It's a little worse for wear, but there probably aren't a whole lot of these out there.
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| Here is a circa 1930s bottle opener for La Vida Mineral Water, the name of which is on the flat panel. Click on any photo to see them in a separate window in an enlarged view. |
This is a bottle opener for La Vida Mineral Water, bottled from the hot springs at the La Vida Mineral Springs resort in the Brea portion of Carbon Canyon.
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| The reverse of a La Vida Mineral Water bottle opener, ca. 1930s, with the phrase "Internationally Indorsed" on the flat middle panel. |
The water was bottled for a period in Placentia and also in Fullerton and branch plants were in northern California, as well.
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| A detail of one of the flat panels on the bottle opener with the wording "La Vida Mineral Water." |
As noted here previously, the water was sold from the late 1920s and several examples of bottles from 7.5 ounces up have been shown here in other posts.
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| A detail of the "Internationally Indorsed" flat panel. |
The opener is pretty rusty, but the lettering can be made out pretty well. The opener could date to the early days of the selling of the mineral water, perhaps the 1930s. Someone who knows bottle openers can probably give a date, so if you have one to provide, please leave a comment.
3 comments:
Not a bottle-opener expert, but what caught my eye was the spelling of the word "indorsed". This alternate spelling began to lose out in favor of "endorsed" around 1900. By 1920 "endorsed" was almost twice as common; by 1940 it was over six times as common. So the spelling would argue for an earlier date--unless it was just a mistake. (Stats based on Google's "Ngram Viewer".)
Hi Jeff, sounds entirely reasonable. Have come across milk-bottle openers, dated from about the 20s, that look very similar. Thanks for the comment!
I was reorganizing my tool bench and found this hanging with all the other tools I didn't know about. So we looked it up and found this post. hmm, guess I'll hang it with the other random old things.
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