Collections is a series from The Show devoted to the things we acquire and treasure.
Janet Traylor’s collection of ancient apothecary and medicine bottles is kept in an old wooden ammunition box under the grand piano in her midtown Phoenix home.
Her collection came to her already completed and filled with memories. It’s a gift from her late father, with whom she collected these blue and green and clear glass containers when she was a child. KJZZ contributor Robrt Pela visited Traylor to learn more.
Full conversation
JANET TRAYLOR: So I collect because the things that I collect spark joy. It just happens to be that a lot of things sparked joy for me. So I'm not a minimalist, but I also think that we collect because it's a representation of times past, and it's intellectually interesting to see how people lived and to see the artifacts of those lives.
I ended up with this great stash of bottles by being the daughter of an inveterate collector of odd items, but at that time, this was in the early 1960s and the family entertainment for a family that had limited resources included sort of spelunking, not in caves, but in the mountains, and in particular in the abandoned mining dumps around Buena Vista.
And my dad was an outdoorsman, not only an outdoorsman, but had an old Willys Army type Jeep, and we would go high above Timberline and look at these old mining camps. But closer to home, only one block away from our house, was an abandoned dump, and this provided hours of cheap entertainment for our family.
My dad would come home from work, you know, unlace his boots and put on another pair of boots, I suppose. And my siblings, sometimes my mom, I sometimes would go and help him. We were his little pack of archeologists with our little spades. So during that time, my dad and the family collected dozens, dozens, dozens of these bottles.
And fast forward, after his death, I ended up with his collection, which is now my collection and most recently, has been housed in a wooden ammo case. People come, they see this under my piano. They say, are you waiting for the apocalypse or whatever? And I said, “No, no, no, it's my dad's bottles.”
OK, so here it is, and in here, I don't know how many bugs there are, everything in this is still wrapped from the time my father put them in here.
This is wrapped in a piece of newsprint dated Feb. 4, 1978, and inside of this, there is a bottle called fill lotta, Dr. D James Karmative Balsam. It's a skinny little bottle about 6 inches tall, and this is the first time it's seen the light of day since my dad put it in here.
Here's another one. This is an early version of milk of magnesia. This is a patent from the U.S. Patent Office, and the date on the bottom is Aug. 21, 1906. There are a lot of patent medicines, and a lot of them make kind of interesting claims.
We have a remedy for consumption. We have remedy for diarrhea, spelled the old-fashioned way, and separate from the patent medicines were things like suitors, elegant flavoring extract. Oh, that's actually a remedy. Also suitors, elegant flavoring extracts, Royal Remedy Company in Dayton, Ohio.
So these bottles all have their provenance. Here's one from Leadville, Colorado. There's one from Denver, Colorado. They're from large cities, small cities, Chicago, there's one from New Mexico. It's quite a range. They do not have paper labels. The labels were essentially molded into the bottle. So it's this raised lettering that's very tactile and actually quite beautiful.
Many of them have a nice, kind of a pearlescent look on the exterior just from being buried for many years. I think my dad kept these kinds of things because he had a fascination for ephemera. He had a fascination for how people lived. He had an aesthetic appreciation that maybe wasn't about. About museum pieces or art in the conventional sense, but he had an esthetic appreciation for these items.
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