Comments on: The History of the Lunch Box

By: Julieann Wozniak

Julieann Wozniak — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:23:05 +0000

My mom went the vinyl route. Fire engine red with a generic rocketship and spaceman theme. Never used the thermos, as our school served cold milk.

By: Jill Solomon

Jill Solomon — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:42:30 +0000

In Nebraska, 1973 or 1974, my mom let me get a Speed Buggy, with dreamy Cory on one panel. Later, my mom picked out this (totally NC) soft, plastic, zippered, weird, textured, oval, starfish-patterned, nerd alert lunch tote. I hated it and wanted to use my Speed Buggy, but she had thrown it out. I’m still scarred.

My husband, who used to get one each year (envy!) said he had an Evel Knievel, Six Million Dollar Man, AND Star Wars! What a brat!

By: Kay

Kay — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:18:35 +0000

The only one I ever remembering having was Annie Oakley and Tagg. I had a pony and a be-be(?) gun and pretended I was Annie Oakley. Thanks for bringing back great memories!

By: Kris

Kris — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 05:49:37 +0000

Where we lived (in the 50′s) everyone went home for lunch except for a few kids. The rest of us envied them with their cool metal boxes. We would plead with our parents to let us stay in school for lunch so we could get a box with a favorite character on it, but it never worked.

By: Bill Wilson

Bill Wilson — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 18:21:11 +0000

One of my delinquent buddies quit school at 16 in 1969 to embark on a scavenger career. He cruised the alleys in the Chicago area suburbs and NW Indiana with a pick-up and trailer collecting rags, metal, furniture and whatever else he could sell for recycling or to “junke shoppes”. He hung onto old printed lunch boxes, radios with that had Elvis, Hopalong Cassity or others on them along with anything else that looked cool while stoned on weed. He’s been doing the same thing all these years and is cementing his retirement thru E-bay selling off all the wierd crap he’s saved. He used the printed lunch boxes to hold small items related to the characters printed on them, like toys, doll clothes, doll parts, accessories, Happy Meal toys, etc. Says there’s a lively market for all that mess, too!

By: Aaron Johnson

Aaron Johnson — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 03:26:48 +0000

I still have my Lost in Space lunchbox. I actually used it at work for a year. It was well received. I found out how much it’s worth, retired it and cleaned it up. It’s now on display in my sci-fi museum area in my home.

By: LinC

LinC — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:13:31 +0000

My first lunch box was a dark blue box with Roy Roger’s horse Trigger rearing on the front. Loved that box. It saw me all the way through grade school. Years later I read in a lunch box book that the artist did a lot of food advertising art and that Trigger looked a lot like a rearing Cornish game hen.

By: David Welden

David Welden — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:40:14 +0000

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea http://www.flickr.com/photos/treaspaulsbsmt/7052373351/

By: Greatestcollectibles.com

Greatestcollectibles.com — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:32:15 +0000

Great post, i also build a price guide for vintage lunch boxes here http://www.greatestcollectibles.com/lunch-box-price-guide/ hope its helpful.

thanks

By: Kevin R Foote

Kevin R Foote — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:57:04 +0000

I had a Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids box for a while. Hey, Hey, Hey!!!

By: DianeAKelly

DianeAKelly — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:54:59 +0000

Metal lunchboxes may have been mostly supplanted by plastics nowadays, but I still think they’re the better choice: my kids inevitably tore through the soft plastic cloth before the end of a school year. A slightly dented metal box is still a perfectly useful metal box.

(This year, I sent my son off to school with a TARDIS-imprinted metal lunchbox. He told his classmates it was bigger on the inside.)

By: Ron

Ron — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 00:19:50 +0000

Remember many of these. I never had one, family couldnt afford them

By: LJ

LJ — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:39:01 +0000

The only one I ever had was a Batman & Robin lunchbox from when I was in first grade. One of the first days of the term, I was yelled at in the lunchroom by a teacher because the thermos was in the box. We had been told we weren’t allowed to bring the thermoses because the glass inside could break, and it was a safety hazard. I was very upset, probably even cried, because I knew I had told my mother we weren’t allowed to have the thermos. It was only when I went to eat my sandwich that I realized what had happened. My lunchbox and the exact same one of another student had gotten mixed up in the coat closet where we were told to leave them until lunchtime. When I unwrapped a cream cheese and jelly sandwich, something my mother would never have packed for me, I realized someone else had my box. Perhaps scarred by the incident, I walked home for lunch most days for the next six years. This was the 1960s, and that was still allowed then.

Though I didn’t save that box, my very first purchase on eBay, years later, was that same Batman & Robin box. Without a thermos! The kits with thermoses were far more expensive; my assumption is that many of the thermoses were thrown out because kids were not allowed to bring them to school just as I wasn’t, and the scarcity drove up the price of the kits that still had them.

By: David Morrison

David Morrison — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:44:32 +0000

Alas, I was one of those rare few subjected to the lowly “brown paper bag”!

By: carl benson

carl benson — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 03:38:16 +0000

You must have lived in a rich neighborhood, everyone in my school carried their lunch in a paper bag.