Sample | lunch box:Coca-Cola | The Simpsons

For half a century, lunch boxes have been key symbols of identity for American school children. The character or subject matter illustrated on a lunch box can shape a child's identity among her/his peers for the entire school year. For other children, the perfect lunch box remains an object of desire. Lunch box history extends back into the nineteenth century and our collection includes examples that accompanied cyclists in the new bicycling craze. The first manufactured children's lunch box appeared in 1902, but it wasn't until the 1950s that the lunch box reached its full potential. A Nashville company named Aladdin found that their metal lunch boxes were all too durable, lasting children from year to year. What the company needed was the equivalent of Detroit's tail fins, something to distinguish this year's lunch box from last year's model. Since TV cowboys were all the rage, Aladdin started with a decal of Hopalong Cassidy on its boxes and 600,000 flew off the shelf in a year. Aladdin introduced full-box lithography in 1954 with raised designs following in 1962. Throughout the sixties and early seventies, lithographed metal lunch boxes served as popular culture barometers, illustrating the latest hit TV shows and the most popular cartoon characters. With the arrival of the plastic lunch box in 1972, the lunch box began its decline. Plastic was cheaper for manufacturers and safer from the perspective of some parents. Lunch boxes began to be seen as something that "little kids" carried and older students found other consumer culture means to express their identity. By the late 1990s, Baby Boomer nostalgia had reached the field of lunch boxes, inspiring an active market for old boxes and prompting manufacturers to reissue classic and classic-look metal lunch boxes as collectibles. And, despite such alternatives as insulated fabric bags, Lunchables, or school fast food courts, there are still children carefully scanning the racks of lunch boxes each fall, debating the merits of the latest Disney movie over the star of that hot computer game.