Beer Can Collector Fills Up With Empties

Most guys with Nick Johnson’s love of beer cans have a Betty Ford Clinic in their future.

Not this 34-year-old U.S. Air Force staff sergeant, who figures he’s amassed maybe 5,000 cans through archaeology, not alcohol poisoning.

Beer cans clutter Johnson’s garage. Beer cans line shelves floor to ceiling in the basement of his Suncrest home.

You’ve never seen these brands on TV: Senate beer, New England Ale, Imperial, Cream Top, Black and White, Krueger’s, Nu-Deal, White Horse, Happy Hops, Atlas Prager. …

“I could get 200 bucks for that one,” says Johnson, pointing to a slightly rusted can emblazoned with the name “Glory.”

I once lived next door to a guy with a similar interest in beer cans. The difference was that my neighbor put his empties out with the trash every week and started working on a fresh collection.

Johnson got his collection, which he figures is worth $15,000, through a dedication few could muster.

He dug many of the cans out of abandoned dumps and even the earthy sites of - gasp! - ancient outhouses.

There’s a certain logic to it, he explains: 1. Guy goes to john with a beer for company. 2. Guy finishes beer. 3. Bombs away goes the dead soldier down the hole.

“Man, we were about five feet into one old outhouse site and, well, you could sure tell what we were digging into,” says Johnson, wrinkling his nose. “One of the old cans we found still had toilet paper wrapped around it.”

I met Johnson during my recent vacation. He invited me to a Beer Can Collectors of America can-vention at a north Spokane motel.

Can-vention. Get it?

These beer can collectors are a riot.

When Johnson offered me a tour of his private stash I jumped at the chance. You only go around once, after all, so you’d better grab for the gusto while you can.

The truth is that collectors fascinate me.

No matter how obscure or mundane an item might be, it’s sure to become the Hope Diamond to some poor obsessive soul.

I once interviewed an Idahoan with a jones for potato mashers. He had over 100 of them and could rattle off masher facts like baseball batting stats.

And I’ll never forget the Spokane bachelor who littered his house with 2,600 pig figures. That was a squeal for help if I’ve ever heard one.

Johnson felt the call of the can as a child growing up in Michigan. Fortunately, he is now blessed with a very understanding wife. “Renae grew up with collectors in her family,” he says. “She was already broken in when I got her.”

Viewing so many beer cans filled me with a grave concern for America’s liver not to mention a deep longing for pretzels and Monday Night Football.

“Beer is such a part of our culture,” says Johnson, who is midway through writing a history of Spokane breweries. Cheap and intoxicating, foamy beer has always been the drug of choice for the raw-knuckled loggers, miners and railroad lugs who shaped this meat-and-gravy burg.

Spokane had a brewery as early as 1879, probably before the first undertaker set up shop.

The humble beer can is a relatively new phenomenon, however. The first ones appeared in 1935 and some brands, like Budweiser, felt obliged to put illustrations on cans showing drinkers how to punch a hole in the lid.

Breweries flourished here until Prohibition struck in 1920. One by one, Spokane beer makers had to close or change with the dry times.

Johnson says the owner of the Schade Brewery tried making soda pop for two years and got so depressed he blew his head off with a shotgun.

It’s just another case of beer today, gone tomorrow.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo