Bottle Diving for Wisconsin Sodas by Jim Koutsoures
A day was finally agreed on. It was no secret that Lake Mendota had given up Matthews gravitating stopper bottles in the past. Steve Libbey already owned the Milwaukee Spiral spring stopper, an Otto Zwietusch, but it was missing the spring. The J.A. Lindestrom bottling works was also a source for the spiral spring stopper as well. The bottling works was located on the shore at one time (1859-1889) and they discarded their broken glass in the lake. Wisconsin divers had already dived this site, so we were there to see if they missed something.
SPLASH; Me, Bob and Steve drop in. I find lots of broken glass and piles of 1870's gravitating bottles scattered over a ¼ mile stretch. I like old glass, even broken, so I started to systematically load up my goody bag with cracked, chipped and broken bottles.
The pile I was working on had at least 18 bottles; they were lying on a tree branch. I kept carefully scraping, hoping to find the glass stoppers, but I found none. (As it would turn out, a year later Bob Libbey would find a couple of piles of just glass stoppers numbering more than one hundred. He dropped a goodie bag full of them and it's still there.) I finished the pile and pulled out the branch and put my hand in the depression, scratching around and I finger tipped an embossed glass..... as I walked my hand down the bottle I knew right away it was different and the size felt larger. Then I gently touched the blob, I knew instinctively it was a spiral stopper bottle!
Now for the excavation part, nice and slow. I tunneled the sides away and put my hand under the bottle and very slowly worked it out of its grave. I used my other hand to make sure the blob top stayed with me and then I felt the missing part of the blob, ½ of it, and as I explored it some more I discovered the spring was still in it!! I make it a priority not to lose the spring as it felt loose, and so I fill up my BC and head up. If you were on shore you would have heard my yell of YES as the sunlight brought out the aqua blue back to its gem status. Bob and Steve recovered examples of the same bottle, most with the blob top missing, or just shards. On shore I carefully removed the rubber washer and slipped the brass spiral spring out (in two parts as it was broken). I handed the spring over to Steve and told him he now has a spring for his Zwietusch. (He did get it professionally welded and it works great.)
At Home now lays a pile of broken Madison Matthew gravitating stopper bottles in my outside bottle garden. As for the J.A. Lindestrom spiral spring stopper it resides next to my office desk with a nice photo of Bob and me that I'll treasure forever.
