In 1975, I was working at my hometown newspaper, the weekly Dalton (MA) News Record. My office mate Arlene informed me that her 12-year-old son Robert was collecting beer cans, and wondered if I wouldn’t mind picking up a few for him if I spotted them in my travels. I was more than happy to oblige, even though I had never heard of anyone collecting beer cans.

My first thought was that Robert was destined to have a very small collection. How many different cans could there be? True to my word, I did pick up a few different ones over the next few weeks, and turned them over to Arlene for Robert. Then, a life-changing (pardon the melodrama) event occurred. A friend and I were playing golf in Connecticut. I walked over to a trash barrel to discard something, and there, lying near the top of the inside pile, was this beautiful can. I had never seen anything like it! Buckhorn? What is a Buckhorn, and how did it make its way from St. Paul, Minnesota, to a trash barrel in Connecticut? If I give this can over to Robert, I may never see another one. So I kept it. And a collection was born. Sorry, Robert.

As a side note, coincidentally, I bumped into Arlene just a few years ago when I was out visiting the old home town, and I asked her about Robert and his long ago collection. As would have been predicted, Robert’s interest in beer cans was short lived. I don’t believe an acquisition of the Buckhorn can would have made any difference in his collecting future. 40 years later, though, I still have the Buckhorn can, plus several hundred others as well. My wife is pretty tolerant of my hobby, as long as it doesn’t encroach upon too much of our living space, but I am willing to bet that, deep down, she secretly wishes I had turned this can over to Robert.