Lunch Pail

I have been searching the antique stores and garage sales for many years looking for a lunch pail like the one I first took to school in 1949.
Grandma Ridnour gave me my lunch box. It was green and white plaid, with two handles like the one above except it was oval and the handles were thinner.

In fact it looked very much like this one except for the color and that it had two handles. When Betty started to school two years after I did Grandma gave her one just like mine except it was red and white instead of green and white.
I know at least one lunch pail like mine exists because I saw it in the early 90's. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One of my friends from work was remarrying. It was at a shower for her at her sister-in-law's that I saw the twin of my lunch pail displayed.


I only carried my little lunch pail for three years before getting a new rectangular one with a thermos. Lack of a thermos was one of the faults of my oval pail, the other was its small size.
I know I wanted a Dale Evans lunch box, but they were too expensive.



I'm almost certain my new lunch box was a plain color - green, I think. Although these red plaid ones were popular in the early 50's and I do remember some like this lined up on the lunch pail shelf at Jasper #2. By the time my children were in school there was such a wide choice of lunch boxes - Jetsons, Scooby-doo, Princesses, etc. Even though they mostly ate lunch at the hot-lunch program at the schools they attended, I think they had lunch boxes, too, for the days they did not like what was being served at school. Do they remember their lunch boxes? Probably. But I don't.

In the book I am reading now, a minister has more than a hundred lunch boxes displayed around his house. He explains their presence: "My mother and father worked hard for everything they had. There were three children, me and my brother and sister. We had everything we needed, but if we wanted something our parents saw as a luxury, we never got it. Lunch boxes were a luxury."
He goes on to tell of a time when as adults the three siblings were trying to top one another with terrible stories from their childhood. He related the lack of a lunch box as his worst memory. For Christmas his brother and sister each gave him a lunch box. From there the joke spread and everybody started giving him lunch boxes.
As a minister he used the lunch box story with youth groups - "I tell them how much sweeter it is for me to have these lunch boxes now, that waiting for them made them that much more special. Sometimes you can't have everything you want the minute you want it, so you have to wait. And when you do? It means more."
It seems to me this is a lesson few learn in this instant gratification world we now live in. We no longer have to save up to buy something we want/need. We can charge it. If there is one good coming out of the current recession it is that more people are learning to think whether what they want to buy is really necessary. And they aren't automatically giving their kids everything the kids want, either.
I don't do much antiquing or garage saling anymore. I don't want to be tempted to begin collecting again after parting with most of my 'treasures' before moving from the farm. And I definitely do not want friends and family to begin giving me lunch pails --unless you find a little green and white plaid oval one with two handles..........