Remember these COKE Caps

[steve B]

Yep, one of the first sports things I tried collecting. We went to a cookout and being 4 I was fascinated by bottlecaps with pictures inside. I rounded up a couple pockets full before mom found out and refused to let me bring home "dirty old bottlecaps".

I have a pretty good collection of them now

Steve B

[alanu]

Love these caps. I only have a few, really like the CFL one's that have the pictures on the outside of the caps.

[okmaybent@aol.com]

They also did Football. If you got them all you got a football. I got all but about 30 of them. So I DREW those in and my mom and dad drove me somewhere in CT to a redemption place. At first they werent going to give me the football because I didnt have all the caps. But my mom convinced them that it was too much to ask for a 7 year old and told them how hard I had tried.

I got the YA Tittle football and this will come as no surprise to this bunch but I still have the football...although its far from mint.

One of the ways I got more caps is that our church had a Coke machine. People would buy a Coke and then snap off the cap on the little bottle opener on the machine. The cap would drop down into a hole. I tied a magnet to a string and then I hung around after church (my parents were Sunday school teachers). I stuck the string down the hole and pulled up the caps one by one.

Dont get me started with what I did in 1975 when Hostess had the cards on the bottom of boxes.

[mckinneyj]

I think it was '67 - needed 5 complete sets of the football caps to redeem for a football at the local coke distributor. We used to ride around on our bikes and visit all the local gas stations that had coke machines out front. We tied magnets on the end of strings and would dip them down into the bucket under the recessed bottle opener and retrieve the spent caps - station owners didn't care. Several of us completed the 5 sets and got footballs within a few weeks that fall...

[David W]

I also would either use the magnet on a string. But the most efficient way to get bottle caps was just to ask the janitor who restocked the machine at our school to save them. he'd dump them in a box for us kids, and we'd stuff our pockets at school the next day.

We used to collect all caps, and trade them, not just sports related one.

[John V]

I recall the pain of finding a cap with a significant bend caused by the bottle opener. Much less appealing the ones that would lay flat.

[1966CUDA]

A few I picked up a while ago....which brands are the tuffer ones to obtain??

-Claude

[grainsley]

For spending money for cards when I was a kid I used to pick up pop bottles from ditches and cash them in at the local store in South Vancouver. The owners got to know me quite well,and I also shovelled snow from the front of their store for fifty cents. They knew I was going to buy cards or Sgt. Fury comics in their store right after they paid me. Smart. They also gave me the key to their pop machine to get the CFL caps in 1965. The pop machine was a slider, so if you were buying a Coke or a Sprite, you could see who was on the cap, and with careful manipulation of the botles in the sliders, you could always get the one you wanted. I know I put together at least four sets (230 in a set) and still have a couple of large bags of leftovers........yeah, I'm a packrat. Love those caps though....thanks for bringing back the memories!

Grant