Can't forget about these!
Steve
When I was in the 7th grade (1959) the school lunches were 25 cents and that included a carton of milk. Milk alone cost 3 cents.Another interesting memory from childhood is school lunches.
I remember using the metal lunchboxes when I was real young, don't remember the design on the outside offhand though.
When I got a little older I switched to the more mature brown paper lunch bags
Eventually at some point I started buying the cafeteria cooked lunches, I think I remember them being under $1 and a small carton of milk was 2 cents.
Many kids were crazy about the peanut butter fudge the school cafeteria occasionally had for dessert and sometimes would trade other food for an extra one
When I took my lunch in the beginning I remember at least 3 sandwiches my mom alternated between making me, peanut butter and jelly, bologna and mayo, and egg salad made with mayo. In hindsight I am thankful I didn't get sick because home brought lunches were kept in your locker unrefrigerated until lunch
Don't remember what design lunch boxes I had but found a couple online as examples
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I'll start with how much more inexpensive things were back then......
I grew up 50's and 60's (I was 10 years old for most of 1962 having a birthday in December) and we had both a Gino's fast food and a McDonald's fast food, eventually Gino's got the rights to make and sell KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) of course some years later KFC had their own places.
Wow, those 15 cent hamburgers and 10 cent fries ! (the ad says 10 cents, but I remember paying 11 cents for Gino's fries when I was in elementary school so I guess they raised the price by a penny back then )
I also remember 5 cent popsicles and 10 cent ice cream bars, as well as inexpensive soft serve ice cream from the "Mr. Softee" truck.
We had a local A&P grocery store, I seem to remember getting packs of Kool-Aid for a nickel each, also candy bars were 5 cents each.
I remember when I turned 15 I got a worker's permit to work at Gino's, they started me out making french fries, then hamburgers and manning the cash register, then I gratuated to making the famous Kentucky Fried Chicken and guess what ? the package with the secret herbs and spices came in a PLAIN wrapper with no ingredients listed
I normally worked the day shift but one time they needed me to fill in on the evening shift and any cooked food that was left over at closing we got to bag up and take home for free and it was a lot. Even during the day shift we were allowed to eat whatever we wanted for lunch at no charge !
I also worked on the back of a Softee ice cream truck for a little while and I made sure I made the milkshakes really thick and tried to give a fair amount of ice cream in the cones and sundaes !
Here are some related pics I found online:
Gino's menu 1960
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KFC menu 1969 ________________________________________ McDonald's 1960
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imagine the coins kids might had dropped
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When I was in the 7th grade (1959) the school lunches were 25 cents and that included a carton of milk. Milk alone cost 3 cents.
I usually took my own lunch which was sometimes peanut butter and jelly, but sometimes was deviled ham or veal loaf. Sometimes it was a "thing" called shaved ham. My Thermos bottle was usually filled with milk.
Looking online for pics of vintage old toys and stuff from when I was a kid I came across one simple but real fun thing I had originally forgot about.....
.....the Pea Shooter !!!!
I remember as a kid that one year after having shot peas from my pea shooter in our yard that later I started seeing some pea plants sprout until then I don't think I realized you could plant the peas from a bag of uncooked dry peas and they'd grow
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Another interesting memory from childhood is school supplies, I'm sure some of you remember some of these !
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I had pea shooters when I was a kid. Back in the late 1950's the local sheriff's association sponsored an annual bus trip to the Yale Bowl in New Haven Conn. to see Yale (an Ivy League team) play a football game against another Ivy League team. The bus trip took about an hour and a half along the Connecticut Turnpike ( I-95). some of us kids took our pea shooters along with us plus afull box of those dried peas and when no one was looking we'd shoot peas out the window at passing cars. We did this a couple of years in a row but then one year just before the buses departed the sheriff came on the bus and said that if anyone has a pea shooter to turn them in before we leave or there's be no bus trip. It wa ssort of like when Wyatt Earp or someone would tell the bad guys to turn in their guns !
We turned them over and the bus trip commenced but the ride wasn't as much fun as it used to be.
I remember the school supplies and one of the ones we had was a pencil box. It had a small plastic six inch ruler, a protractor which is something I never had a use for, a compass, another useless object and some really bad crayons that hardly had any color in them. Every September just before the new school season started the local movie theater would put on a special back to school cartoon show and would give out pencil boxes to everyone who attended. The line to get into the theater was a mile long so it was imperative to get there early so you'd be in front of the line. The usual price of admission to a movie was 25 cents but the pencil box promotion cartoon show had an admission price of 35 cents. My mother would always gripe about the extra ten cents admission fee and how the pencil box isn't really free. Seeing 30 episodes of Looney Tunes cartoons was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, higher price or not.
We always had LePages glue around the house, but once Elmer's Glue came about, Lepages seemed to disappear.
The melted ice cream thing is nice, we had a couple of similar gags.....one looked like vomit and the other looked like dog poop. And of course we had those fake spiders to scare someone with.