Tommy Mitchiner inducted into the FOHBC Honor Roll
03 April 2016
The FOHBC takes great pleasure in confirming that the late Thomas William “Tommy” Mitchiner, of Gordon, Georgia has been inducted into the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors Honor Roll.
The antique bottle collecting hobby for Tommy Mitchiner, of Gordon, Georgia, started in 1966 following a newspaper article about people digging in Savannah, Georgia and finding lots of John Ryan sodas and other bottles. Between that year and 2013 when he passed away, Mitchiner had become Georgia’s most famous bottle collector and had amassed a huge collection of John Ryan sodas, many in rare colors, that was never duplicated. He became known as “the King of John Ryan Soda Collectors.” In addition, he conducted lots of research in the days before the Internet and became well known throughout the Southeast as an authority not only on Savannah and many Georgia bottles, but hand-painted marbles and figural smoking pipes, most of which he dug from hundreds of privies in the coastal city. He willingly shared that hard-earned knowledge with any collector who asked. Mitchiner also had become an expert in cleaning dug bottles and many a collection owes its brilliance to that expertise. privately published an entertaining little book, Trials and Trails of a Bottle Collector.
Read More: I was a very close friend of Tommy Mitchiner
Read “The Tommy Mitchiner Story“
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