Smart dining

In addition to containing shirts, pants,  etc., my two bedroom closets have sort of a flea market, time capsule feel to them, thanks to a collection of stored memorabilia dating to, and in some cases before, my earliest days.

A couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to rummage through some of the items — I was looking, no joke, for a box of Duncan yo-yos, and actually found it. And of course in the process of searching for the yo-yos, I came upon any number of other artifacts from days gone by, including:

– Two large three-ring binders full of baseball cards from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s.

– The Coors mirror I won at a Rose Festival arcade game in 1982.

– A single-shot, spring-powered Marksman BB pistol, still in the box it came in, that had been a boyhood possession of my now 63-year-old brother-in-law Denny. The gun looks quite real and has a lot of heft to it, but it shoots a BB about as hard as you could throw one; should I ever need this particular weapon for self-defense, I’m going to rely on bluffing followed by pistol-whipping.

– And, the gem of this particular hunt, the lunch pail that accompanied me as I entered first grade at Riverside Grade School in September 1969. Here are some pics:

Get Smart has always been one of my favorite shows, and thus did I love that lunch box — which came, as all of them did back then, with a glass-lined vacuum tube for transporting your beverage of choice (which in my case was milk, but only because you couldn’t put my favorite drink, Coca-Cola, inside the tube due to the carbonation).

Of course, like every other classmate with a cool metal lunch pail depicting one TV show or another — Sea Hunt, or maybe The Mod Squad — I dropped and broke the drink container within about three days. We were 6 years old, for crying out loud; how could we possibly be expected not to drop and break them?

Anyway, I used that lunch pail for a couple years, until I decided I wanted to be like my big brothers and carry my lunch in a brown paper sack. In case you were wondering, I brought my lunch from home on probably 95 percent of my school days from kindergarten through OSU; I believe I ate a Velveeta cheese sandwich for lunch every day of the fourth grade.

I did, though, regularly buy fries and a milkshake in the Putnam High cafeteria, and at Rowe Junior High, I always bought lunch on the days they served pizza; it was surprisingly good, reminiscent of what I had eaten at Mazzi’s in Corvallis while visiting my college student brothers.

Btw, striking an early — and completely unintentional — blow for environmentalism back in the days when truckloads of enormous logs rolled incessantly down Oregon highways, I tried to make a single paper sack last an entire school year. This was most easily done when I’d gotten my hands on the kind of sack a hardware store would use for nails; that type was very, very sturdy.