8/28/2023 0 Comments Retro lunch boxes![]() ![]() The decline was so big that the manufacturers stopped making them.” “But they were banned in Florida, and then it went from state to state. “Really, kids were banging them up to make sure they got new ones,” he says. Metal lunchboxes went out of fashion and were even banned by some school districts in the 1980s, after a group of mothers in Florida campaigned to have them outlawed as weapons. A dome-top box painted to look like a yellow school bus with Walt Disney cartoon characters peeking out of the windows was the most popular lunchbox ever, according to the eBay guide, though the specific characters changed over the years. Most lunchboxes were rectangular, but there were also dome-top boxes with storage space for a Thermos bottle in the lid. One is all about making metrics cool: ‘The Exciting World of Metrics.’ I’m sure kids got beat up for taking that to school.” “They’re a very pop culture kind of thing, with many different genres: Saturday morning cartoons, Marvel comics,” says Jake Lefebure, a longtime collector who runs the Design Army graphics design firm in the District. Joe lunchboxes for boys, boxes with photographs of real astronauts and characters from “ Lost in Space” (1965-68). There were Barbie lunchboxes for girls and G.I. “ Hopalong Cassidy” (a TV show from 1952-54) gradually yielded to “ Wagon Train” (1957-65) and then “ Bonanza” (1959-73). “People see them and might remember the one they carried in school, or they see a character they remember and then a big smile comes on their face.”īecause kids gravitate toward designs featuring the most popular entertainment figures, vintage lunchboxes track popular culture through the decades. “They’re like time capsules,” Woodall says. It’s one of at least five books on this niche, an indication of how popular the lunchboxes have become. “These lunchboxes bring back memories,” says Allen Woodall, owner of the Georgia museum and co-author of “ The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes” (Schiffer, $29.95). The Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, Ga., which claims to have the largest collection in the world, and Clarke’s Collectibles and Lunchbox Museum in Nice, Calif., both sell boxes that duplicate what’s in their permanent collections. Today, eBay serves as the premier marketplace for vintage lunchboxes, but you can also find them at garage and estate sales and at stores that specialize in collectibles from the 1950s on. Metal lunchboxes didn’t take off as a school-kid staple until the 1950s, after Aladdin Industries began making boxes that featured Hopalong Cassidy, a cowboy in movies and the first TV westerns, according to a buying guide published on eBay. Walt Disney came out with a Mickey Mouse lunchbox in the 1930s but only for a couple of years. ![]() The earliest metal lunchboxes, from the late 1800s, were utilitarian containers for factory and mine workers, or repurposed tins that once held tobacco or other products. There’s also a brisk trade in reproduction boxes and in plain metal ones that you can decorate on your own. Today, those metal lunchboxes form a whole category of collectibles, with prices up to thousands of dollars. Picking out the perfect design for the school year was one of the rites of August, right along with getting new shoes and a haircut. But for earlier generations, there was one dominant option: a metal lunchbox, usually decorated with characters from comic strips, movies or television. Kids today carry their lunch to school in brown paper bags, insulated plastic sacks and even compartmentalized bento boxes.
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