We used to drink a lot of it in elementary school in Lorain while I was growing up. The packaging – namely, those uniquely square cartons with the lid that you had to bend back to get a straw into – left quite an impression on me. Why? Because some of them had cartoons on them.
The photo above (courtesy of Todd Franklin’s fantastic neatocoolville flickr collection) shows one of those boxes.
Although this carton has Steve Canyon on it, the one I remember the most was the one with my favorite comic strip character: Al Capp's Lil’ Abner.
Decades after I last saw one of the boxes, I still remembered the panel with Li’l Abner. He was shown on one side of the panel, happily heading off to work carrying a lunch box. On the other side of the panel was a drawing of Joe Btfsplk, the unlucky Dogpatch character with the perpetual dark cloud over him. The headline was something like: "Which Will Be You? The guy with the high school diploma and a job? Or Joe Btfsplk?”
For years, I have been trying to find a picture of the Li’l Abner carton online. I was unsuccessful in my quest, until I located the whole series of cartoon panels on the timepassagesnostalgia website.
Here is the Li’l Abner panel. I was pretty darn close to remembering it word for word.
Special thanks to Ron Toth and his Time Passages Nostalgia Company for use of these images. Check out his website (here) featuring these and other series of milk carton graphics, including U. S. Presidents, States, Dates in Space and Great Moments in American History. Some of these vintage carton panels are still for sale, and who knows? – they may be the only remaining sample of these still in existence!
6 comments:
I remember those cartons from lunch at Hawthorne Junior High, which was known far and wide for being WAY cooler than Masson.
We never had milk in cardboard containers, which made more sense since a glass bottle was dropped at least once a week in the cafeteria. Never knew they existed back then, and they look pretty neat.
I still have one that was a bank. Oh Alan Hawthorne cool school but not as cool Longfellow Longhorns! LOL Rae
School Lucnch Program?
I thought that was only a few years old, not that old.
I grew-up in Sheffield Lake and went to the schools there and in Sheffield, we always took a lunch.
Wow. I gasped when I saw the photo of the milk carton. I haven't thought of those in almost 50 years and immediately upon seeing it remembered trying to peel up those silver tabs.
The influence they had on me was the line drawings of the US presidents. I would clip each one out and try to complete the set, which probably went up to Nixon!
As a youngster growing up in the mid-1960s while attending Oak View Elementary School in Bloomfield, New Jersey I fondly remember our mid-morning 10:00 am milk break.
Each schoolday we would receive our milk in a personalized small cube-shaped wax cardboard container with an aluminum foil seal that had to be broken before the corner flap could be folded back to open the container.
These milk containers featured three basic educational themes: U. S. Presidents, NASA space flights, and comic strip characters.
The presidential and space flight themes were interesting, but the theme most memorable to me was the comic strip one featuring Steve Canyon, Joe Palooka, and most especially Li'l Abner.
Although not being familiar with the history of any of these three comic strips the images of these characterizations stayed with me to this day.
I recall during a milk break of once attempting to pronounce Joe Btfsplk's last name and being informed by my teacher that due to an absence of vowels the name was unpronounceable.
But the public service message about completing one's education that all three comic strips conveyed was timeless, and hopefully encouraged enough children to do just that.
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