Many people collect plastic drink stirrers, or swizzle sticks, but most are souvenirs of a memorable night out. While these are personal memories, there are stories behind the sticks, which serve as marketing gimmicks for establishments that come and go but leave a mark. Pam Ashlund noticed her mother's cup of souvenir swizzle sticks in 2007 and became intrigued by their history. That grew into a hobby and led her to the International Swizzle Stick Collectors Association, for which she now writes the monthly newsletter. She's also writing a book about swizzle sticks, and plans to open a museum eventually.
As Ashlund learned more about swizzle sticks, her collection grew. “Originally, I was just buying and selling,” she says. “I’d buy a number of single sticks on eBay and then sell them in sets. I had no idea of the significance of the individual sticks. It was just, ‘Here’s a cute set of giraffes.’ It wasn’t until almost a year later when I realized that some individual sticks were actually quite rare, and that all of them had great histories behind them.”
Turns out, Ashlund is well-suited for studying the stories behind tens of thousands of disposable drink stirrers. In college, she earned a B.S. in psychology, which means she’s sincerely interested in the human stories surrounding swizzle sticks. As a professional accountant, she’s unfazed by the scope of the collectible—vintage swizzle sticks are plentiful because they were an extremely inexpensive form of advertising. And as a finance director at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, she’s developed an appreciation for cultural anthropology and an eye for how objects are presented to the world, hence her interest in publishing a book and establishing a place to share a portion of her collection with the public. Why should her swizzle sticks, and all their wonderful tales, remain sealed in Tupperware?
As you might expect, very few of the sticks that fill Ashlund’s Tupperware were purchased one at a time, or even in batches of 60. “I purchased two collections,” Ashlund explains, “one that had over 12,000 sticks and another with more than 25,000.” To give you a sense of the scale of that many sticks, at one point, Ashlund had about 27,000 swizzles in her 18-year-old Nissan Pathfinder. “They filled it from top to bottom, back to front,” she recalls with an audible sigh.
It turns out that the more you learn about swizzle sticks, the more fascinating they are. Ashlund tells us the origin of swizzle sticks and some stories about particular ones she's tracked down at Collectors Weekly.