NINETY-NINE BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL

Gosh, on school bus trips we used to repetitively sing, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, if one of those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles appear on the wall…” It’s hilarious now when I think about how we would keep counting down ad infinitum until we got tired or, more often than not, the bus driver asked or more likely begged us to stop.

Today, we found about 99 empty beer bottles and assorted liquor bottles that were stashed in our attic crawl space for over four decades. Talk about a man cave! See What Lurks in the Crawl Space?, dated November 4, 2025, and Let’s Talk About Central Air, dated September 9, 2025, at sharonmarkcohen.com.

It’s amazing to us that our children never discovered that hidden space. They were as shocked as we were to learn that there was an unexplored area in the house where they grew up.

Our elder son, Judd, remembers the closet in the paneled room, but said he never explored inside it. He was excited and said that some beer companies, such as Ballantine, in Newark, where my brother Al moonlighted, are out of business. He conjectured with a laugh that with the companies no longer in existence, those long-stashed-away bottles may have some value.

Our daughter Rina couldn’t even picture a closet in the room. I suppose it was just “daddy’s at-home office” to her, and she preferred hanging out in the playroom across the hall.

Before polling our younger son, we ran into a sister of the culprits. She laughed when learning about her brothers’ previously unknown antics. She added that her two brothers had their bedrooms on the third floor and said she would have to ask them what was in the bags. Without waiting, we had someone package the empties into garbage bags and haul them out. He informed us that they were all empty bottles.

The bottles, picked up from the floor, not taken down from the wall, filled three large heavy-duty garbage bags, plus two tall kitchen bags. Knowing they’re only empty bottles, I’m not sure I want to tangle with the dust they’ve collected in half a century.

We feel clean and cool knowing the attic was cleared through the rafters. While the prior owner’s daughter said she never recalls the house being too hot in the summer, with global warming, we now have a functioning central air conditioning system throughout our 100+ year-old brick house. If we drank beer, now would be the time to guzzle some down and say, “Salute!”