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SEVENTIES SAMPLES

So what do you do for an article that will be in a one hundred page issue? I
thought of the autobiographical stuff...but who cares. I thought of showing
some vodkas or tequilas but then there are many who have more and better
bottles than I in those categories. And then I looked at one of my cabinets and
saw these three bottles. These are sample bottles which were never
produced for sale. So...here's the story.

Originally the MBC bottles got started in the early 1970's when a man named
Joe Kaufenberg contracted with a southern California pottery maker to do
some bottles for him in his back yard kiln. He produced miniature slot
machines and a variety of bottles for both Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada as
well as many other pieces. During the course of his life Joe had got to know
Stan Laurel's daughter Lois and thus went to her to secure the rights to do
some Laurel and Hardy bottles. There was the Laurel and Hardy in a car, two
separate bottles of each of the characters and then what was to be the best
were L & H as circus characters. You can see the Oliver Hardy Ringmaster
bottle on the right. However, since this piece was mocked up in Japan, the
price was going to be way above what all the other MBC bottles had retailed
for...namely $4.95. So the Ringmaster bottle never got beyond the mock up
stage. I don't know if a Stan Laurel mock up was ever made.

Later on in the decade, the man who provided the liquor for the World
Chili Championship thought it would be good to have something to give
all the participants...as well as sell on the retail market. So back to
Japan for another mock up and on the left you can see the result. Again
this was a misfire and it proved impossible to get the bottle produced,
approved by the U.S. government for filling, filled and ready in time for
the 1978 Championship. If this had gone into production it would have
had either an MBC or Lionstone label. By
the time the 1979 Championship was
announced the idea was out of favour and
another good ceramic miniature didn't
make it beyond the mock up stage.

A year after that the largest liquor store in
northern Nevada was selling so many
regular glass miniatures and ceramics from
Ski Country, McCormick, Grenadier, etc.
that the owner wanted to get in on the
action. The logo of Dart Liquors was a happy little man counting all the
money he'd saved by shopping at Dart. Thousands of customers drove
from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California to take advantage of
their prices. The logo of the happy little man was dutifully sculpted by an
artist in Seto, Japan, (a suburb of Nagoya where 60,000 of the 100,000
inhabitants worked in the porcelain business) and eventually presented
to the owner of Dart. He loved the bottle...he just didn't want to pay for it.
And, the third of our seventies samples never got to the production
stage. If it had it would have been a Grenadier bottle.

This same story may be told about samples from Ski Country, McCormick and others. Hey, how
about the Playboy Bunny...a sample of that even exists as a miniature bottle.
David Spaid

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