Their quest for artifacts and collectibles has taken them to the bottom of the ocean and the dustiest corners of the nation.
Diving In
Tom Grace’s passion for creatures of the sea began with a love of snorkeling for abalone at 13. The shellfish delicacy fetches about $100 per pound, but as a teen growing up near Berkeley, Calif., Grace gave away his catch of the day to friends and family. Ironically, Grace, now 60, never cared much for seafood himself. From an early age he delighted in the ripples of color, delicate curvature and exquisite detail of the shells left behind.
“I just fell in love with diving,” he says. “All this was new and exciting and a little scary, too.” In the years since, Grace has encountered sharks and other creatures in the watery depths. Once, a sea turtle that rivaled Grace in size slammed into him while he was examining an underwater cave, pinning him on his belly until it swam away. “I’ve logged, literally, thousands of hours underwater,” Grace says. “Sometimes you see things that make you run through your air a little faster.” But Grace’s parents never worried for their son’s safety. “Well, what are you going to bring back?” they would ask.
In the basement of his Landis Store home, Grace, now a world authority on abalones, has methodically organized 35,000 specimens in an area that resembles a natural history museum’s archives. In drawer after drawer, he stows his treasures — everything from the humble mussel to a vast cache including every known species of abalone — painstakingly catalogued with the Latin name and other important details in an exhaustive log and cross-referenced in a card catalog by family group.
Grace is downright giddy as he tells the stories behind his labor of love. A glistening tiger cowry, passed down from grandmother Cordelia when he was 5, was the real start of his treasury. One drawer holds dozens of tree snails, now illegal to collect because the species is teetering on the brink of extinction. They were once in the private collection of Archie Jones, a renowned scientist who worked with the government in the 1930s and 1940s. There are 10-inch-long abalones with gleaming mother of pearl undersides and piles of shells so small each one could balance on the tip of your finger. Everything in the massive archive was found, bought or traded for, but never up for sale. “I never look at it economically,” Grace says. “That takes away the fun.”
Grace, who holds a Master’s degree in marine biology and works in environmental engineering, spends his free time curating exhibits for the Academy of Science’s Philadelphia shell show and penning articles for scientific journals. For years, vacations meant Grace and a group of like-minded friends chartering diving expeditions to the Bahamas, California and western Mexico, scouring the sea all night and sleeping away the day. On one of those treks he proposed to his wife Linda on the deck of the ship. They now have a son, Todd, who’s 17. Grace pulls out a photo of Todd in a familiar shell collector’s pose, stooping over in the surf. But the boy has no desire to take over his father’s mammoth collection, Grace says, and he’s hopeful that a museum will show an interest. After all, the cataloguing work has been done. All that’s left to do is enjoy.
A Sign of Good Taste
When officials at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta have a question about the soft drink’s history, they call the experts at their historic Reading home. Bill Bateman and Randy Schaeffer boast the largest private collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia in the world, a premiere and priceless archive that includes some antiques so rare, like an apothecary scale kept under glass and lamps shaped like the legendary bottles, only a handful are known to exist.
The collection began quite innocently in the 1970s, when the partners were amassing beer trays to decorate the Lehigh Tavern, where Bateman was part-owner, and a 20-year-old Coca-Cola tray caught their eye at a Kempton auction. Today posters, calendars and paper advertisements in tasteful frames line the walls of every room, while cardboard cut-outs of forgotten film stars populate a hall. Shelves are lined with tchotchkes — Buddy Lee dolls and other promotional tie-ins, including a child’s oven and a toaster that emblazoned the beverage’s name right onto a slice of bread. The duo is constantly on the hunt for the rare, unique, or missing piece to add to their trove. They once walked into a shop to ask for directions and walked out with a Coca-Cola thermometer after talking the owner into selling the piece of Americana.
Touring the house is a walk through history. The main stairwell is adorned with Coca-Cola trays and ads — some so old they still bill the drink as “the ideal brain tonic” from the days when it was used to treat headaches. Drawers are heaped with pencils and other promotional trinkets, but Bateman and Schaeffer keep their most prized and peculiar possessions in a special case: bottle openers, razor blades etched with the company name, watch fobs and gold-plated and diamond-encrusted pendants reserved for the company’s best clients. “We’ve done very well if we can add something to this case,” Bateman says. In all, they figure there are a staggering 50,000 pieces of Coca-Cola memorabilia or more among their treasures, including original handwritten letters from the inventor and 24’ billboards, original and unhung, but too large to display in their home.
When Bateman, 71, and Schaeffer, 63, began collecting, precious little was known about some of the oldest pieces; nearly every find was a puzzle. One illustration led the pair on a 10-year hunt to discover where the unmarked 1909 image fit into the company’s extensive advertising history. The search finally ended at the U.S. Copyright Office, where they scoured disorganized 3x5 card indexes to find which ancient leather volume held the key. After years of searching they found the scrawled description. “At this point chills are running up our spine, literally,” Schaeffer said. Coca-Cola’s historians have reveled in the pair’s knowledge, but fellow collectors haven’t always been as pleased. “People were angry with us,” Bateman said, when their decade-long discovery decreased the market value of a piece some thought was 5-16 years older. “We didn’t just collect this stuff. We figured it out.” The market is known to have fakes, but “you can’t get it past these two,” says Bill's son, Tom Bateman.
In the early days, collecting was a way to socialize with like-minded individuals, to make friends across the country on a scavenger hunt for the next piece. Since then, they’ve written the book on Coca-Cola collecting — several volumes based on their vast collection. Their knowledge has landed them on the witness stand in copyright infringement cases and has been recorded for an exhibit at the Coca-Cola museum.
BY KRISTIN BAVER | PHOTOS BY HEIDI REUTER
