By Maxyne Trompeter special writer
From the February 20, 1986 edition of The Salem Times-Register
Long before he was legally old enough to drink beer, Salemite Jerry Mick was collecting beer cans.
Not the run-of-the-mill Michelobs, Schlitzes and Buds, but beer cans with Kentucky Derby winners on them and even cans adorned with pictures of young German women.
He began his collection, currently about 300 cans, when he was 14, said the 22-year-old Bradshaw Road resident.
“A buddy got me into it,” he recalled. “He had a fishnet strung from the ceiling with cans lined up in it. And he had more cans on the wall in a pyramid. It looked really neat.”
Mick’s first can bore a Weidemann label “because my dad drank Weidemann at the time,” he said.
From there, his collection “just kept growing,” explained Mick, a fabric cutter for the Rowe Furniture Corp in Salem.
While the size of his collection is impressive, it’s also the size of his collection that has forced Mick to put his cans up for sale.
Recently married to the former Teresa Martin of Salem, Mick said his wife “doesn’t like all these beer cans lying around.
“When I started collecting, 10 cans were nothing. When I reached 100, I started running out of room. And now…” Mick voice drifted off.
And now his entire collection can be had “for a steal,” he said. “I’m asking $300 to unload the cans.”
“If I were to sell the cans individually, I could probably get $500 to $600 for them,” he added.
“And if I looked at every can, I could you a little something about each one,” he said proudly.
For instance, there’s the Old Sterling can with a Kentucky Derby winner on it. “For about 15 years,” Mick explained, “Old Sterling beer would put a picture of the winning horse of the Kentucky Derby and his ratings right on the can.”
And there’s Tennant beer, from Germany, which used to put a picture of a different young woman on the can each summer.
“They just don’t make those kinds of things anymore,” he said.
“There’s Iron City beer, whose cans used to boast Superbowl winnersin both the 12 ounce and 16-ounce sizes. And there’s Falstaff beer with World Series winners on the cans.
In addition to his German Containers, Mick’s foreign collection includes cans from France, England, and Australia.
A member of a national beer can collecting club, he traded for many of his cans, but most them he’s found “in junk piles along abandoned roads or near the Everglades,” said Mick, a Florida native who moved to Salem five years ago.
His oldest container is an Olde Virginia can from the 1930’s. His most valuable, he guessed, is an Old German can worth between $60 and $70. His most unusual has a cone top, “like a brake fluid can with a bottle neck.”
While three-quarters of his cans are empty, Mick said he “carefully put pinholes in the bottoms of the unopened oner to let them drain.”
He waxes each can every five years with a high-grade car wax to keep them from rusting and preserve their color.
He has been known to concoct a formula of warm water and special salts to remove surface rust and to tenderly apply touch-up paint where needed.
Mick said he wouldn’t be too disappointed if he doesn’t find a buyer for his collection right now. He’ll just “put them away in boxes and bring them out again in 25 or 30 years.”
Considering that idea for a moment, he added, “Can you imagine what they’ll be worth then?”
-Prepared by Shelly Koon
