One man’s empty beer can or bottle is this Santa Rosa collector’s treasure

To have your house filled with beer cans and booze-or-brew-or-soda bottles isn’t laudable or terribly interesting.

Unless you’re John Burton.

A longtime trainer of bartenders and the widower of a Santa Rosa mayor, Burton lives in a world-class museum. Neatly displayed on shelves and in cases throughout his home in the Junior College neighborhood are mostly Sonoma County cans and bottles that from the late 19th century to the mid-20th were tossed or buried as common garbage.

Not just a collector but a true can-and-bottle historian, Burton treasures his beverage containers from yesteryear for their artwork, workmanship and nostalgic charm - and even more so, for the stories they tell.

He picked up a tin growler from Santa Rosa’s former Grace Brothers Brewing Co., from 1897 to 1966 (except for the Prohibition years) one of the state’s most prolific beer makers and the city’s No. 1 private employer.

In Santa Rosa in the late 1800s and early 1900s, he said, a father would thrust an empty jug at his kid, “growl and say, ‘Go get me some beer.’?” Someone at Grace Brothers would fill it and hand it to the kid after noting on a ledger that the father owed for it.

Tall and trim and perpetually good-humored at 77, Burton leaned over his glass case of liquor bottles embossed with the names of long-ago downtown Santa Rosa bars: The Model, Brown & Gnesa, Jones & Mathews, The Castle.

“Fourth Street was loaded with saloons, all the way from about the ?600 block to Railroad Square,” he said. “It was a drinking society.”

Around the turn of the 20th century, a bar patron wrapping up his visit might order a bottle to take home.

Quite likely, Burton said, the barkeep would hand him not only the filled bottle but a metal or wooden token “to get him back into the bar tomorrow.”

Burton has a fine collection of the tavern tokens that would cover the cost of the next day’s first drink.

He savors also his many hand-blown, no-two-identical soda bottles, some of which still contain internal, rubber-ringed stoppers that would ride the carbonation bubbles up into the neck, blocking it. They were called pop bottles, he explained, because of the noise they made when the consumer used a palm to punch down the stopper.

Burton will have a selection of his cans, bottles and other treasures on display at this weekend’s Antique Bottle & Collectibles show at the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building. He won’t be selling, but he’s always looking for nice, old alcohol containers and other local tavern memorabilia to buy.

He remembers clearly his first purchase, in 1985.

“I found a soda bottle that read ‘Rose City,’?” he said. It had been sold by a soda distributor in Santa Rosa.

Unaware then that “Rose City” was a nickname for Santa Rosa, he purchased the old bottle as a gift for his wife, Nanci Burton. She’d been elected to the City Council in ’83 and three years later would serve her first term as mayor.

The couple met at the Flamingo Hotel, where the future mayor, as a young woman, worked for a time as a hostess. John Burton has never been far from the hospitality industry; he was the former Los Robles Lodge’s food-and-beverage manager for ?28 years and for the past ?39 years has operated the Santa Rosa Bartending School.

His late wife liked the Rose City bottle he gave her, but he decided after doing a bit of research into antique bottles and cans that he liked it better. So he took it back, and became a collector.

A widower since cancer claimed his wife in 2008, Burton discovered part of the thrill of the hobby derives from knowing that most old bottles are broken, and most old beer cans are crushed or decayed from long exposure to the elements. So to find one in good shape is pretty exciting.

Burton purchased many of his antique liquor and pop bottles from people like Lou Lambert, chairman of this weekend’s show, and his wife, Leisa. For decades, the Lamberts have dug for old bottles in abandoned dumps, wells and outhouses, in filled-in basements and in other places at which their research revealed the likely presence of beverage-related artifacts.

Lou Lambert recalled that when much of downtown Santa Rosa was scraped away by urban renewal in the 1970s, city officials allowed collectors to dig around the foundations of razed theaters, stores and other buildings.

“That was fun,” Lambert said. “There were a lot of things found there.”

Unlike glass bottles, beer cans deteriorate from contact with the moisture in soil. Said Burton, “The better cans have been stored indoors.”

Many of the nicely preserved cans that wind up in collections were found where workmen long ago ditched them: inside the walls or crawl spaces of old houses or commercial buildings. Occasionally the cans someone used to decorate his garage are offered up for sale by the former collector or his heirs.

Burton owns also a number of flats: sheets of tin that were printed for use as beer cans, but were never cut and rolled. Breweries would sell the flats as excess, and sometimes builders or homeowners would put them to use as ductwork or sub-roofing material.

As with most collectibles, some old beer cans and liquor, beer or soda bottles can be purchased quite cheaply and some are so rare and desirable their value can be breathtaking.

Clipper Pale beer was one of a great many labels produced by the Grace Brothers. In 2003, a Clipper Pale can in mint condition sold for $19,300 on eBay.

Burton owns a Clipper can and figures that today he’d be lucky to get $6,000 for it. But he’s not selling.

He occasionally offers a piece for sale if his collection includes a duplicate or two. Mostly he buys - at shows like the one coming this weekend to Santa Rosa, and at antiques stores, flea markets, anywhere he might happen upon a can or bottle or token that speaks to him.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.