Collecting's been around forever, though the items may have changed through the years. Stamps, matchbooks (when people smoked), baseball cards, marbles, POGS (1990s throwback)...

... but if you had to define a collecting mania that defined the 1970s it would have to be:

Beer cans.

The rules were: they had to be found as discarded trash. The condition was important. Full collections of variants and one-offs, like a Budweiser can that used black striping instead of red striping. You could showcase cans of discontinued or small runs from defunct companies. (The 1970s was long before anyone thought of the 'microbrewery' mentality. Everything was major corporate monolithic entities.)

A REAL rare can would be what they would call a 'cone-top', meaning it was canned in the 1940s or so -something very hard to find along a roadside ditch or railroad track or open field.

Another rule: cans got valued and traded, but in terms of how many average-value cans' worth, not money. In other words, how many cans would some other kid trade for to get that particular can. The cone-top may fetch as many as 20 regular cans, so its value was '20'. Kids would trade up or down depending on what they needed to complete a set.

Naturally it attracted every Junior and Senior High School aged kid (mostly boys) who were underage, so barred from drinking liquor. It made them 'edgy'. They could act 'sophisticated' about the product by showing a deep passion for collecting the iconic 'junk' as it were. It showed all their friends 'hey, maybe I'm too young to drink beer, but I know A LOT about beer.'

(a kid's bedroom wall from the 1970s.)

Like most fads, the beer can collecting thing went away utterly after 1979 or so. Maybe through the rise of portable video games or watching videos on your VCR player, who knows?

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