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From Tin to Sterling:
Oil Can Collection Offers Variety
By Leslie C. McDaniel, with submitted photos
When show season arrives, Guy Gerberich's bags are always packed and ready. But his suitcases aren't loaded down with clean socks and extra shirts: instead, his vintage valises carry as many as 600 antique oil cans.
Guy, who lives in Jonestown, Pa., puts old suitcases to work when he hits the road. He finds the oil cans much easier to haul than his original collection.
"I always took hit-and-miss engines to shows," he says. "But about 15 years ago, I took along a pegboard I had with cans on it, and it fit right into an old suitcase."
"After a while, I noticed that nobody was looking at the engines," he says. "They were all looking in the suitcase at the oil cans. I told my wife, 'That's it: I'm going to go to the flea market and buy oil cans.'"
When he started collecting oil cans, he says, it was almost as a sideline to his first love.
"I still have hit-and-miss engines in my head," he says, "but it got to the point where it was too much work to haul them around."
Fifteen years later, though, he ranks as a serious collector.
"I have everything from a sterling silver Tiffany can, to an old handmade tin can," he says. "I never knew there were so many different ones."
Guy's collection provides a footnote to the industrial age. Many engines, machines, industries and even guns had their own unique oil cans.