You are right! You did read this last month! Some things just bear repeating! It does seems like we just got home from the spring hunt, were on earth did this summer go? Well, the club board wants me to encourage each of you to plan on paying your hunt fee this month for the fall hunt! The Fall Hunt will be on Sunday, September 20th, at Tom and Jackie Latterner's. You will find a map to the hunt site on the cover of this newsletter.

    The third Tuesday comes early in September. The month of September starts out on a Tuesday and the meeting is on the 15th! Just 5 days later we will have our hunt!

    Tom and Jackie live at 4339 North 3rd Street, a short drive west of Kalamazoo. The hunt will be open for camping, but only come to stay Saturday night. If it is not too dry, which as I write this we have had a lot of rain, we will have a Saturday evening bonfire. I'm jumping ahead of myself. There will be things to do most of the day on Saturday and at 3:00 there will be a fellowship hunt. John Dudley has been scouting the area for a good location. If he does half as well as he did for the spring fellowship hunt, it should be great!

    I hope that you have been thinking about prize donations. You don't need to donate a prize for the hunt, but if everyone does, it makes for all the more fun! The way the hunt prize program works is easy. Mixed in with the loads of old silver coins that we plant, will be numbered tokens for you to find! Each one will be good for a prize right after the two hunts wrap up. It is really one of the fun parts! If you have never been to a seeded hunt before, treat yourself to this one; they are a lot of fun!

    We can count ourselves very fortunate to have two great Huntmasters! John Dudley is a member of the Michigan Flywheeler's Club in South Haven and, when we have our hunts over there, he really takes the bull by the horns and makes sure everyone has a great time!

    Tom Latterner is another great Huntmaster. When we have our hunts at his property, he usually comes up with some great plans or contests. The last time we had a hunt at Tom's, he had a detector quiz where everyone got a chance to test their target ID skills! Some of those who felt like they were highly skilled came away feeling like they needed some practice, to say the least!

    What we thought was common trash turned out to be rare gold coins, rings, platinum and other treasure! Much of it was not the foil, tabs and screw caps that we thought it was! I'm sure Tom will find something new to amaze you. With as many new hunters as we always have, I don't think you could run that same contest too much and we will have something like that at the next meeting! Read on!

    I have talked to Tom since the last meeting and he has already been working very hard on some treasure hunting games and special learning exercises that I am sure you will love! So get with the program and sign up at this meeting! You can pay and hunt in both hunts or just pay to have a single hunt. Single hunt people will be in hunt number two. Also, we will have a large kids hunt so be sure to sign up for that if you have large kids! (Joke) This is important at this meeting because it really helps the hunt planners how much treasure to plant --- and it will save you a $5.00 late fee!

    At this meeting our club president will have a selection of unusual targets to test your detector and your skills. We did this a couple years back with an assortment of gold coins. I'm not sure what these targets will be, but I am sure it will be an educational and eye opening exercise for everyone. So be sure and bring your detector to be apart of all the fun. At the dragstrip they call this, "Test and tune night!"

    This summer I have been a little too weak to get out much. All the while I have been thinking about you diggers. So many times you are crying the blues because you cannot probe or dig due to the hard, dry ground. For the most part we have had great ground moisture and cooler weather this summer, so I hope that you took advantage of it!

    A friend of mine from the detector club, Greg Stonerock, just called me from an antique shop in Tennessee. He wanted to know if he should buy a half pint dairy bottle embossed "Sambo's Chocolate Milk?" I didn't know anything about it, but I was online at the time of his call. I did a quick e-Bay search and it only turned up a re-production tin sign for Sambo's Chocolate Milk but no milk bottle. I also did a search for past, or completed auctions, and that turned up nothing also.

    At that point I asked my friend about the bottle's condition. I figured that if it was like the half- pint bottles we had when I was in school, it would have what they call 'case wear,' The milk bottles that our school used must have been washed and refilled a few hundred times in the bottle's life span! Back in those days beverage bottles were used over and over again! Today we recycle them, or at least many people do, but that isn't the real green way to do it! It takes a lot of energy to scrap, sort, haul and melt down the glass for complete new production. In the old days they were sterilized and refilled, simple, and earth friendly!

    Of course while I am on the subject of Americans moving away from good ideas, I can remember when they went down the Kalamazoo river destroying all the earth-friendly hydro-electric power plants!

    Anyway, Greg told me that the glass, on this seemingly old dairy bottle, looked like new. It did have a few air bubbles in the glass, which is sometimes a sign of an old bottle but you cannot always go by that. So I am thinking, "Looking like new, fitting nicely into the black memorabilia category, especially with the caricature of a black waiter or bus boy. . . Reproduction!"

    He said that it was priced at only $12.00 and that sent up more red flags for me! But at that price why not take a chance and buy the thing? If he finds out that it was a big collectable, and the real deal why not? This could be desirable for both bottle collectors and black memorabilia collectors if it is real. If it is, he will be glad his buddy Al steered him right!

    However, I got the feeling that after he left that shop with his new found treasure, the store- keep went into the back room, reached into a cardboard shipping case, and unwrapped another for his sales shelf. As he watched my friend drive away he noticed the Michigan license plate, shook his head and smiled! The store owner probably paid $12.00 for the case! He just got his money back and still has 35 left to sell! I hope Greg finds out it is the real thing and I cannot wait to see it!

    What do you know about this bottle, anything? I know that in Shipshewana IN. there is a giant hardware store called Yoder's, they stock a selection of reproduction antique bottles in assorted colors! That is one of the things I love about digging bottles . . you rarely run across reproductions! As I am writing this, I have some baby pork ribs on the grill. When was BBQ sauce invented? Does anyone have an antique BBQ sauce bottle? Was pepper sauce the forerunner? Food for thought!

    The digging team of Chuck Parker and Scott Hendricksen reported in a recent digging adventure to me. They drove to Flint Michigan where they caught up with a member of the Flint Antique Bottle Club. It seems like the downturn in the automotive industry has left Flint with some real problems, like much of Michigan.

    From what Scott told me complete neighborhoods are being deserted right in the oldest parts of town and the city is tearing things up! They are turning entire blocks into green zones! Bill Heatley is the fellow who took them digging, and as I understand it they were probing for outhouse pits with not a whole lot of luck.

    The guys did find places to dig, but they were not finding much in the way of old bottles. Then, when they had just agreed to load up and move to another location, one of them noticed a small animal hole with small chunks of pottery in the tailing piles! This looked interesting so they started digging!

    The guys ended up digging a trench twelve feet long and only two feet deep! From this ditch which they unearthed around 50 whole bottles! My question is where were the metal detectors?

    Many of the bottles that they dug were a selection of early Flint beers and one Lapeer MI druggist bottle! They also found a Kalamazoo Zoa-Phora bottle and several doll heads! For those in the detecting club bottle diggers often turn up antique doll parts. I sold a bisque German doll head on e-Bay for over $350.00! Ernie Lawson saved antique doll parts and had a couple dolls restored and even had sets of clothes made for them!

    Needless to say my bottle digging friends were very happy with their finds. By the time you read this they should have been be back to Flint yet again!

    There was one "cry-over bottle to report! A cry-over is a rare bottle that you dig, one that would have been worth a ton of money if it had not been broken. They found a slightly broken "Union # 1" wax sealer fruit jar that, had it been whole would be a $500.00 bottle!

    Also, from somewhere different, Chuck Parker, the bottle club president acquired a C.S. Dewitt & Co. Kalamazoo Hutch beer and two amber Berliner Weiss Beers. . also Kalamazoo bottles! All very good bottles! Great going guys!

    Our pastor has been on vacation and he asked one of the men from our church to fill for him in last Sunday. One part of his message was taken from the many e-mail things that are making the rounds. It was the one where a grandfather is comparing things from his childhood with that of his grandchildren. It is a real eyeopener! You cannot help but see how much better things were in the good old days!

    One of the things that his message made me think about was something one of my older customers talked about recently. He was recalling how in the 60's and 70's many guys recovered their coins with ice picks. Back in those days the detectors didn't go very deep, so you could pop most targets out of the ground without digging. Now, I didn't think an ice pick was a good idea back then and I still think it is a bad idea!

    Using an ice pick or a screwdriver is not good because they are made from harden steel! They are so hard that even touching a coin can leave a mark! That is why a probe should have a brass shank. Brass is a softer metal than any of the coin metals yet strong enough to deal with the soil as well as poking and prying.

    My customer remarked about how difficult it is to find an ice pick anymore. Back in the early days of my father's RV business we rented out a lot of pop-up campers for family vacations. Each of them were equipped with ice boxes instead of the more modern combination gas & electric refrigerators. We had a large vending machine that was stocked by the old Kalamazoo Ice and Fuel company. I always thought it was strange for a company to deal in what they called crystal clear ice and also to sell dirty coal at the same time! However they did a good job of keeping the ice pure.

    Every week a delivery truck would come around to fill the ice machine with big blocks of ice. I don't remember how much a block weighed but it must have been 30 pounds or more. I keep thinking back and remembering a question that I wish I had asked my father or grandfather, now that they are gone. The same thing goes for equipment like the ice machine. I wonder today how the thing worked. I wish I had been more curious and stuck my nose in where it didn't belong!

    As I recall our first machine was like a giant cooler and if someone wanted a block of ice we came out and pulled out a block. When the ice came out of the ice truck on a hot summer day the outer part of the block would be slightly wet and when the machine was loaded, the ice blocks would freeze together. My mother was in charge of the little sideline money makers like the ice machine and the R.V. sewage tank dump-station.

    The ice machine plugged into an electric outlet we had on an old power pole where we also had a big mercury vapor lamp. On that power pole my mother hung a large ice pick and ice tongs. You always had to take the pick and stab the ice around the seams to break a block free. I still remember how good it felt to open that door on a very hot summer day! It was really refreshing to suck on one of the large ice chips that broke of from a block!

    Later on, the old ice cooler was replaced by a modern vending machine. The vending machine was unmanned and available 24 hours a day. You put in your quarter, it may have been 35 cents and the machine would dispense a block of ice. The ice blocks were separated when loaded, so they wouldn't freeze together, and when the blocks of ice slid down the 'ways' or 'track' it would make a loud rumbling sound then crash loudly as it came to a stop behind a flip up door.

    When someone came to buy ice who was using a simple 'cooler' the ice pick was used to break the ice into tiny chunks and it didn't take that long to break up a block.

    Back in the early 90's I purchased a tiny cab-over pickup camper that was designed for mini trucks. It was in real bad shape! I tore the roof completely off and rebuilt the whole thing, inside and out. I rebuilt the roof so that it would never leak again and I am certain that someone is still enjoying it to this day!

    I hauled it on a standard size 1990 Ford Ranger with a four cylinder engine and a four speed transmission. The little truck handled it well even though I had to downshift on long grades. We developed some great memories in that little camper. We traveled with my daughter who was only around 7 or 8 years old to start out. The truck cab was only wide enough for two adults comfortably so she rode in the camper. Both the truck and the camper had a slider window so she had access to the cab at all times. I had the area around this opening well sealed so she had instant access to the cab without rain, noise, or wind.

    The reason I brought this up was because the camper was just like new when I finished it, I even restored all of the upholstery! The only original equipment was the stove, sink, furnace and ice box. By that time you could not buy block ice only bagged chunks and it just wasn't as good! As I remember a block of ice in a 50 pound ice box would last over a week keeping all you food and drinks nice and cold. The bags of ice would only give you three of four days at best.

    To tax the power of that little four cylinder engine even more, I added a small trailer that I hauled our three bikes on. It also had a storage box where I stored a screen room and my treasure hunting gear! One episode that I will never forget, one that still sends chills up my spine! We were crossing the Mackinaw Bridge with the little camping rig. I'll never forget, it was a crystal clear day and we were headed north. Headed north means that vacation had just started and the big bridge was like the gateway for fun and adventure. Off to the west, in Lake Michigan I could see a distant freighter working its way towards the bridge. Oh how I love to watch those big ships! It is one of the many things I love about the U.P. It just don't get any better than this, I thought. You only spend a few minutes on the bridge and the scenery is breath taking! The size of the bridge and the height over the water still leaves me spell bound! I was in a trans, taking it all in hoping to somehow capture that moment forever.

    Suddenly my day dream is interrupted by my daughter's voice! As if she was deeply alarmed she poked her head into the truck cab and exclaimed, "Dad, the camper door came open!"

    As I was rudely awakened from my day-dream I could imagine everything in the camper tumbling onto the highway! What could I do? You don't pull off to the side on the Big Mac bridge and close a door, do you?

    Without really thinking I said, "Well close it!"

    Without even questioning my order my little girl who wasn't 70 pounds soaking wet, grabbed one side of the door post, leaned out to reach the door with the other hand and almost--- well I must not think about it!

    She did close the door, and by that time I had just realized what had happened! We went on to have a great vacation and I always enjoyed camping with my daughter, she was a good traveler as a young child and a lot of fun!

1. Women's 18k gold watch                                                                          By: Mike Walker

2.14k Ladies Diamond Ring                                                                                By: Shawano

3. 925 Silver Carezzio Rope Chain                                                                 By: Steve Brown

4.Worry Ring                                                                                               By: Carlisle Legal

5.10k Diamond & Ruby Ring                                                                      By: Brian Matecun

6. 925 Silver Ring                                                                                          By: Ernie Lawson

7.10k Ladies Ring                                                                                            By: Keith Payne

8.14k Ladies Heart Pendant                                                                   By: John Assenmacher

9.14k White & Yellow Gold Ring                                                                      By: Denny Noel

10. 10k Gold Filagree Ring                                                                                By: Ron Jenner

11. 10k Gold Ring                                                                                      By: Deb Wittkowski

12. Antique Buckle                                                                                             By: Janet Gray

Our winner was Mike Walker with an awesome diamond laden watch!

COIN

1.1944 Quarter                                                                                              By: Ed Kaminskas

2. No Date Buffalo Nickel                                                                               By: Mike Walker

3.1914 Barber Dime                                                                                        By: Tom Herman

4.1906 v. Nickel                                                                                                 By: Tom Beilby

5.1891-O seated liberty dime                                                                       By: Greg Stonerock

6.1839 Large Cent                                                                                            By: Keith Payne

7.1858 Flying Eagle Cent                                                                                By: Brian Norgan

8.1867 Shield Nickel                                                                                      By: Rick Seymour

9. Bi-Metal $1 Mexican Coin                                                                             By: Ron Jenner

Greg Stonerock was our winner with a sweet 1891-O dime!

Fob,Badge,Token

1. 1965 1st Place Track Medal                                                                       By: Mike Walker

2.Token From Uncirculated Set                                                                  By: Billy E. Knapp

3.100 Year. Western Mich Token                                                                  By: Ernie Lawson

Ernie Lawson was our winner with his 100 year token from Western Michigan University

MOST UNUSUAL

1. Antique Duck Toy                                                                                        By: Janet Gray

2. Old Hose Sprayer                                                                                  By: Greg Stonerock

3. 13 Function Rite Knife                                                                                By: Ron Jenner

4. Mid 1800's Crotal Bell                                                                            By: John Newman

5. Lead Soldier WW 1                                                                                    By: Keith Payne

6. Old 14k Eye Glasses                                                                                  By: Mike Walker

7. Toy airplane                                                                                             By: Ernie Lawson

Ernie was the big winner of the night! He did it again with his die-cast toy plane!