The selection was nearly limitless. Some depicted television shows like Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Lost In Space while others covered a wide array of cartoon favorites, from the venerable Peanuts to such Saturday morning fare as Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, Fat Albert and Hong Kong Phooey. Picking just the right one wasn't an easy decision, even with the impatient prodding of a parents' "Would you come on already - its only a lunch box, for Pete's sake." We knew it was much, much more.
You could tell alot about the kid sitting across the table from you in the cafeteria by what he packed his bologna sandwich and Ding Dongs in. Playground jocks went for the baseball, football and race car themes and class clowns invariably showed up with their Welcome Back Kotter boxes. Girls seemed to gravitate towards Little House On The Prairie, The Brady Bunch, Miss America or Wonder Woman. Even the smart kid who's test paper you copied off of had the cool box with the Apollo moon mission on it.
Whether those long lost relics found their way to the thrift store or ended up as garage sale rubbish, the old adage of one man's trash being another man's treasure has become a fitting epitaph to the legacy of the metal lunch box. The painful truth being that those sturdy, school age companions are now heavy hitters in the collectables market.
Originally produced in the late 19th century for use by factory and farm workers as plain pail containers or collapsible metal boxes, the shape of things to come occured in 1935 with a tin carryall that had handles on both sides that folded up and over a lid that bore an image of Mickey Mouse, Produced by the Gender, Paeschke & Frey Co. of Milwaukee and today is valued at almost $1,300.
Lunch boxes with the likeness of cowboy icon Hopalong Cassidy became an overnight sensation for Aladdin Industries in 1950, which sold 600,000 in just the first year alone.
Rival manufacturer American Thermos Co. struck back in 1953 with completly lithographed boxes picturing Roy Rogers and Dale Evans with scenes of their Double R Bar Ranch. The kits, which came with a matching thermos, became an even bigger hit and sold 2.5 million units.
Being a product where image litterally was everything, the two companies, along with Ohio Arts, maintained a long and heated competition to gain licensing rights to whatever television and movie characters happened to be popular.
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