Pepsi collector bubbles with stories

Wearing a Pepsi logo turtleneck, a Pepsi blue sweatshirt and tiny earrings shaped into Pepsi cans, Marty Geolfos walks to her kitchen for a morning drink of Pepsi Twist. She passes by a Pepsi clock, a Pepsi telephone and a cooler in the shape of . . . you guessed it.

For nearly 40 years, Geolfos, 66, has collected anything to do with Pepsi. Unlike many collectors of the odd and quirky who scour the world for rare objects, Geolfos has, for the most part, let the collectibles -- including 40 different sizes of cans and bottles from 30 states and 42 countries -- come to her.

It all started back in 1963 when Geolfos was traveling by car to the Seattle World's Fair and stopped for lunch. She ordered a large Pepsi, and the clerk came out with a 26-ounce bottle, a size she'd never seen before.

Her brother picked up another rare breed of the times -- a 6 1/2 ouncer. Geolfos displayed the glass bottles in a window of her Boulder, Colo., home. The rest is history.

Ever since, friends, family and co-workers have felt compelled to bring her Pepsi items. Geolfos' cousin once brought her a yellow patch sporting a bottle top graphic. She had ripped it from her own shirt during a bowling tournament in Puerto Rico; Pepsi was the sponsor. Many items have arrived from overseas, including a row of Italian cans adorned with dancing Smurfs.

Geolfos' collection also includes shot glasses, golf balls, cameras, miniature trucks and race cars, a kaleidoscope and gumball machine -- all bearing Pepsi logos. Her napkin dispenser came from opening day at Denver's Pepsi Center. Her Pepsi Barbies clutch miniature cans. And that's just the beginning.

When in Italy's Vatican Square, Joan Jahnke, Geolfos' friend since 1970, queried a cheese cart vendor about his empty turquoise blue Pepsi bottle.

"I handed him some lira and he turns it over to show me there's nothing in it," Jahnke recalls. "I said I wanted it." The vendor's last words were "crazy American."

The guest bedroom in Geolfos' home remains the hub of 40 years' worth of collecting with two walls of bookshelves filled floor to ceiling with Pepsi cans and bottles in sizes ranging from a quarter- ounce to 67.6 ounces. There is the kosher can with a blue Star of David, and a can with Arabic writing. She kept Pepsi's promotional Denver Nuggets series from 1974-76, its bottles plastered with the faces of star players and coach Larry Brown.

Geolfos holds onto a yellowing, hand-typed catalogue of her collection that she began in 1980. "I tried to keep up, but it became too overwhelming," says Geolfos, who recently retired after 28 years working for Colorado University, first in the budgeting department and then as a manager for the law school.

When stripping the floorboards of his Denver home, her son, Colby, stumbled upon a weathered edition of the cartoon "Pepsi & Pete: The Pepsi Cola Cops," which now hangs on her guest-room wall. On a shelf is a gift from a friend -- a miniature sailboat with sails made from cut-up aluminum Pepsi cans.

A visit to Geolfos' home is a trip to the past. She's got the original Pepsi bottles made with simple etched glass sitting in wooden crates and the first ones with paper labels. In her garage, where she stores overflow Pepsi memorabilia, sit two rusty blue Pepsi coolers she dates back to the '50s or earlier.

"It's amazing to see how things have changed," Geolfos says. Her guest room is piled high with cans representing every era of Pepsi marketing, from "Gotta Have It" to "Uh Huh" and "You Got the Right One, Baby."

Geolfos doesn't know how much her collection is worth but guesses "the low thousands." However, she says, she has "a million bucks of memories." No two cans or bottles on display are alike and no single one is her favorite.

One way to recognize which bottles are old and which are new is to look closely at the dots between Pepsi and Cola, Geolfos says. A bottle with two dots (like a colon) instead of one was manufactured sometime before 1940.

The collection will likely stay in the family, says Geolfos' daughter Debi Geolfos. Debi and her own two daughters are always on the lookout for additions to the collection.

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