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Foreword to Early Sodas of Florida and Cuba By Larry Smith of Jupiter, Florida

My path to meeting and becoming friends with author David Kyle Rakes was a grateful and humble experience.
My passion for digging and collecting antique bottles started in the fall of 1977. It continued for many years into the 1980s. I found bottles in old bottle dumps behind old 1800s houses, in crawl spaces, and later in the water.
Early on I was greatly influenced by South Jersey bottles of Frank Bruce. Frank lived just down the street where I grew up in Port Republic, New Jersey.
Frank took me to my first bottle show in Williamstown, N.J. I was floored by what was for sale and what I saw that day. It was there that I handled for the first time a real “booz” bottle. I remembered how expensive that bottle was, and it took me almost 40 years to find and buy one for my collection.
A few years later, in 1984, I graduated from college and moved to South Florida to work in my dad’s business. The bottle bug took a break for a while, and I eventually settled down. I moved to Jupiter, Florida. I was able to display my collection again and started to collect local Florida bottles. I started to attend Florida bottle shows around the state. In 2000, I met my future wife Rose and in 2004 I became a bottle dealer.
I had so much interest in bottle collecting that I decided to give something back to the hobby by writing the first of my two books. It was titled, “Treasures in The Sun,” a book about all the early soda bottles from Key West, Florida. A few years later, I decided to write a second book closer to home, “Soda Bottles from West Palm Beach to Miami.” It was sometime after that when I first met David Kyle Rakes. We both had an interest in collecting early Savannah, Georgia soda bottles. I bought one of his first books, Early Georgia Sodas.” I found that David and I had much of the same passion in bottle collecting and writing. David soon became a regular at most of the bottle shows I set up at so much we became friends.
In terms of writing, we turned out to be almost the opposite. David took the time and great patience to research all the bottle proprietors while I simply wrote my Key West book based on what I handled, dug or collected. I tried many times to call the Key West Historical Society to do research, but no one would ever call me back. With my second book, I fared much better being closer to home and I felt my writing was gaining some momentum of its own.
David requested some information on D.T. Sweeny from Key West and I was happy to help him with his current book. His passion for researching Florida bottles has rekindled my interest in collecting early Florida bottles. I am forever grateful to have met a great person, David Kyle Rakes