School Lunch
Throughout the years, school lunches have changed dramatically. The children of a hundred years ago were usually fed as a group by either the teacher or some parent that would send something with their child and then it was heated up on the ever-present wood stove. Some children brought a sandwich and maybe some cookies or a piece of fruit.
This arrangement continued for many years except for the wood stove. There were no cafeterias as there are today, and certainly no free lunches. I remember lunch time at St. Francis as being herded to the basement where several 8-person tables were set up. The only thing available was milk, which cost three cents. At the end of lunch two of the older boys walked around with a trash can and emptied the trash from each table that the children had passed down to the end of the table. A vivid memory I have is of one boy who always positioned himself at the end of the table so that he could take anything edible and consume it. When I think back on the situation, he must have been desperate to do what he did. The remnants of a sandwich or a half eaten apple never escaped his grasp.
Since no food was provided by the school, everybody had to “pack”. The different methods of carrying lunch varied from the standard brown paper bag to fancy metal boxes that displayed your favorite TV show or maybe a hero of the day. Some of them are quite collectible now. Of course, the most valuable are the ones that weren’t so popular then and therefore fewer of them were made. Mine was what you would call generic. It was gray and green like the one pictured above. I used mine from the second through the eighth grades and by the eighth grade it looked like chrome. I did go through many Thermos liners, though, as did every kid that carried this type of lunch box. If you dropped the Thermos, the glass liner was sure to shatter. They screwed in and were fairly easy to replace. I imagine Thermos made quite a bit selling glass liner replacements as everyone was good for a couple each year.
I was looking at my granddaughter’s lunch box this year and it was something to behold. She didn’t have a Thermos as she got her drink at her school. I went there for lunch a couple of times and they have a selection that would make any restaurant proud. They have a regular cafeteria where you can obtain a hearty meal and dessert. Kids have their favorites and I think everyone buys on pizza day. Ice cream is always popular. They have a computer set up that the parent pays into and from which the student can draw.
Things have certainly changed over the years and the responsibility of feeding our own children has been taken over by “the government” because they know best. People of my generation seemed to have survived because our mothers made sure we had what we needed, not what we wanted.
4 comments:
What you needed presumably was what was good for you.A generation where children never complained about what their mothers put in their lunch box because they knew that she knew best.Those must have been marvelous times.
I remember in the early 70's, buying "lunch tickets" at my elementary school. There were platter, milk, and ice cream tickets that were different colors.
George I remember having a thermos in my lunch box. I also had a can opener in my lunch box because my mother must have put a soda in there for me to drink. The can opener was the kind that opened a can with a v shaped hole and had a rounded end on the other which was for opening bottles. Soda cans during that time didn't have pop tops so you needed a pointed can opener. While on the bus ride home I opened the thermos and stuck the can opener in there and touched the glass and it exploded. Boy that scared the crap out of me. Do you putting can openers in lunch boxes?
When I was little in the mid 60s my mother would by us a lunch ticket. At school there were volunteer cooks that would come in a cook hot lunch. These ladies cooked like mom at home and were like moms away from mom.
Around 11:00 you could smell the fresh roles baking and I remember how my stomach would churn in anticipation.
Lunch was always always good, and if you were one of the first to finish you could go get seconds.
The only thing that I didn't like was the stewed spinach because it was so slimey.
Wiener roll arounds were my favorite. Today they are called pigs in a blanket.
Very fond memories!
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