Birth of the lunchbox

Linda Jones

FROM GOATSKINS TO HOPALONG CASSIDY

1/13/2005 - Admit it - you carried a prized Roy Rogers, Huckleberry Hound or Star Wars lunchbox to school. If you’re over 30, you probably carried one of the 450 different decorated metal lunchboxes made between 1950 and 1985. By carrying the latest television character box, we could show our “cool”. 

  But BT (before television), before the discovery of tin-plating steel even – early man also needed to carry his provisions. Originally, a simple grass or bark basket, an animal hide or a goatskin solved the problem.  In the Industrial Age, families began using any sturdy metal container for a lunch pail for working men and for schoolchildren. Lard pails, honey buckets and molasses buckets were often converted to lunch pails.  Buckets varied in size and might be straight, or slant-sided. Their lids might be push-on or push-in, but they were attached with a string. After commercial baked goods became available, children from middle and upper class families could reuse the pretty tins that had held cookies or biscuits.

  Since the Thermos jug had not yet been invented, pint fruit jars were used to carry fresh milk or buttermilk, but the usual liquid was water, pumped up and carried in a bucket to the schoolroom. Everyone in the room then dipped with, and drank from, the same dipper. The rest of the lunch in the 1800’s and until WW II was probably crackers spread with something, homemade bread sandwiches, cold bacon or sausage patties, cold biscuits, fatback and corn pones, cornbread, maybe a sweet. The contents of the lunch depended on the family’s income, and that often depended on sickness or other misfortunes. In rural communities, the food  depended on crops, crop prices and weather. In bad times, cold biscuits or pancakes tasted good, compared with nothing.

  A retired teacher remembered lunchtime at her one-room school in the early 1900’s. The oldest sister in a large family seated her many siblings in a circle. They took turns saying grace and sat quietly as she passed out the contents of the family lunch bucket.

  In many working families, tobacco tins were always around the house, and the tobacco companies began to fill the lunch pail niche in the late 1800s. Farsighted tobacco companies starting selling their products in colorful tins designed to be reused as lunchboxes, with one or two handles, in a variety of colors and sometimes featuring elaborate artwork. Not surprisingly, these tins are popular collectibles.

  Perhaps it was a manufacturer of these tins who watched his own children proudly tote their R. J. Reynolds tin to school who hit upon the idea of lunchboxes made specifically for children. Colorful boxes debuted around 1900.

  The metal lunchboxes carried in the 20^th century evolved from a century of discoveries on both sides of the Atlantic. The first tin-plated iron can rolled off the line in England in 1810, and the first metal stamping machine patented in America was in 1847. A vacuum bottle was created in the lab by an English scientist in 1892, and the first American thermos bottle was manufactured in 1907. A tin lunch box shaped like a little picnic basket and featuring children playing was made in 1902, and only 33 years later, a model featured Mickey Mouse.

  But television created the explosion in school lunchboxes. The first experimental television in 1925 begat  the first broadcasts in 1936 by NBC and the rest is history. In 1950, a year after Hopalong Cassidy became a hit on NBC, Aladdin licensed his character on a lunchbox and Roy Rogers boxes soon followed.

  Most of those 450 different decorated lunchboxes between 1950 and 1985 were made by Aladdin and King Seeley Thermos (KST). Aladdin transformed itself from a producer of kerosene lamps and stoves to lunchboxes and bottles, moving from Chicago to Nashville, Tennessee, to take advantage of the abundance of inexpensive natural gas, a vital component of glass making. When Aladdin attached Hopalong Cassidy decals to their plain lunch boxes and added a lithographed Hoppy bottle, their sales jumped from 50,000 to 600,000 kits the first year! KST, American Thermos before 1960, had made plain steel children’s lunch kits since 1920, but their production took off in 1953 when they brought out a colored Roy Rogers kit. In that first year, sales exceeded 2.5 million kits. They competed in introducing the latest television heroes. The best-selling lunchbox of all time was not a television character, however, but the dome-top Disney “Schoolbus” made by Aladdin.

  Over 120,000,000 lunchboxes were sold in the U.S. between 1950 and 1970, 1.5 lunchboxes for every child of the baby boom generation. Superman, the Jetsons, Bullwinkle, Miss America, The Flying Nun, Pele, Rat Patrol, Howdy Doody, Mork & Mindy, Care Bears, Star Trek, Davy Crockett, Strawberry Shortcake, Huckleberry Hound and The Bee Gees followed.  It ended in 1985. The last metal box featured “Rambo” Sylvester Stallone. Economics and hygiene led to the soft vinyl and hard plastic lunch boxes and bags, which could be more easily shoved into a backpack. Steel was costly. Those colorful, whimsical lunchboxes needed to be rolled, stamped and lithographed, then have their edges rolled and handles and clasps attached.

  That costly process has an upside for collectors - metal lunchboxes can’t be counterfeited. The prices paid for that metal lunchbox you carried for a year and then replaced are reaching for the sky. Collectors call themselves “paileontologists” and “boxers” and pay increasing more for rare metal boxes. A prototype for a 1950 Hopalong Cassidy box and bottle brought nearly $10,000 recently. A 1954 Superman sold for $13,225 last year. The rare 1935 Mickey Mouse lunch pail brings over $7,000.

  The Smithsonian Institution is running two lunchbox exhibits currently. One is running indefinitely at the National Museum of American History in Washington and one has been touring the country since 2002 and is booked into 2006.

  The vinyl lunchboxes which ended the colorful era of metal boxes are also becoming collectible, with the most popular being the pink one featuring Barbie. Be proud, Denverites – the mother of Barbie was born  and raised in the Mile High City. Ruth Mosko Handler was born in 1917, the youngest of 10 children of Polish immigrants who settled in Denver. Her father was a blacksmith and deserter from the Russian army and her mother came in steerage on a steamship. Ruth left Denver at 19 for a vacation in California and stayed on the West Coast, where she “gave birth” to the popular blond doll.

  In 1765, the 4^th Earl of Sandwich created the popular lunchtime entrée when he ordered that roast beef between slices of toast be brought to him as he gambled. Apparently he was on a lucky streak!