​FOREWORD
 
I started collecting bottles 55 years ago when I was in junior high school. Some of my classmates and I found some old trash dumps and dug up unusual bottles. The sites were not old enough to hold Texas blob top bottles, but we did find some Hutchinson-type sodas from local towns. My favorite bottle-digging story started in 1978 and ended 45 years later in 2023. I was digging in my hometown of Shiner, Texas with my friend Scott. He dug up a milk glass Hartwig Kantorowicz bitters bottle which we valued highly at that time. Then I dug a Houston Texas amber Coca-Cola bottle which we knew was rare. In those days information about bottles was not easy to find but I subscribed to OLD BOTTLE MAGAZINE to learn what I could. Within a week I found a collector in Georgia with an ad in the magazine who was looking for an amber Houston Coke bottle and I sold him the bottle for $200. Since I didn’t collect Coke bottles. I used that money to buy a Drake’s Cabin and a Roback’s Barrel for my bitters collection. As time passed it turned out the Houston amber Coke is one of the rarest Coca-Cola bottles, with only about 5 intact examples known to exist. I came to regret selling the best bottle I ever dug and told the story many times. Then 40 years later I was able to track down the collector who bought the bottle and he still had it, but didn’t want to sell it. Another five years passed and then one day in 2023 I received a phone call from Georgia. “Jay, I’m thinking about selling my bottle collection and I still have that amber Houston Coke bottle I bought from you in 1978.” That weekend my wife and I drove 14 hours from Texas to Georgia to retrieve my long-lost bottle and return it to the town where it was originally dug, where it now resides in my collection. I didn’t start collecting Texas blob top sodas until 2018 when I purchased a collection that included seven of them. Since then, I have put together a collection of 27 Texas blob-top soda bottles and five blob-top beers. My favorite is the F. A. Conant green iron pontil soda from Galveston which recently won first place in the BEST TEXAS SODA BOTTLE COMPETITION at the 2024 FOHBC National Bottle Show in Houston. I’m honored to be able to include my little story in this book, EARLY SODAS OF TEXAS. David Rakes and Brandon DeWolfe have done a fantastic job researching the history of the early Texas bottlers and this book will be a fine historical document to carry this information into the future
 
 Jay Kasper, Shiner, Texas