This tin lunch box was made in the 1940s , and has a metal snap for hinged lid and a collapsible silver handle. There is a plain blue and gray design on the exterior.
This tin lunch box was made by ADCO Liberty Manufacturing Corporation and has a metal snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible metal handle. The lunch box features drawings from the television series The Lone Ranger on the lid and back, which ran from 1949-1957 on ABC. The front features the Lone Ranger uttering his trademark phrase “Hi-Yo Silver!,” and the back is both the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding their horses, the Ranger saying “Hi-Yo Silver,” and Tonto saying “Get-em Up Scout!”
The school lunch box has long been an item of interest in post-war America, just as school lunch itself is of recent interest in discussions of American food policy and nutrition. The National Museum of American History has a rather large collection of school lunch boxes, and there are many private collectors of such boxes. The museum has even had a small exhibition of some of these iconic boxes (see http://americanhistory.si.edu/lunchboxes) from the earliest, which featured working man’s lunch boxes and dinner pails (often made from repurposed food tins) to the inauguration of school lunch boxes specifically manufactured for children’s lunches from the 1940s on to the 1970s.
Updating the older collections of lunch boxes inevitably had to involve taking substantial changes in what and how we eat. Two factors that made Americans change what and how they eat, from 1950 to the present (in 2013) concern the increased travel abroad by Americans since the post-World War II period and, conversely, new resettlements of millions of people from the global world to America. These resettlements caused millions of Americans to be exposed to new foods and once-exotic cuisines, even to new containers for meals taken to school and work.
The two layer multiple compartmented soft plastic Japanese lunch box, a pink bento box in the popular “character” bento “Hello Kitty” design, was made to carry a child’s lunch (with rice, fish, meat, fruit, or vegetables nicely arranged inside) from home to school, a picnic, or sports event. This one was made for repeat usage, though ekiben (portable bento) made of cheap plastic or cardboard, can be purchased at train stations or airplane terminals and thrown away. Though this bento is Japanese, where bento making is competitive and taken very seriously, other bento using cultures include Taiwan and China, and India, where workers carry multiple compartment and tiered lunch boxes called tiffin.
Like the bento box, “Hello Kitty” (Haro Kitty) has become popular in the United States, but like the bento, “Kitty” (or Kitty White, a white bobtail cat) is of Japanese origin and has been an important figure in Japanese popular culture and popular in commerce since 1974 when she and many associated consumer products were first introduced. Pre-adolescents and adults alike buy and adore the “cute” school supplies, wearables, and theme-park/animated television show/video-game based goods identified with Kitty, her friends, and family members.
Medium sized aluminum metal lunch pail with a long, thin handle on the pail and a lid with a shorter handle. It would have been used for liquids such as soups or milk, and could have accompanied other food containers from tobacco or food, or wrappings or pouches made of paper, leather or fabric. Lunch pails more typically were used in rural schools when students would have eaten on school grounds and not gone home for lunch.
This lunch pail is marked with a registered trademark of VIKO/ The Popular Aluminum/ MADE IN U.S.A. It is the brand for Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company of Manitowoc , Wisconsin (also known as "Goods" The company was formed in 1909 from a merger of Henry Vit's Manitowoc Novelty Company, Joseph Koenig's Aluminum Manufacturing, and New Jersey Aluminum Company of Newark. The brand name VIKO is an amalgamation of the founder's names: VI from Vits and KO from Koenig. With the outbreak of World War I, the company was producing not only pots and pans and hubcaps, but also mess kits, canteens, cooking utensils, and school lunch pails. Over 1 million canteens were produced by "Goods"; by 1917 the company had also introduced the brand name of Mirro.
This metal lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1974. The lunch box features imagery of the short-lived TV series, Space: 1999, which ran from 1975-1978 in syndication. In Space: 1999, an accidental explosion of nuclear waste stored on the moon propelled the moon out of its orbit and sent it hurtling through space sending the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha looking for a new home and encountering adventures along the way.
This dome-shaped metal lunch box was made in 1977 by Aladdin Industries. The box features imagery based on the hit TV series, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, which ran on NBC for two years from 1977-1978. The television series was based off of a 1974 feature film of the same name that was a huge success. The fictional character of Grizzly Adams was based off of the real man, James Capen Adams, a man who roamed the wilderness and tamed bears and other animals, often for P.T. Barnum’s shows.