Daddy

I think this photo was taken by a photographer for the Atlanta Constitution, circa 1974. I'm not sure. It certainly looks like Daddy as I remember him from my childhood before he died on June 11, 1975, when he was 53 years old. Daddy was in the Atlanta Constitution in 1972 when he dug up several pre-Civil War jugs in a single 6' hole in a dump site before someone built a highrise building on that spot. That was a different picture, but it helped raise awareness of bottle-diggers in general.

Daddy was passionate about bottles and bottle-digging. I have discovered in my research that bottle-digging doesn't really mean digging in dumps -- mostly it means digging up old outhouse sites. Outhouses were the dumps for people in the boonies and small towns before the 20th century.

Bottle-digging was Daddy's fall and winter hobby. Daylilies and gardening were his spring and summer hobbies. He used to come home covered in mud, grinning from under the dirt, sporting new scratches and wounds and carrying dirty bottles. He would tell us wild stories to explain the scratches -- saber-toothed tigers or Indians were usually the causes of his wounds in his stories; the bottles were always the booty.

I have hardly any bottles left. But this photo tells quite a story, doesn't it?