Visionaries of the PSBCA

Founders from the past

The Museum of Beverage Containers & Advertising, 1055 Ridgecrest Drive, Goodlettsville, Tennessee, operated by Paul Bates and his son Tom opened on April 3, 1987 and closed in 2007. The museum attracted visitors from all over the country and was featured in Smithsonian Magazine. Originally the soda and beer can collection of Paul and Tom Bates was located in a mobile home outside their residence in Nashville, Tennessee. This was during the early 1980s and many of us from all over the country would go to the Bates home to see the incredible collection they had assembled. This was indeed the "Mecca" of the ACL hobby back then. Eventually they moved their quite expanded collection to new facilities as part of the same building where Paul Bates' "Bonded Filter Company" manufacturing facility was located in Goodlettsville. This became The Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising. The museum famously housed their personal collection of over 400,000 vintage soda and beer cans and bottles, signs, and pieces of memorabilia.  

Starting in 1985, every year those of us in the hobby would participate in the “ANNUAL SODA BOTTLE EXCHANGE EXTRAVAGANZA” by first attending the original Nashville Bottle Show which was held at that time at the fairgrounds in Nashville, Tennessee. Then we would head out to the museum. We had an incredible time with a group of usually about 25 people or more coming from all across the country. And we had a unique "ACL only" bottle show there at the museum as well.  We usually had about 10 dealers with 10 to 15 tables of nothing but ACL sodas. This was unique and has never been specifically duplicated again, it was indeed a "supermarket of painted label sodas." Of course many bottles were in the $1-$5 range with an expensive bottle being $20. Every year, using his Kodak Carousel slide projector, David Meinz would show a presentation of newly discovered ACL bottles from the last year. The “ooh’s and ahh’s" every time a newly discovered soda bottle image showed up on the slide screen made it sound like it was some kind of stag party! Those, indeed, were the "good old days!”