Vintage Metal Lunch Box Articles

Collector’s Memories
Michael Johnson from Honolulu writes:

"I loved lunchboxes when I was a .. uh ... kid. I liked the metal ones, with a nice clasp that closed with a click. I remember two in particular. One was the flat, oblong kind, about the size of a dictionary. Mine was painted or somehow coated in a red plaid pattern, which probably was my mother's influence, although I might have picked it out. This was in the era of Davy Crockett lunchboxes, so it had to have been a bit unusual, but I don't remember any angst over it. It had a matching thermos that fit inside, leaving very little room for food beyond a sandwich and apple.

"The other was the humpy kind, just like a real workman's lunchbox. The matching thermos fit in the lid, and that box had some capacity. I don't remember the color, but I'm pretty sure it had no pictures or patterns. I was very proud of that lunchbox, but I wrecked the whole deal on the second or third time I carried it. It's one of those moments frozen forever. I was eating lunch, seated at one of the tables set up on the little stage in our cafeteria cum assembly hall. Maybe that was the cold lunch area, while the hot-lunchers took the tables on the main floor. I don't remember. But I was telling a story and waved my arm to make some point. I had forgotten about the thermos, which was open and about three quarters full of milk. I knocked that baby right out into the middle of the room, and as I watched it go, it left a contrail of milk all the way until it hit with that definite smash that you only get with glass.

"Instantly, I pretended to have done it on purpose.

"My mother, a Great Depression baby, refused to replace the thermos, and I never enjoyed that lunchbox again. The empty hump was a daily reminder of my humiliation."

Jim writes:

"When I was in junior high school, I had a red bicycle with saddle-bag type baskets on either side of the rear wheel. My schoolbooks fit into one side basket and the lunchbox went on the other side.

My lunchbox wasn't a theme lunchbox; no pictures of movie stars or comic book characters. This was in the middle fifties and there may have been some Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes available at Woolworth's or McCrory's, but a seventh grader wouldn't carry anything like that to junior high school. Definitely not Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

"No, I had a big black lunch box with the kind of curved lid you could put a thermos in. When I was a kid my mother went out to work and my father stayed home and washed and ironed and cooked. As a result, I never acquired what I suppose are the usual attitudes toward sex roles. It was only years later that I came to understand how deeply and rigidly ingrained these attitudes are in so many people. Washing dishes, ironing a shirt, vacuuming the floor were not, to me, things that only females did. And Dad was a pretty good cook.

"Dad would sometimes fill up a wide-mouth thermos with Chun King chow mein and wrap a handful of noodles in wax paper (no ZipLoc baggies then), and add an apple or a banana. The top of thermos was big enough to mix the noodles and the chow mein in, and I'd leave the mixture to sit for while to soften the noodles. Otherwise they'd tend to gouge up the roof of my mouth for the rest of the afternoon.

"We got enough time for lunch so that after we'd finished eating, we could go out and stand around under the trees outside the cafetorium, and do all the things that kids our age have to do to get through adolescence. Then the lunchbox went back into the locker. I still have the old Master combination lock I got for that locker. I found it not long ago. 37-19-25 — still worked.

"At three o'clock the lunchbox came out of the locker and got loaded back on the bicycle. Halfway along the way home was a little mom and pop candy and soft drink place that the Seven-Eleven and Circle K chains have long since driven out of business, and the group of us riding home together would stop and get a big Coke for a dime. If we said we were going to drink it there, we didn't have to pay the two cent deposit on the bottle, so we'd sit on the bench and look through the lunchboxes to see if there was anything left and sip our Cokes and burp."