Coke Memorabilia Auction

The first auction of the huge Coke collection owned by the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia in Elizabethtown, Ky., brought in $3.3 million. Most expensive was a 13-inch hanging leaded glass globe that sold for $165,200. The museum closed this year—two years after the death of Bill Schmidt, the museum’s founder. Schmidt’s family ran Coca-Cola bottling operations in Kentucky for more than a century and built the world’s largest private collection of Coke memorabilia. Of the 80,000 pieces in the collection, 650 were auctioned in September by Richard Opfer Auctioneering. The next auction is scheduled for the spring.