Old Skool
New shoes were always an essential part of starting a new school year. I have distinct childhood memories of visiting a little shoe store in Massachusetts that had a “carousel” of horses you
pedaled around a track while you waited for the salesperson to get the correct size shoe after they had measured your feet. And you couldn’t wait to show off your newfound footwear to your friends! Over the years, Mary Janes and Buster Browns evolved into Candies, Pappagallos, Doc Martens, and Timberlands. Keds and Converse are still out there with Tretorn, Nike, Reebok, Addidas and so many others on the casual and sports scene. Over the years, our tastes in shoes have ranged wildly, spanning everything from Old Skool checkered Vans to Air Jordans and docksiders to duck boots. Even mocs, clogs, and ballet flats have had their moments. There’s nothing like a new school year to see current trends, styles, and hot new sellers.
While Millennials and Gen X revived the popularity of the “Chucks” first introduced by Converse
in 1932, and have successfully carried the All-Stars into Gen Y, Boomers carry fond memories of another old “gym shoe.” Believe it or not, those two tone lace-up oxfords known as saddle shoes began life as a sport shoe, and, my, what a history they have had!
Sporting goods company, Spalding, introduced the “original saddle oxford” in 1906 as a gym shoe. The innovation of the shoe was that the overlaying saddle made the flexor area, where the most stress occurs, stronger. By the 1920s, saddles were typically worn to play sports like tennis, hockey, and badminton. They were a cheaper alternative to the two-tone brogue spectators preferred for golf. The canvas shoes of the time, known as sneakers, weren’t considered durable enough for exercise. Acceptable as dress shoes, saddles became part of school uniforms, with their colors often matched to school colors.
As saddle shoes became popularly adopted by youth, the new style soon met with broad condemnation from doctors, shoe clerks, grandmothers, and even clergy. Doom was predicted for girls’ feet (ironic, considering the popularity of high heels for women) because flat, broad-toed shoes, they said, were bad for the arches. Spalding incorporated high quality rubber soling to improve traction and make the shoes more lightweight. When kids started to wear saddles as street shoes, they discovered another problem: the dirt that accumulated on the soles with everyday wear tracked in and marked up gym floors. Eventually gym shoes with lighter rubber soles were introduced, leaving saddle shoes for mostly dress wear.
Interestingly, during the Jazz Age, fans showed support for racial harmony and greater acceptance of black musicians by wearing the two-tone footwear. During the Depression, saddles crossed over to everyday wear, and girls wore them throughout the physical culture craze of the late 30s. Throughout the war years, saddles were a common sight on swing dancing floors, but brown replaced the black leather dye which rationing made scarce. By the 50s, teens continued to wear saddle shoes, following in the fashion footsteps of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Marilyn Monroe. From the 70s onwards, the fashion for saddle shoes dwindled, sales dropped off, and manufacturers discontinued production of the two tone classics. Over the years, when warehouse caches of saddles shoes have been discovered, they’ve been snapped up by entrepreneurs and are sold now as retro collectables. With the resurgence of the popularity of Grease, 50s sock hop themed parties, and retro fashion trends, don’t be too surprised if you see them around today.
Satchels to Backpacks
When it comes to carrying books to school, the truth is that Boomers and Gen X had it easier than Millennials and Zoomers. Often textbooks were supplied in school and didn’t need to go home at all. And for many years, students also were able to stow their belongings in lockers
during the school day and overnight to keep from having to carry unnecessary books between classes and home. More and more schools have gotten rid of lockers entirely. Now we make wheeled backpacks and issue warnings about weight-load of backpacks for kids. It’s a far cry from the times when our grandparents or their parents carried books to school using a simple strap—even if they had to walk ten miles uphill through the snow both ways.
In the 1950s, single strap book bags, worn cross-body, were the standard school bags. Leather backpacks weren’t uncommon. The 1960s saw the emergence of soft leather briefcase style bags and leather bags with short handles, a style now seen in many modern purses. These satchels were all the rage in the 1960s-70s, and were sometimes made in a style to be worn on the back. Around 1969, the name of the game changed with the introduction of the JanSport Ski & Hike bag, which first became popular with University of Washington students and made its way to other college campuses. In 1982, L.L. Bean introduced the Book Pack, and it quickly became the company’s top selling item. From that time on, JanSport and L.L. Bean continued modifying and improving their backpack styles for student use. Nylon backpacks were the predominant style in the 1980s and 90s. The introduction of novelty characters and smaller sizes made them popular even for the youngest students.
While in the past couple decades, backpacks have continued to get bigger and more tech-savvy
to accommodate laptops, tablets, chargers, and cords, there’s been criticism too. Pediatricians and chiropractors recommend that students carry less than 15% of their body weight in a backpack; however, at nearly all grade levels from 1-12, the combined average weight of textbooks for History, Math, Science, and Reading/Language Arts exceeds this percentage. According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, during the 2011-12 school year more than 13,700 students, aged 5 to 18, were treated for backpack-related injuries. An interesting development? There has been an increase in the use of tablets to replace textbooks. The 54% decrease in backpack-related injuries in 2016 is credited at least in part to that trend. It will be interesting to see what emerges following the virtual learning experience of 2020.
Cafeteria Cool
While lunches have been available in school cafeterias for all generations, there are those who choose to bring their own lunches from home, at least on occasion. Today, there are all sorts of insulated totes and mini soft coolers for kids and adults in colorful designs or decorated with favorite characters. Japanese-inspired bento boxes with their neat little compartments for a stylish lunch à la Molly Ringwald in Breakfast Club are also popular. But can anything ever top kids’ lunch boxes of the 1950s-1990s?
Industrial-style metal lunch boxes with matching vacuum bottles had been in use, mostly by factory workers, from about 1920 on, and whimsical children’s versions popped up in the mid-20s. In the 30s, popular brands started to jump in the market, and, in 1934, Mickey Mouse became the first character to appear on a lunch box.The problem with lunch boxes, however, was that they were very durable and long-lasting, so once a child had one, there was no need for another for quite some time.
In 1950, lunch box manufacturer Aladdin came up with a brilliant idea to increase the demand for new lunch boxes by featuring popular television and radio characters. When they introduced a red lacquered box with a picture of Hopalong Cassidy, they sold 600,000 units the first year. Characters like Howdy Doody, the Lone Ranger and Barbie followed, and the trend for popular television and cartoon characters continued. Now, even if there was nothing wrong with their old lunch box, kids wanted a new lunch box every year to keep up with the newest characters! TV, cartoon characters, and superheroes weren’t the only lunch box stars; The Beatles became the first band immortalized on a lunch box in 1965, and four years later, Neil Armstrong’s lunar landing was celebrated with custom astronaut lunch boxes. While the simple rectangular boxes were initially made of tin and often had a matching thermos for beverages or soup, they transitioned to plastic in the mid-1980s.
Georgia happens to be the site of the largest lunch box museum in the world. Rivermarket Antique Mall in Columbus is where you can find Allen Woodall, Jr.’s collection of more than 3,500 classic lunch boxes and original lunch box art. The amassed assortment of vintage and rare lunch boxes has been featured on Roadside America, The Food Network, and is recognized by the Smithsonian. If you’re feeling that back to school nostalgia, it might be worth a road trip!
Making Mistakes
Inevitably learning includes making mistakes. People tried to correct mistakes they made while writing even before the eraser was invented. Using wax tablets allowed marks to be removed. To remove ink from parchment or papyrus, bits of rough stone like sandstone or pumice were often used. Another option, which sounds thoroughly disgusting, was using soft bread. That changed in 1770, when natural philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestly (the man who discovered oxygen) described "a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil." The substance, initially called India gum, became known as rubber.
Although Priestly discovered rubber's erasing properties, it's British engineer Edward Nairne who is generally credited with developing and marketing the first rubber eraser in Europe. Nairne inadvertently picked up a piece of rubber instead of breadcrumbs and accidentally discovered rubber's erasing properties. It’s Priestly who gets credit for naming rubber, from the act of rubbing that one needed to perform to erase. The name ended up generally applying to the construction material of the erasers than to the erasers themselves. Unfortunately, these erasers crumbled easily, were sensitive to weather, and smelled bad.
After 1839, when Charles Goodyear invented and patented vulcanization, a method of curing rubber to make it more durable, erasers made of this sturdier rubber then become a household item. The first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil was issued in 1858 to Hyman Lipman of Philadelphia. It was later held to be invalid because it was merely the combination of two things, without a new use. Interestingly, pencils with handy built-in erasers on the tops are a largely American phenomenon. Pumice, made from volcanic ash, is added to pink pencil-toppers and Pink Pearls to add abrasiveness. Now many erasers are made with vinyl and shaped into novelty items.
Correcting mistakes made with ink still remained a frustrating problem, especially for secretaries who made typos that they could not fix on typewriters. It was Bette Nesmith Graham who came to the rescue here. Graham, a divorced single mom working as a secretary and also making money with art and modeling, created a solution for those dreaded typed mistakes by tapping into her artistic background. She used fast-drying white tempera paint and a watercolor brush to obscure the typos.
Nesmith Graham called her concoction “Mistake Out,” and continued to work on perfecting the formula. In order to keep her job, the sales of the correction fluid she made to other secretaries and, later, to wholesalers, were kept secret. As her business grew and her son, Michael, got older, she paid the teen and his friends $1 an hour to work out of her garage, filling nail polish
bottles with liquid and affixing labels on them by hand. Four years after coming up with the idea, Graham’s private company ownership slipped out to her employer and she was fired. This gave her the time to devote herself fully to the business and she applied for a patent, also securing clients like General Electric and IBM. Within 10 years, she opened an automated plant and, by 1975, the company made 25 million bottles of what became known as Liquid Paper per year. In 1979, she sold the company to the Gillette Corporation for $47.5 million, and sadly, died unexpectedly of a stroke six months later. Bette’s son, Michael, made a name for himself in the world as well; he was the hat-wearing member of The Monkees, the musical group spawned by a television show.
Millennials and Zoomers have little concern with mistakes. Smartphones and word processing programs have autocorrect. Mistakes are corrected even before they're sent. There’s the added layer of spell check and grammar check for writers. And, not only do pencils have erasers, there are pens with erasable ink. Such progress!
Evolution of Writing
No discussion of back to school essentials would be complete without touching on the evolution of writing from Baby Boomers through Generation Z. We won’t get into how writing began as ink scratched onto parchment with quills or learning letters on slates that each student hung around their neck. No. We all started out with Ticonderoga #2 pencils and Pink Pearl erasers, composition books, Crayola crayons, and a pencil case (maybe even one of those cool roll-top ones). Classrooms had pencil sharpeners affixed to the wall or the teacher’s desk and you had to get permission from the teacher to use it. It doubled as a fashion runway where you could show off those sweet new shoes or maybe a sassy new haircut in front of the class.
Pencils and sharpener
Pens were usually your standard BIC crystal ballpoints with blue or black ink. Red was reserved for your teachers. But if you showed up with one of those fancy 4-color pens (first introduced in France by BIC in 1970) that you could click between blue, black, red, and green, you took things to a whole new level of cool. You might also get that pen taken away for over-clicking! Felt tip pens and roller balls with smooth ink, and later, gel inks, were also available. Pens now have ink in a rainbow of colors and trendy metallic shades, but these are widely frowned upon by teachers for class work. Don’t forget your Sharpies and highlighters too!
Bic pen
Notebook paper in standard wide and college rule hasn’t evolved much. Long gone are the practice books for cursive and spelling books. Most schools no longer teach penmanship; after all, it’s not on a standardized test. Big, bulky three ring binders and loads of folders were replaced by Trapper Keeper organizers. Boring file folders used to take a creative hand to decorate, but now they’re printed with pictures of favorite movie, television, and cartoon characters, and there are notebooks to match. Black and white marbled composition books have not gone out of vogue and are still included on most middle and high school school supply lists.
Boomers and Gen X teens knew the pain of timed typing tests (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.) and making sure there was enough correcting ribbon on the IBM Selectric to get through the dreaded ten-page essay. If not, we thanked God for Bette Nesmith Graham! By the time Gen X kids made it to college, essays and term papers were completed on a home PC or in the computer lab in the library and stored on a floppy disk and stowed in your backpack to go from place to place. If there wasn’t a printer free, you might have headed over to Kinko’s or another open-all-night copy center to print out your master work and have the requisite copies made. Milennials and Zoomers, on the other hand, were practically born with a keyboard in hand. They learned typing skills without ever touching a typewriter, through video games and learning programs.
Home computers and laptops have rendered computer labs obsolete and now everyone has their own printer, although we may use them more for photos than writing assignments. Email, DropBox, and cloud storage make it easy to submit a paper that never actually makes it to paper in the literal sense.
Tablets and iPads continue this incredible technological evolution. Lightweight, easily portable, and user-friendly, tablets can store books and educational programs, while also acting as a writing/drawing device. You can write directly on the screen with a stylus to fill in worksheets, take notes, or draw. Programs turn handwriting into typed copy. When you factor in the camera and video capability, with programs like FaceTime, Skype, and Zoom, it’s clear how the tablet and laptops can be a full-featured classroom portal. In 2020, for many, that’s exactly what they have been.