PSBCA National Convention

2025 PSBCA National Convention

Tulsa, OK June, 2025

James Campiglia, was the main speaker for the 2025 PSBCA annual meeting in Tulsa. He gave a great presentation on his purchase of the John Kilcherman collection. Quite a story, about 10,000 bottles and a significant price paid for the transaction. He partnered with Steve Wells and Chris Weide. This surely broke the record for the biggest collection to ever change hands. Ask any of the three guys and they will give the amazing details. Check out the full Kilcherman story below written by James.

James Campiglia sharing pictures of the John Kilcherman collection and talking about this crazy journey on purchasing this huge collection

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2025 PSBCA Bottle Auction Sales

Purchasing the John Kilcherman Collection

By James Campiglia

The purchase of the massive John Kilcherman acl soda bottle collection began on YouTube. My friend and ACL bottle partner, Steve Wells, watched an online video of the collection and brought it to my attention. Eventually, I called Kilcherman and asked him if he would consider selling. He came up with a figure of $200,000 for the roughly 12,000 bottles he claimed to have with 10,000 being different.

During the Tulsa Show in 2023, we got together with David Meinz who had already seen and appraised the entire collection some time earlier. He showed us a lot of pictures he had taken and gave us his opinion of the situation. This was a great help as we were new to serious ACL collecting, although as a teen I was a founding member of the PSBCA. However, up to that point, I was focused more on antique bottles.

In late July, 2023, we went up to Kilcherman’s place in Northern Michigan. We spent the entire day looking around and tried to negotiate a reasonable price, but the 93 year old Kilcherman was very hard to deal with, and we wound up going home without being allowed to purchase a single bottle! We pretty much assumed at that point, that the deal was too hard to make and we put it on the back burner.

In the spring of 2025, I called Kilcherman just to check in and see if anything had changed. To my surprise, he quoted a new figure of $150,000. That made the deal much more interesting. I did repeatedly ask if all the bottles were still there that we saw previously. I asked if he had sold anything out of the collection. He swore up and down that everything was exactly as it was. Based on that, we made our second trip up to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with the intent to actually buy the collection. This occurred in May of 2025.

We realized our new 16 foot trailer would only hold about 4500 bottles due to weight limitations. We decided that a second trip up there was something we wanted to avoid for several reasons. One, is that we didn’t have anywhere to put 7500 more bottles! Also, we didn’t want to have to deal with so many low-end bottles. We contacted the owner of the world’s largest ACL bottle collection, Chris Weide, and made a deal that we would pick out about 4500 bottles and everything that remained would go to Chris. This saved us time and money and allowed Chris to grow his collection by over 1000 bottles! He collects all variants of all bottles and this deal worked out great for all of us.

The big downer was that at least two of the best bottles were missing: The Chevy Club squat with the car instead of the horse, and the TP Indian squat. He swore he didn’t sell them, but the fact is that they are missing.

This massive undertaking took a solid three and a half days to pack into the 450 new Uline boxes were ordered for this task. We also hired a 19 year old to help and he was indispensable for all of us. Without him, we would have needed two more days!

We decided to keep the best bottles and hold several big drafts to build our collections. Building a great collection was our main motivation for undertaking this project. We have separated all the bottles, but have not drafted them yet. That event will occur later in the year, and we will write more about that in the future.