Jim writes:

"When I was in junior high school, I had a red bicycle with saddle-bag type baskets on either side of the rear wheel. My schoolbooks fit into one side basket and the lunchbox went on the other side.

My lunchbox wasn't a theme lunchbox; no pictures of movie stars or comic book characters. This was in the middle fifties and there may have been some Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes available at Woolworth's or McCrory's, but a seventh grader wouldn't carry anything like that to junior high school. Definitely not Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

"No, I had a big black lunch box with the kind of curved lid you could put a thermos in. When I was a kid my mother went out to work and my father stayed home and washed and ironed and cooked. As a result, I never acquired what I suppose are the usual attitudes toward sex roles. It was only years later that I came to understand how deeply and rigidly ingrained these attitudes are in so many people. Washing dishes, ironing a shirt, vacuuming the floor were not, to me, things that only females did. And Dad was a pretty good cook.

"Dad would sometimes fill up a wide-mouth thermos with Chun King chow mein and wrap a handful of noodles in wax paper (no ZipLoc baggies then), and add an apple or a banana. The top of thermos was big enough to mix the noodles and the chow mein in, and I'd leave the mixture to sit for while to soften the noodles. Otherwise they'd tend to gouge up the roof of my mouth for the rest of the afternoon.

"We got enough time for lunch so that after we'd finished eating, we could go out and stand around under the trees outside the cafetorium, and do all the things that kids our age have to do to get through adolescence. Then the lunchbox went back into the locker. I still have the old Master combination lock I got for that locker. I found it not long ago. 37-19-25 — still worked.

"At three o'clock the lunchbox came out of the locker and got loaded back on the bicycle. Halfway along the way home was a little mom and pop candy and soft drink place that the Seven-Eleven and Circle K chains have long since driven out of business, and the group of us riding home together would stop and get a big Coke for a dime. If we said we were going to drink it there, we didn't have to pay the two cent deposit on the bottle, so we'd sit on the bench and look through the lunchboxes to see if there was anything left and sip our Cokes and burp."