If anyone knows about Coca-Cola, it’s Dick McChesney. The 88-year-old has spent most of his life collecting anything with the company logo on it because, to McChesney, Coca-Cola is.
“It’s America. I think it’s growing. I took my bike to the gas station. It was five cents. I had a Coke all to myself,” McChesney said. “I was intrigued by the signs. I was intrigued by the bottle. The bottle was like a piece of magic for me.”
For 75 years, Coca-Cola memorabilia has added a special touch to the life of the MINNEAPOLIS man.
McChesney’s 75-year quest for the real thing began when he was just 13 and the Coca-Cola delivery service next door hired him to sort bottles.
He worked for the Home Beverage Company for 18 years, then bought from the owners and ran it for more than half a century.
“It was a natural thing. Different size Coke bottles started coming out, 10 ounces, 12 ounces. I’d display them on a shelf and put a clock next to them. I started adding to that collection.”
Over the years, McChesney amassed a large collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia, from bottles and signs to watches and syrup dispensers.
Some pieces were extremely rare, like a Coca-Cola candle holder from the early 20th century, while others were more common, like soda cans that represented different eras of popular pop.
“Coca-Cola put its name on just about everything it could. The collector categories never stop.”
“It could be big cardboard signs. It could be smaller serving trays. Every year they put out serving trays. What’s more fun than collecting all these serving trays?”
In the 1970s, McChesney founded the nation’s first Coca-Cola collectors’ club in Minnesota.
He also became a founding member of the National Coca-Cola Collectors Club, which eventually grew to have as many as 30,000 members in nearly every state, as well as branches around the world.
Dick McChesney said the attraction of Coca-Cola is that it allows collectors to reconnect with their earliest childhood memories.
“It was fun to find people who fascinated me collecting the same things I collected, just in different categories. They didn’t have as much as I did, but then we were all just starting out.”
“A kid rides his bike to the store and gets a Coke out of the machine,” McChesney said. “Now he's an adult, and he sees that same machine, and he's got to have it. It brings back some part of your childhood.”
He said a woman came to that first convention in 1975 in Atlanta looking for a clock to put in her amusement room at home.
“She ended up being a president of the club and having 75 different Coca-Cola clocks,” McChesney said. “That shows you how it catches on.”
“Coke just fascinates them,” McChesney said. “It has a rich history and probably touched their life somehow as a kid.”
He said collecting familiar red-and-white Coca-Cola items, both large and small, reflects other passions.
“It is no different than any other collection, be it coins, stamps or something else,” McChesney said. “The older, the better; the better condition, the better. We are collectors by nature, and many of us collect coins and other things.”
But in 1915, a new, soon-to-be iconic 6 1/2-ounce bottle was designed in Terre Haute, Indiana, by the Root Glass Co.
The company wanted a bottle so unique “that even a blind person would know what they were drinking,” McChesney said.
“I have a friend in Washington, D.C., who has 10,000 different Coke bottles, from the earliest to 1960, when they started painting white lettering on them,” he said.
McChesney said that the company's organization and attention to detail make collecting Coke paraphernalia both easy and interesting.
“Coke had so many rules, and change was orderly, so it is easy to date and identify items,” he said. “They could be confident in what they were buying. You have to give Coca-Cola credit for how organized they were and for the quality pieces they put out.”
McChesney said the average Coke collector “likes the big porcelain signs they can hang in their basements and small things that are unique. Early on, they all wanted trays.”
In the 1990s, Coca-Cola paid McChesney to travel to the Middle East to promote Coca-Cola memorabilia collections in places like Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
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