New Mickey Mouse Club, metal, 1970s
Hippy!
UFO series metalhttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0mD-1orMR3Y/S-YpdsbOcsI/AAAAAAAAAiA/9sFoyxJJE80/s1600/IMG_0410.jpg
Sorry, messed that up on my phone ! Link works though !
1971 – I was 6 and had a Partridge Family lunchbox. A big kid on my bus used to make fun of me and unlatch the lid when I’d walk past him to get off the bus every day. My school papers would scatter everywhere. Then my big brother (who was 17) rode the bus home with me one day. No problems maintaining lunchbox integrity after that.
My dad was a hoarder, though, and he’d grab and keep stuff that wasn’t even his, including toys and objects that belonged to me and my siblings. And so the lunchbox vanished into the black hole that was my dad’s hoard whic he kept under lock and key; after he died in 2010 and we started to clean out the mess, all my oldest brother wanted to do was to be able to present me with that long-lost lunchbox (since crap literally from the 1920s onwards had been shoved into this 2500 sq foot, two story garage/outbuilding).
Turns out my sister, who is 15 years older than I and thus way way out of the demographic for the show back then, had stolen it a few years back because she thought it would be hip and trendy to keep her embroidery threads in. As I have no relationship with her, it might as well been binned or gone for good. (She stole a lot of my brother’s and my stuff as well as family heirlooms while combing through this building – my dad wouldn’t let US into it, but she had free reign. :mad:)
I was really crushed; and while it had been almost 40 years, my brother still would not tolerate anyone who messed with his little sister or her lunchbox.
So he tied my sister’s Patty Playpal doll to a chair and executed her with extreme prejudice.
This was all last summer, by the way, when the main actors in this little drama were 62 (my sister), 58 (my brother), and me (47).
But whacking Patty won’t bring back my lunchbox 
Hopalong Cassidy…I was proud. Then I lost the thermos. Then I was so heart broken.
Scooby Doo, then Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
I was always a brown bagger but I envied the kids who had a black barrel-domed workman’s lunch bucket with its own thermos jar. That was a professional lunch box.
The real thrill came with junior high when you could actually leave the school grounds, nick down to Yoder Brothers’ Grocery and, with four or five other guys buy a bag of hamburger buns, a half-pound of baloney, a bag of potato chips and a six pack of Pepsi and make your own fresh lunch on the spot. The store kicked in a jar of mustard (French’s bright yellow). Eating off grounds was a rite of passage.
Being able to go off campus was for lunch was a great thing. Nowadays, at least at my daughter’s high school, they aren’t allowed to leave. Even if they were, they only get 24 minutes for lunch and would barely have time to go anywhere. It sucks. 
When I was a kid, I had a metal Empire Strikes Back lunchbox. A little older, when that one had worn out, I had a plain black metal construction-worker-style lunchbox (you know, the kind with the half-cylinder lid). After that one wore out, it was just brown paper bags.
The only lunch box I can recall having is a metal Planet of the Apes lunchbox. I only mention it because it was passed on down to my baby sister when she was in elementary school, and I once came upon her using it to beat the crap out of two boys who had tried to beat HER up.
Okay, one boy. The other ran off when he realized that my baby sister was a fierce little kid.
This one. It’s still at my mom’s house, minus the thermos and plus some Scooby Doo stickers I slapped on it.
The first that I can remember was the Disney Schoolbus.
My all time favorite was Planet of the Apes (the TV series). I also liked the Bicentennial one except, I remember, I was bothered by its identity crisis: a couple of the pictures were straightforward drawings (like the boy shining Washington’s boots) while others were Keebler-Elf cartoonish.
The one I wanted but never got was Land of the Lost.
The lamest was The Waltons. Needless to say, my mother picked that one out (or maybe I was being punished).
I remember almost all of these, though. Even to the smells of peanut butter and juice and the like from where the lunchboxes stayed in the classroom.
Some I can remember.
- This spice girl one
- A green and blue lunch box. It was long, and skinny. The clasps on it was a BUGGER to open. I have a few containers made by the same company, and I still struggle with them.
-multiple reincarnations of the soft, freezer bags
I still take my lunch.
One of these this cutlery set maybe a few ofthese for snacks with a few freezer blocks (if needed) and put in a canvas bag, which is then put in my backpack.
Holly Hobbie. I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder. This one in the image is from 72, but I was only 5 then, so it probably used or a hand-me-down. I think I carried it in the 2nd grade.
None. For twelve years I ate leftover WWII rations and government provided food the school got to save money.
No one else brought a lunch box either. People would have laughed at the absurdity. We were raised by people who had gone through the depression and were conditioned to either eat what was put in front of us or go hungry. If we didn’t already know that it was spoken loud and clear to be grateful for food whatever it was. (Typing this it sounds hilarious. Right out of Oliver Twist but it really wasn’t all that grim.
The idea of food allergies was obscure. I only know of one person in my high school who claimed an allergy to strawberries. And fat chance of being served those!
The menu varied so little that a person didn’t have to look at a menu to predict what each day’s meal would be. I can still remember some. Monday - beans, Tuesday - soup, Wednesday, - canned chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, Thursday - chili, Friday - fish sticks. Then next week, Monday - goulash, Thursday - saurkraut and hot dogs. Dessert was an apple, cake, pudding or a Dixie cup.
There was never pizza, hamburgers, green salad, french fries or any other kind of fun food. Well, the Dixie cups, though rare, were fun. They had pictures of movie stars on the inside of the lids and came with little wooden spoons that gave you shivers when you ran them over your tongue.
Guess it served me well. I still have a healthy body mass index.
Always brown-bagged it - one problem was, at my school, if you had a lunchbox, then, after you ate lunch, you would leave your box in some area until it was time to return to class, so there was always the risk of either leaving your box out or having someone else take it. (Well, I didn’t “always” brown bag it; my elementary and middle schools sold hot dogs every other Thursday. Strangely enough, despite my high school having a cafeteria, I never bought lunch in high school.)
This one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1967-ITS-ABOUT-TIME-LUNCHBOX-THERMOS-by-Aladdin-/230851801951 I hated it. My mother refused to return it and get me an alternative so when I left it on the bus I didn’t regret it.