Memories of The Golden Goat

Sometimes it is a small thing that can set me off on a journey of discovery.  Recently in a conversation somebody mentioned the automatic can collecting machines you used to see here and there.  This brought back memories.  Memories of The Golden Goat.

These don't seem to have ever been common, but you'd run across them sometimes.  Bulky, shed like machines, they would usually be sitting in the parking lots of grocery stores.  They had a hopper into which you'd toss aluminum cans.  There would then be a remarkable series of spinning, clanking and rattling sounds and - if it was working properly - a few coins would plink out into your hands.  It was a bit like a gigantic slot machine where you always won just a little.  They looked like this:

Back in the early 90's we had a Goat down the hill from us.  And it made an impression on one of my kids who was then roughly five years old.  He and I would gather up cans, from our own use, that of the next door neighbors and others from who knows where.  Down the hill we went pulling a wagon load.  In go the cans.  Clanking and rattling commenced.  Coins dropped into a small eager hand one at a time.  

This young lad went on to become very mechanically adept, as well as being quite the capitalist.  I credit The Goat.  So what's the story of these machines?

They were invented by a John "Tyke" Miller of Phoenix Arizona.  He applied for a patent in 1979, receiving it two years later.  Miller died soon thereafter and I have to date learned nothing more about him.  The machines appear to have been manufactured by the Golden Recycling Company of Golden Colorado.  They were marketed primarily in the West and Midwest.  

One account I read says they compressed the cans into 20 pound cubes that were referred to as "biscuits".  These would then be bundled together into larger units that weighed 2,240 pounds and would be hauled off by semis to be recycled.

There were issues with these machines.  They didn't always work for one thing.  Sometimes they'd take your cans and give you nothing.  More valuable life lessons for the lad, but not good for repeat custom.

They were also messy.  Throw in thousands of empty cans, squish them into compact biscuits and you can easily imagine what happens to the drips of beer and soda that were often present.  They would be squeezed out, intermingled and ooze out the bottom of the machine.  This was messy, smelly and attracted yellow jackets.  

Mentions of Golden Goat machines - mostly complaints - are scattered through the 1990's and beyond, but after the Millennium they were probably in decline.  The last definite sighting I ran across was in Appleton Wisconsin in 2016.  Our local example used to sit on this spot.  The power that ran it came out of that adjacent pylon, which I think once held the sign of the grocery store on the site.  The yellow color is coincidence.

A curious footnote.  When looking for internet mentions of the Golden Goat machines I kept running across references to marijuana.  As this is a subject in which I have no interest at all it took me a while to figure out the connection.  Evidently a marijuana breeder in Topeka Kansas had an inadvertent cross breeding event.  One of the parent plants was called "Romulan" for some reason.  The resultant hybrid had a distinctive odor that reminded the breeder of the peculiar smells that emanated from the local can recycling machine.  Thus was born the Golden Goat strain of cannabis.  

It's never a good day unless you learn something new.