Kalamazoo Antique Bottle Club News

There’s No Business Like Show Business!

Ticking Down!

Hi friends!
            Time is ticking down towards the 40th Kalamazoo Antique Bottle & Glass Show! I wish Ernie Lawson and Jack Short, our club founders, were here to witness this! Our 40th year anniversary, wow!!

            We only have a limited time left before the bottle show. At the last meeting, we passed around some sign-up sheets. One sheet was for the Hospitality Suite’s food and beverages. Based on what I saw, we are always in need of more help! But thank goodness we did get the ball rolling. Many thanks to Kevin for getting things organized.

            Chuck shared with me since the last meeting that a decision was made to have a display room at the show this year. If that is the case, we will need to pass another sign-up sheet. If you can possibly make it to this next meeting, that would be a great encouragement! We are going to need all the help we can muster! If you cannot make it, but you are willing to help, please let us know!

Here is the phone number for Chuck Parker (269) 329-0853, John Pastor (616) 581-7005

              I called John Pastor a week-or-two back to discuss the show raffle prize. We will be featuring a new 2019 White’s Treasure Master metal detector this year!

             I mentioned last year how White’s pulled-out all the stops going after their biggest competitor, Garrett Electronics. In 1968 I talked my father into becoming a dealer for Garrett. We placed the required first order for 5 new detectors. Garrett and Whites are both great American made metal detectors!
During the first couple years, as a Garrett dealer, it seemed like the guys running the White’s detectors were finding more stuff, and more often than I was! Now, with my being far wiser than I was as a seventeen year old kid, I realize as my Dad would say, “The problem here is, you have a loose nut on the end of the handle.”

            As I mentioned in the past, the driving force behind metal detector development recently has been the Internet. Primarily the Internet marketing, like Amazon, has dictated the products we choose and how we buy them.
This has come at the great expense of many mom-and-pop shops all across America.

             I was having this conversation with someone who suggested, “Al, why don’t you become an Amazon dealer.”
To be honest, I have considered that, but it really came down to deciding that ‘I can’t do both.’ I don’t want to be a cataloguer, busy just shipping stuff out. I like helping people in person.

           The development of this year’s raffle detector took about 7 years, maybe longer. White’s had a very clear target to aim for. It was the Garrett’s ACE 250! What made the Ace 250 so popular? It found the good stuff!
One of the biggest challenges for any metal detector is getting depth. The older detectors operated at a VHF high radio frequency, which enabled them to reach targets at very impressive depths through the air. However, these older high frequency detectors required constant tuning because they would drift, and they did not go very deeply on small targets.

           Most treasure hunters would blame the poor depth on the detector not being sensitive enough, when the exact opposite was true. Their old detector would be so sensitive that the ground they were hunting was overwhelmed by the detector’s power. Instead of penetrating the ground, much of the radio signal was reflected off the surface of the soil.

           I am not sure which company first discovered the actual depth advantage of building a detector in the Very Low Frequency range of the radio spectrum, but what a door that opened up!
           V.L.F. led to one breakthrough after another. Soon someone discovered that the detector’s coil sensitivity could be controlled with a ground cancel knob. That would enable the operator to tune the coil’s sensitivity to the actual ground being hunted. With a proper tuning technique, the coil could be as sensitive as the ground would allow, without being too sensitive.

            White’s pioneered a system that monitored the coil for 'signal reflection' and a system called 'Auto Trac' would tune the coil hotter or cut back or relax the coil’s power as needed. That system is called automatic ground cancel, White’s calls it “Auto Trac.” As the ground changes, the detector adjusts to those changes automatically and continually. However, to get the auto-trac, you had to spend the big money!

   Rarely does the ground stay the same. This Auto Trac technology was reserved for the high end metal detectors until now. The Treasure Master has Auto-Trac. Another item the Treasure Master uses is old school technology that White’s pioneered back in the 80's called digital target number assignment.

The early target ID detectors used an old style analog meter with a needle. The circuitry employed a component whose job it was to sample and hold.
With this system the sweeping meter needle would swing up and hold as it pointed to a probable target label. For example if the target was a quarter, the needle would point to 25 cents.
Some of the guys got so good that they could identify really unusual targets just by a slight deviation in the position of the needle. For example, if they were hunting where uniform buttons were being found, you could hear, “Hey I got another button!” and they did!
With the companies going to digital, the old school guys (like me) started hoarding the old analog machines! Guess what, the detectors with White’s digital number assignment can, by number, ID a copper wheat cent from a copper Indian head! They are the same size and weight but by the early 1900's the copper was better refined and purer!

           This raffle detector has large screen target ID and it even uses a digital sweep needle so everyone is happy!
Here is the kicker, White’s being a very aggressive competitor, put these machines on the market at a break-even price point which meant they were actually making next to no profit. Then for the 2018 Holiday season, these detectors were offered with a discounted accessory bundle. With this bundle the purchaser got headphones, treasure apron, White’s baseball cap AND a free $100.00 pin~pointer!!!!
            Thinking of the bottle show, I put one of these bundles aside. Then, right after the first of the year, I received a letter informing me the price went up $100.00!!
The suggested retail value on this new detector with bundle is about $600.00!
I know that my talking about metal detectors can be boring to some, but I could go on-and-on about this detector!
   I can teach whoever wins this detector some amazing tricks . . and they also will get training and full service! Try getting that at Amazon!

LAST MEETING

        The Following members were at the February meeting: John Winkler, Kevin Siegfried, Chuck Parker, Jeremy Winkworth, Ron Smith, Rob Knolle, Allan Holden, and Chuck’s grandson.
   Of course each of you who receive the newsletter by mail received a little Valentine 'Love Button.'
I checked with the post office to make sure the envelopes would work. The little gal at the post office listened to my reason for including the little trinkets. I told her it was intended to make a bunch of old guys feel younger.
She put one of the letters through a templates and it cleared just fine. But she shook her head and said, “If these are canceled by machine, I am afraid the buttons will be smashed and the newsletter damaged.”
          At that point, I gave her a little Racoon “Love Bandit” button. She said, “For Me?”
          She quickly pinned it on and all the other clerks wanted one!

          She said, “These need to be hand canceled and I will be happy to do that for you!”

      At the meeting we discussed the Dealer’s Hospitality Suite and that discussion will continue at this next meeting. I don’t have possession of the sign up sheets. But we did discuss a tiny little problem we had with items being duplicated.
      I don’t want to bore you, but maybe you would like to know; I am bringing the condiments, which include: salt & pepper, mustard, olives, horseradish, cottage cheese, cheese sandwich slices, (cheddar and swiss) roast beef and ham sandwich meat.
         You see, this is some of what we need to settle at this meeting. Also, we will need to start a sign-up for security detail at the show room. Please try to be at this meeting if at all possible.

LAST MONTH
         The items we saw at the last meeting included a very nice Dealer Award Certificate that Kevin printed up. It is for a dealer, drawing good for one free table at the 2019 Kalamazoo Antique Bottle Show.
          I have to admit that, Kevin did a beautiful job with this printing! I think he has been practicing on $20 and $50's.
I have had a theory about counterfeiting. Most criminals print fake bills in common denominations. Why do that? People are far too familiar with $20, $50 and $100's. I would print something people can’t easily identify. After all who could actually say what a $6.00 or $9.00 bill looks like?

THIS MONTH
             We were slightly surprised at the last meeting. We had been told we lost the conference room to a ladies book club. What we misunderstood was the time for that. Most of you, me included, went down to the Van Deusen Room and found it full of guitar players! I was able to quickly see that something was amiss and I was able to get out without autographing any guitars! And the bottle club was in our usual location! But folks, this is the month we are in the larger Van Duesen Room at the end of the hall.
Maybe I will bring my little brother to play a little AC/DC Back In Black! Actually I understand the room divider is sound proof!

      This winter has been brutal! At the end of February, I took a much needed order for some gold prospecting supplies. My supplier is Keene Engineering in California, and normally they are a slow connection. Many of the prospecting equipment they actually build to order, and they take their time to build high quality equipment.
    So I knew it would take a while to get the items but eventually the customer became a little anxious. I made a couple attempts to find out how the order was coming because they did not send out a tracking number. I was e-mailing and leaving voice mails with no response.
             This is the only supplier I deal with that uses FedEx for their shipping company. One day I went to empty the mail that automatically funnels into my spam folder. That’s when I found a letter looking like it was from FedEx with a heading, “We made 3 delivery attempts.” OK that would explain things.

    It truly was the perfect storm! I opened the attachment which contained at least 5 malicious virus attacks.

I realized I had done something bad!!! Something I had warned everyone not to do!

I quickly started my Norton Power Eraser. It found the 5 viruses right away, but that only made matters worse! The Norton Power Eraser is a very aggressive tool! When it cleared out the problem, it cleared out the good with the bad!

               The next day, I booted up my computer and it was basically an empty box! Thank God I had my important financial files, club business files and Word Perfect files all backed up. But, I even had to reload my entire windows program! It wiped out my complete hard drive! You cannot imagine how much stuff you have to lose! All my old e-mail, passwords, programs, were lost for good: it really was devastating! One of my friends suffered a terrible house fire and he said, “Years later, you think of precious things you lost!”
               I am hearing him and for some reason I am thinking, “I have been there . . . but I have never lost everything in a house fire?”
              Then it dawned on me a divorce is just like that. In someways it is even harder than a house fire. Being hurt in a auto wreck is bad, being hurt because someone purposely runs over you is far worse.

               The night before this computer thing happened I started feeling some symptoms that I recognized as an infection. Even on antibotics I held onto a temperature of 100 for 5 days!
    To top it off, my drive belt on my snow blower went out! If I wanted to hang myself the rope would break!

      This has been very tough on me! I will be the happiest man in Michigan when I see spring flowers!
    At the last meeting the guys came with their sleeves rolled up ready to tackle show business, so we didn’t see a lot of bottles.

         Rob Knolle found a little half pint B.H. Child’s Dairy bottle. This little milk bottle is from Cleveland OH.
I contacted our dairy expert Steve DeBoode, who told me that he sees the paper caps for sale often. I asked him what it was worth and he told me that it was worth very little around here. It is the local Ohio collectors who would pay the most. That is the beauty of e-Bay, you can get it in front of the Ohio collectors.
Rob also brought in a familiar Bowman’s Dairy bottle. I see these often because it is a Chicago bottle and Southwest Michigan has always been Chicago’s vacation land!
    In 1874, J. R. Bowman of Clinton County, Illinois, headed west to St. Louis, where he established a dairy marketing business called J. R. Bowman & Co.
    In 1885, Bowman entered the Chicago market by purchasing the milk business of M. A. Devine. In 1891, Bowman and his brothers decided to sell their St. Louis operation and move everything into Chicago, where they formed the Bowman Dairy Co. The company soon became one of the leading suppliers of dairy products and eggs in the Chicago area. During the 1920s, it opened large bottling plants on the South Side. By the middle of the

1930s, Bowman employed over 3,000 Chicago-area residents. The company continued to carry on a large business until 1966, when it was purchased by a local rival, the Dean Foods Co.
Jeremy Winkworth brought in a local beauty from Kalamazoo! It was a sparkling attic-mint amber Kalamazoo Brewing Company bottle. It was a deep honey amber, with a crown cap, and a slug plate label. It had no flaws, no chips bruises or case wear! That is indeed the rare factor on this one . . . it is like a new beer bottle!
For this month if you found something interesting bring it along! I picked up some cheap treasures. One is a french colbalt ink, and a Detroit dairy bottle that may be good.

KALAMAZOO ANTIQUE BOTTLE CLUB
Meets at the main Kalamazoo Library,
315 South Rose Street.
We meet on the third floor in the Van Deusen Room.
This meeting is March 12th. Meeting starts at 7:00
e-mail
prostock@net-link.net
Phone 269-685-1776 www.kalamazoobottleclub.org