Robby Raccoon
Trash Digger
The local bottle expert I think was calling these the "hood" to the milk-bottles so that dirt wouldn't get onto the cap and thus, when opened, the milk, but here you go: I brought back on my dig the day before my 19th birthday about 38 of God only knows how many of the caps I dug out of a hill-side next to an old school-turned-Police-Station. Sanitary Dairy (this bottle is an earlier one) was one of our largest dairies here in Muskegon from the '20s to the '60s, which is when I believe it changed its name as it combined with Farr View Dairy. Talking to the expert, he believes these to be 1940s-1950s-- about 1-2 decades older than I'd have thought, but it makes sense as on previous digs (I'd noticed these before scattered in leaf-litter covering the hillside, but I'd ignored them in thinking them as true garbage) I'd dug 1940s-1950s vials and medicine bottles from there. That day I also dug part of a Sanitary Dairy bottle. Of all the adults I had talked to on what they used as a milk-container in schools, by the 1960s they'd all seemed to have switched to cartons-- thus helping me believe that these are pre-1960s. Only a matter of meters from the hill, I'd once dug my best local milk bottle-- and it is a 1920s Twin City Dairy bottle. Most of these look like they had a straw impaled through them, so perhaps these were as Dacro caps and not really "hoods" covering a cap?One stack had 5 unimpaled in it, but they were so heavily corroded that they were almost unsalvageable. Yet a stack of two had one still very good one-- with its original coating on it, even? I spent about an hour gently scrubbing them all up. Most say, SANITARY DAIRY CO. / PASTEURIZED / [shield design] / HOMOGENIZED / SOFT-CURD / VITAMIN MILK / [almost totally-unintelligible small, weakly-embossed text] / MUSKEGON, MICHIGAN.I have one for VITA-VIM (I think that it's a bit older) but cannot guarantee that it is Sanitary Dairy Co. I have one Chocolate Milk as well.In the creek I spotted a little tinge of orange in the glassy and rippling waters rushing over deep mud and bricks/stones tossed in decades ago (it turns up 1940s-1960s bottles and marbles.) It was a marble, so I reached my mini-shovel out to get it. Also on the creek-bank was a blue swirled marble. Then, returning from poking around the creek, I retrieved a brick I had left behind before to dry (It had been in the creek but is now rather light.) Also, on the hillside I found partially lodged in a tree a Laclede Wallac fire-brick. I got it out after working at it a bit.
See the other words beneath VITAMIN MILK but above my town and state?
Vita-Vim had lots of embossing above and below it, but it's worn out and weakly done.^
Most, as you can see, are missing the golden coating on their exteriors. The golden ones were thankfully a bit better-protected.
Seems to be pre-1950s. ^ And if you're wondering why I would keep the dark brick that's almost impossible to read and is not pictured (click on "Left Behind" hyper-link,) then here ya' go: Great for staging.
^ Vintage-antique firing cannon for my toy soldier collection, birthday gift from mom (birthday was yesterday.) Displayed on the old brick turned upside down as it looks like (at the correct angles) a muddy and war-torn battle-field full of craters from heavy shelling.
An edit: Looking closer at one cap without a hole poked through, it said "VITAMIN-D MILK" and not just "VITAMIN MILK." The "D" was centered where the straw was supposed to puncture. I researched Vitamin-D milk to see if it would help narrow down the range, but America began fortifying milk and labeling it as Vitamin-D milk back in the '30s.
