collector from Scotland who had 22,000 different mini scotches at the time.  He owned a hotel in the highlands and had all  of his bottles on display.  I had 200 bottles he did not have.  These were bottles from the 1930's in the years after prohibition ended.  There were several new distilleries that sprang up and they would import malt scotch whisky from Scotland in barrels and then add grain whiskey and bottle it at their distillery and sell it as blended scotch whiskey.  They would put gorgeous labels on the bottles, both big and mini.  These bottles were never exported and therefore were never available to overseas collectors.  He made me an offer I could not refuse.  I packed them up in 80 banana boxes and left them on the driveway of my home on the appointed day, and sure enough, a truck pulled up as scheduled, loaded the boxed and away they went.

Next time, I will talk about what I did next.  See you then.