Vintage Metal Lunch Box Articles

Lunch Boxes
BY BRUCE E. JOHNSON

Collectors find a taste of their youth in the metal and vinyl lunch boxes they once toted to school.

Though some consider it a nostalgia-driven fad, colorful lunch pails bearing the likenesses of America's favorite advertisement
television personalities, musicians, and comic-book heroes are currently attracting considerable attention among collectors.

Plain metal lunch kits consisting of a dome-topped box and a matching cylindrical coffee container, later commonly referred to as a thermos, were first mass-produced late in the 19th century for use by factory workers and field hands. Metal lunch kits for children appeared early in this century. A glimpse into the future of lunch-box production came in 1935, when the Gender, Paeschke & Frey Co., of Milwaukee, printed Mickey Mouse on the lid of a tin carryall -- a lunch box with handles on either side that folded up over the top.

The idea of featuring a television or movie character on lunch boxes originated with a watercolor by artist Robert O. Burton. His 1949 renditions of Hopalong Cassidy were pasted onto a standard metal lunch box and matching thermos and presented to Alladin Industries of Nashville, which put the set into production the following year. Competitor American Thermos Co. of Norwich, Conn., countered in 1953 with the first fully lithographed tin lunch box with matching thermos, bearing the images of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

In the years that followed, character lunch boxes chronicled the most popular television shows, pop-culture icons, movies, musicians, comic-book superheroes, toys, sports stars, and more.