Rick Sinner, a retired Boulder High teacher, has an extensive collection of thousands of old advertising items from Boulder County businesses.
Old bottles like this one from the Crystal Springs Brewing & Ice Co. offer a glimpse into Boulder's business history.
Stonewear jugs usually held whiskey but also water, vinegar, molasses or other liquids.
Rick Sinner’s collection of advertising is an incredible
time capsule of Boulder business history.
Being an amateur collector of ‘50s pottery and various
“collectibles” myself (some friends describe it as slightly fanatical), Sinner’s
devotion to collecting and the in-depth research he puts in to verify business
names and owners is remarkable.
I’ve wanted to visit Sinner’s home since we met while planning
for Boulder’s Sesquicentennial, when he provided the 150 committee with a
well-researched list of Boulder companies still in business and at least 50
years old.
That list was impressive, but after a few hours looking at his
collection – some 4,000 items indexed and identified, with another 1,000 or so
awaiting his database, I feel like I just toured the Boulder Smithsonian.
In a basement collection room, items are painstakingly
displayed in glass-enclosed cases, with an eye to detail of a museum curator. Old
whisky, beer and drug bottles line the shelves, adjoining calendars, stoneware
jugs that held liquor, vinegar, molasses and water, buttons, signs, medals,
spoons, match covers, shoehorns, trays, fraternal lodge ribbons and photos.
Antique advertising plates hang on one wall, with scenes of
Boulder County’s original Victorian courthouse, built in 1882, and early CU
buildings. Most were hand-painted in Austria and Germany as advertising giveaways,
usually with the business name on the back.
“I don’t collect anything that doesn’t have a business name
on it,” Sinner says, although I think he does. A date, of course, is really
good. A find sends him to Carnegie Library on Pine Street where he sorts
through city directories and newspaper archives on microfiche.
Picking up item after item, he reads off business names and I
jot down notes as fast as I can. “You’ll never get them all,” he jokes. He’s
right.
He’s framed beautiful Victorian-style art illustrations
and hung them around his home. A calendar from Maxwell and Greenman’s University
Book and Drug Store at Broadway (then 12th Street) and Pearl. A calendar with a Remington Western
scene from Boulder Lumber Co. Two huge
calendars are from the Berkhimer Insurance Agency, each with art of Will Rogers
and the simple slogan “Dependable.” A calendar for the Alba Dairy, 2718 Pine
St., has art by Charlotte Becker, an illustrator who painted for calendars,
children’s books and magazines.
Sinner likes his Christmas Santa operating a hot air balloon on a calendar for The
Department Store, 1223 Pearl St.
I asked to see something he’s really loves, and he takes down
a colorful “corner sign,” which would attach to the corner of a building, for
Boulder’s Crystal Springs Brewing & Ice Co. It’s totally cool.
Sinner, 58, is retired after teaching pottery and
photography for 31 years at Boulder High, and is a 1969 grad of the school
himself.
One year, the city started digging near the school for flood
plain work along Arapaho, and unearthed the city’s original 1880s dump. Things
like this send bottle collectors into a tizzy, and Sinner was no exception. He
borrowed the school’s photography lights for night digging, and occasionally
would send students out to check up on other collectors.
Holding up a desirable cobalt blue bottle, with raised date
of 1887-1888, he estimates he has about 100 items from that site that either he
or others found. Other discoveries took place when the city built both
libraries along the creek. Sinner’s also the president of the Antique Bottle
Collectors of Colorado.
Sinner says one woman collector swooned after seeing he had
a silver spoon celebrating the “Texas Colo.” Chautauqua opening on July 4, 1898 in Boulder. I enjoyed his
Bing Crosby Ice Cream box, from Valley Farm Diary in Longmont, and his antique
map table with drawers full of ledgers, mine stock certificates and old
letterheads and ledgers. There’s a story behind each one.
His collection of postcards shows area landmarks and
historic buildings like the Masonic Temple Building that housed the Temple Drug
Co. He showed me razors and razor
straps from the Western States Cutlery Mfg. Co. in Boulder.
This month, you’re in luck. A display at the Carnegie
Library through October commemorates Gold Hill’s 150th, the same as
Boulder’s, and two cases of items, including brochures and photos from the Blue
Bird Lodge (next to the Gold Inn Hill), are from Sinner’s collection.
You also should do a little of your own history digging on
Boulder’s Sesquicentennial site at www.boulder150.com.
Photos from Sinner’s collection are next to the 50-year business list under
Boulder History. I like the yellow “Worms That Squirm” can from the Bios
Earthworm Hatchery in Boulder. I’m watching for one of those at my next yard
sale.
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