Thursday, April 16, 2009

School Supplies

Someone at CR 2.0 wanted a list of school supplies from back in the day. I started school in 1954 and compiled a list of this and that--can you think of any other school supplies we used? Cross post on A Very Old Place

1. Big Chief or Alladin Tablets
2. Crayon 16 pack (?) in early grades there were 8 colors, they were big and fat with one flat side
3. Big Husky wooden pencils with real lead
4. Pink Pet erasers
5. Cartridge pens, (fountain pen with nub; bought replacable cartridges)
6. PeeChee folders
7. 3 ring notebooks blue canvas cover w/ color-coded dividers; notebook paper with reinforcements (liitle white canvas circles)
8. purple memeographed handouts (they smelled)
9. metal lunch boxes and thermos' with glass liners (always got broken!)
10.In junior high and high school all textbooks had to be covered with brown paper
11. no backpacks--you just stacked up you stuff and carried the stack either in front of you or if you were very clever on your hip!
12. Sliderules, if you took advance math
13. Chalkboards and chalk
14. Black and white essay books for tests
15. LePage Glue--glass bottle with ruber top, top has a slit in it and you press the top on the paper and the glue came out or white glue (did it have a brush or a paddle) that would harden into a lump and there was always a kid who would eat it.
16. We put all our pencils and stuff in a cigar box.
17. This was the same time as white soxes, brown tie up shoes, petticoats, twin sets, girls never wore pants, Ah those were the days!! I'll add more as I think of more during this trip down memory lane.

5 comments:

Kevin said...

Sorry, even in the 50s pencils used graphite+clay, not lead.

http://www.pencils.com/pencil-information/pencil-history

Kevin said...

Another flub. The smelly sheets were from "ditto machines" or spirit duplicators---the mimeograph was a slightly more expensive process that used a stencil, produced more copies, and did not smell as bad. People were pretty careless about the terms in the 50s and 60s though, and a lot of schools did refer to their ditto machines as mimeographs, even though they weren't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicating_machines

nbosch said...

So all the stuff about lead-poisoning was a bunch of hooey?

nbosch said...

OK, remind me not to invite you to my next party! You sound like some of my gifted students--won't let me get by with a thing!!

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