What do you think of when you think of elementary school? Playgrounds, favorite teachers, bullies? Some of us have nice memories, others… well, not so nice.
One thing that stands out in my mind was lunch time. Don’t stand in long lunch lines for me! No way! My mom made sure she had nutritious meals. So, every August we would go looking for… yes… lunch boxes. That was a process. After all, it had to be the right one, the one that would show my favorite… whatever of the year. That was part of the fun of shopping, finding what best suited my mood or personality at the time.
Here’s a bit of history on lunch tins: they weren’t used until the early 20th century, when people began using tobacco tins to carry their lunches to work and school. Can you imagine the smell that accompanied each bite of sandwich? Yuck! The first lunch cans were made at the INCO mines in Sudbury, Ontario.
In 1935, Geuder, Paeschke and Frey produced the first lunch can featuring a licensed character, “Mickey Mouse.” It was an oval lithographed tin and had a removable tray inside. It did not contain what they called the “vacuum bottle”, what we know today as the thermos.
In 1950, Aladdin Industries created the lunch tin based on Hopalong Cassidy. This one sold 600,000 in its first year!
Do you remember your favorite lunch can? Superman? Partridge family? Careful eyes? Barbie? How about Archie Comics or Peanuts or Knight Rider? There was a lunch can for everyone! Sadly, they stopped making metal or tin lunch boxes in the 1980s out of concern that they would be used as weapons on the playground. . Too. It was fun that first day of school “showing off” our lunch boxes (no matter the contents!), seeing what fashions my friends were in.
Some of the older, well-maintained ones sell for a few thousand dollars! Do you have one in your attic? It is an era long lost. The fun news is that “retro lunch tins” do exist. Some places sell them, and antique stores still have some.