You’d see them crowding the subways and buses at rush hour. Big, powerful men straight out of a Carl Sandburg poem: reading their newspapers in the morning, soaked with sweat in the evening but always clenching a lunch box in their ham-fisted left hand. From the depths of The Great Depression through the early 1960s, American cities were rebuilt by an army of craftsmen, tradesmen and construction workers, fueled both by a beneficent blend of government and private funding and massive quantities of sandwiches and coffee, carried to the jobsite in vault-like steel containers. The term “Lunch Box” doesn’t seem adequate here: these were spacious steel sarcophagi, capable of holding a quart-sized Thermos in their lid and a larder of sandwiches and snacks below. These lunch pails were as tough as the men who carried them…thick, cold-rolled steel clad in bright green enamel. Serious. Built to last a lifetime then handed down to future generations.
The term “Lunch Box” doesn’t seem adequate here: these were spacious steel sarcophagi, capable of holding a quart-sized Thermos in their lid and a larder of sandwiches and snacks below. These lunch pails were as tough as the men who carried them…thick, cold-rolled steel clad in bright green enamel. Serious. Built to last a lifetime then handed down to future generations.
America’s Blue Collar greatness is long-passed, eviscerated by politicians, the decline of unions and America’s inevitable transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. The steel lunch pail has likewise been replaced by lightweight, ultra-efficient zippered bags decked with air-tight containers and insulated liners. And yet, though no longer ubiquitous, the steel lunch pail still survives, a timeless connection to the glory days when the American worker broke his back feeding his family and building the greatest cities in the greatest country in the world.