Lunch in elementary school could be traumatic. In junior high and high school, it was no problem: I brown-bagged it, bringing in a paper sack into which my mother had inserted either a meat loaf sandwich or a tuna sandwich or a peanut-butter-and-strawberry-jelly sandwich (something of the sort) and a little baggie containing three Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. Today, they call them Chips Ahoy but back then, they were just Nabisco Chocolate Chip Cookies. I'd eat, toss the bag and that would be it.
Not so easy back at Westwood Elementary. Back there, if you didn't have a cool lunch box…well, forget it. You might as well paint a big sign on your butt that read "Mock me unmercifully." I don't recall if a bagged lunch suggested you were poor or low-class or boring or just why it was such a social faux pas. All I remember is that whenever my old lunch box had to be retired, I had to get the new one before the next school day. I didn't dare go to class with my eats in a sack.
Lunch boxes had to be replaced with alarming frequency. (So did our Student Teachers.) On our schoolgrounds, both got battered about a lot — enough that I'm amazed any lunch pails from that period still exist, let alone in "collectible" condition. But what was really vulnerable about them was the thermos bottles. Today, I'm told, they're like the black box on an airplane. Back then…drop one and it was history. Heck, just nudge one and it was goner. You'd shake it, hear the inner lining rattle about like broken glass and then pitch it into a trash can. So what did you do if the thermos in your Porky's Lunch Wagon lunch box (I had one) busted? Well, you didn't replace it with a generic thermos; not unless you wanted snide remarks from your fellow pupils. Instead, you had to get your parents to buy you a new lunch box with matching milk container.
This was how it was in first through third grades while I was at Westwood. In fourth grade, they began having someone sell milk at lunchtime — a little carton for a nickel, sold from a cart behind the cafeteria building that they'd been building since I was in Kindergarten. This simplified the process since you no longer needed a thermos at all. This not only spared you replacing the whole lunch box every few weeks, it enabled all our mothers to pack more into our lunch kits. Mine took to adding in fruit and small packets of Laura Scudder's Potato Chips. I think each packet held about four chips.
Then in fifth grade, they finally got the cafeteria building up and running. I'll write about that wrenching experience in the second part of this post, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.