Bottled Treasure : Collector strikes it rich in dumps, outhouses of ghost towns. His book gives prices for such gems as Moxie Nerve Food containers.

When Michael Polak hits the bottle, it’s usually with a metal rod. Polak has a collection of some 2,000 old bottles, and he got a great many of them by digging around ghost towns. He uses a rod shaped like a sprinkler key to poke around beneath the ground, and when he hears a suitable clunk, he starts digging.

“When I’m on a dig I always wonder if I’ll find a body out there or something,” Polak said of his excavation excursions. “I’ve dug up boots, spurs, old coffeepots, canteens, frying pans, spittoons, a 1900 Liberty Head nickel, interesting stuff.”

Interesting, but secondary to his main interest. Twenty years ago a work-mate returned from a desert trip with similar souvenirs, as well as a couple of old whiskey and medicine bottles that caught Polak’s eye. He trundled his family (he has since divorced, and his children are grown) off to the deserts of Nevada, where they unearthed some glassy gems of their own.

“And that was it. I’ve been hooked ever since,” said the Cerritos resident.

His favorite places to go looking are still in the rustic, scenic ghost towns of Nevada, where he finds the pickings extremely good at the sites of old dumps and outhouses. (You can bet we’re going to ask him more about the latter.) He also maintains that old bottles can often be dug up closer to home, that redevelopment in towns such as Santa Ana, Anaheim and Whittier makes them fertile fields.

Polak added, “There have been some great bottle digs after earthquakes. In fact, some of the bottle clubs in L.A. have already gone to the construction companies (doing the rebuilding) and asked for permission.”

Bottle clubs? Like seemingly every other item and idea in this country’s history, a subculture has risen around bottle collecting, to the degree that there are more than 700 bottle-collecting clubs in the United States, 107 of them in California alone. The source of this information is Polak’s just-published “Bottles, Identification and Price Guide” from Avon Books.

He does a lot of writing in his job doing finances and contracts with an aerospace firm. It’s not the most satisfying of writing, though, and he enrolled in a writers workshop at Orange Coast College a few years ago.

“They said, ‘Write what you know about,’ so I sent an article on bottle collecting to an antiques magazine,” he said. “They ran it, and then I got a call on my message machine from an editor at Avon Books, asking if I’d be interested in writing a book.”

That’s not a bad track record: Take a writing class in ’92 and get a book published in ’94. Polak is even doing book signings. There will be three in Orange County: Sunday at Waldenbooks in the Mall of Orange; March 26 at Brentano’s South Coast Plaza and March 27 at Waldenbooks at MainPlace/Santa Ana. All of the signings will be from 1 to 3 p.m.

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Wonder how bottles were made in the First Century B.C.? Want to know where to dig for bottles? Wonder what that unearthed lime-green Moxie Nerve Food bottle from 1888 is worth, or that 1897 bottle of Dr. Liebig’s German Invigorator? It’s all in Polak’s 493-page book. (Those bottles, should you happen across them, go for $125 to $175 and $50 to $100, respectively.)

He’s learned a lot of things about bottles in his 20 years of collecting. For example, “You see the cowboy movies where they smash guys in the head with a bottle that breaks? You’d break a million heads before you’d break (a real) bottle,” he said, handing over an old Busch beer bottle that hefted like cast iron. “I’ve dropped these bottles off a table onto a concrete floor and they don’t break.”

Western settlers didn’t necessarily need to have the bottles broken over their heads to get the same effect. Polak brought out some medicine bottles he’d dug up in Nevada, stoppered and still containing some of their original ingredients. These, according to the labels, were concoctions such as “Sweet Spirit of Nitrate,” bottled by the aptly named Cannon Drug and Jewelry Co., which operated out of a hotel.

“Just look at the alcohol content!” Polak exclaimed, noting that on most bottles it hovered around 92%. “You can imagine these old miners saying, ‘I’m just taking my medicine.’ If that was my medicine, I’d be taking it too.”

He isn’t especially tempted to sample any of these old nostrums now. “I leave the corks in them. To open them would ruin the value and uniqueness of the bottle. And you have to worry about something that old with labels that say ‘40% alcohol, 40% codeine, 10% something else.’ I’ve heard of people who do take the corks off, just smell the stuff and get sick.”

There are others, though, who drink vintage Cokes in bottles such as the full late ‘40s ones Polak has, and say they are not only safe, but also better than the current stuff. Polak shook one of his bottles to show that it still fizzes.

“I had 25 of these and sold some of them off. One guy said, ‘I’m going to open this and try it.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor. Don’t open it around me.’ To me that ruins it. You take the top off and drink it, and you just have a bottle. . . . I’ve been tempted, though,” he said, gazing into the caramel liquid in the fluted bottle.

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He gets some of his glassware at bottle collector shows and sometimes finds them at local thrift shops and swap meets. One of his oldest pieces, an English ale bottle from around 1780 worth $500, was found at a La Mirada swap meet for 25 cents.

His biggest thrill still comes from digging bottles up in the desert, something he’s scarcely had time to do in the two years it has taken to see his book into print. Sometimes he’s dug as deep as six feet. He has found a surprising number of buried bottles, given that in most deserts the dirt-to-bottle ratio is formidable.

“It’s not that easy. You really have to do a bit of homework. You have to get the maps, find where there were old homes or buildings. Then you have to figure, well, here’s where the house sat, they probably threw their trash maybe 15 yards away, so you start pacing it off. Outhouses would be more like 25 or 30 yards away. If you see a clump of bushes or grass growing, chances are that’s where the outhouse was, because it was so fertilized over the years.”

Though travel magazines aren’t likely to be running features titled “Outhouses of the Old West” anytime soon, Polak said digging for privies is increasingly popular among treasure hunters, and that there is actually a how-to book out on the subject. Unappealing as it sounds, Polak says such areas are considered safe after 20 or 30 years of disuse, and the ghost town ones he shovels in are typically 80 to 100 years old and basically just dirt. Dirt that’s extra-rich in bottles.

“Outhouses are a great digging spot because people would treat them as a trash reservoir as well. Also, because of people sitting down, coins would fall out,” he said.

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One of his favorite digging spots is the site of an old dump outside of Goldfield, between Las Vegas and Reno. He doesn’t mind sharing such information, and says that generally bottle collectors are a friendly bunch who often steer others toward good digs. That’s exceptionally neighborly, considering how hooked some collectors get on their bottles, not to mention their rarity.

“Some of these bottles are very beautiful,” Polak said. “They’ve got purples and blues, greens, ambers. Some are very decorative, very neat. There’s some very rare whiskey flasks from the 1700s with the likeness of Jefferson or Washington etched in them. It’s like a piece of fine china or a painting. Then you unearth things with labels that say things like ‘You can use for human consumption or treating your horses.’ That’s kinda fun.”

Some ordinary bottles wind up looking special, after the sun bakes minerals from the surrounding earth into them for decades, lending some glass an iridescent sheen like fish skin.

The value of antique bottles varies greatly. An 1880s beer bottle may be so common as to only be worth $2, while 1700s bottles from the Pitkin or Henry Stiegel glassworks can command $50,000. Except for the rarest bottles, being cracked or broken all but destroys the collector value.

Polak still gets a thrill out of finding a rich lode of glass, but doesn’t see bottles so much as an end in themselves.

“The bigger interest for me now is how you meet some of the neatest people. I’ve sold at bottle shows, and it’s not so much making money from the bottles, but the people I’ve met. Interesting, interesting people. When I first met my girlfriend, now my fiancee, when I first told her about the bottles, she said, ‘You’re doing what ?’ But when she went with me to a bottle show in Las Vegas two weeks ago she couldn’t believe how many different, interesting people there were there.”

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Polak also enjoys the detective work some bottles present.

“If I find a strange bottle, I’ll spend countless hours searching it out. If there’s a location on it, I’ll call the chamber of commerce of that town. They’ll lead me to something else, which leads me to something else. It might turn out that there was some guy in Tonopah who decided he was going to make soda pop. He might make a thousand bottles, and not make any money and go under, and that’s the last you’d hear of it. I love history, and this is a neat way to go into it.”

Some bottles stump him--for a while at least.

“I had one that just said ‘Jake’s Whiskey House’ etched on it, and on the bottom it said ‘Nevada,’ and that was it. It took me about six months before I found it came from a guy in the 1880s in northern Nevada with a mom-and-pop kind of still operation for about a year.”

As much as he loves finding such mysteries in old dumps, he opines that to collectors in the future today’s trash will always just be trash.

“Our stuff is so mass-produced,” he complained. “It’s not unique. There’s nothing special to it. It’s just kind of like there . What I do imagine is people 75 or 100 years from now looking at it and going, ‘Jeez, what kind of life did these people lead?’ ”