Some people have collections.
Larry Bard of Manor might better described as someone with a collection of collections.
From milk bottles and coffee tins to Bugs Bunny and ‘ALF’ memorabilia, Bard and his wife, Verdine, have filled their home — and a separate building, and basically just about any available space — with items from his various collections.
It all started with a discarded soda bottle.
“When I bought this property in 1968 and started working on it, I found a bunch of discarded soda bottles sitting along the foundation,” Bard said. “A neighbor who was an old-time bottle collector noticed them.”
The neighbor recognized the bottles as having originated in Jeannette. Shortly after that, Bard was digging all around the area looking for more items to add to his collection.
“The old drive-in theaters were a great place to look around,” he said.
As his collection grew, Bard joined the Laurel Valley Bottle Club, a regional group of collectors. He started attending bottle shows.
Today, Bard’s basement — with a sign outside, “The Bottle Shelf” — is a mind-boggling wall-to-wall collection featuring thousands of bottles in all sizes, shapes and colors.
“See this one?” he said, picking up a glass bottle with a dark purple shade in the glass. “They mixed (manganese) into the glass and then used ultraviolet light to turn it this color.”
Bard’s milk-bottle collection is a history lesson in local dairy farming. While most bottles look the same at first glance, a closer inspection reveals the individual dairies where they were filled, from small farms all over the region.
Bard estimated his collection was 50% purchased and 50% found.
“Me and my son spent about two-and-a-half years digging at a dump in Penn Township, and we still didn’t get it all out of there,” he said.
A separate building on the property has rooms dedicated to oil-industry memorabilia, Shriner hats, old-style Polaroid cameras, ashtrays and even a room dedicated to all things Cher, with album covers and magazines mounted on the wall in chronological order.
A significant portion of Bard’s collection came from items he discovered during his commute to and from Torrance Hospital.
“I used to stop by an ice cream place called the Pink Cow in Blairsville,” he said. “One day, I saw that their light-up sign, the big ice-cream cone, was just sitting in the grass,” he said.
Bard snatched it up for $25, and now it helps illuminate what he calls his “museum.”
“This is the fun part of it, getting to show all these things to people,” he said. “I can probably tell you a story about everything I’ve got.”
