Most everyone back in the old days carried some sort of a pail for their school lunches. A few of the kids used brown bags. Seemingly, the favorite dinner pail was an empty gallon syrup bucket. It took some time for our family of five to use up a gallon of syrup. When Lila started to school in 1938 there were three of us Caywood kids needing a dinner pail. By this time Willis and I already had older pails so Lila got the newest one emptied. I think Willis and the Riley boys had some friendly bucket fights on our mile and a half walk together to Mt View. Wllis’s bucket had some dents and Lila and mine didn’t. The syrup buckets with tight lids were secure enough to keep our lunches fresh as well as dry during rainy or snowy trips to school.
The Caywood lunches consisted mostly of homemade bread and butter topped with either plum butter or peach butter and perhaps a cookie on the side. Everything was wrapped in wax paper. Sometimes we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We felt honored when Mama bought small cans of potted meat for sandwiches. She spread it so thin we yearned for more meat on our bread, but times were hard and we had to go sparingly on such a deluxe meal. Mama made her homemade bread into much larger loaves than other Mom’s did, so basically we were getting more bread than plum butter or potted meat.
When we arrived at school our dinner pails were placed in a large cabinet. A few times ants got into the cabinet and ruined the lunches that were bagged; Not ours!
One time we girls got together and laid all of our lunches out on a cloth in a small grove of trees that was located on the school grounds. We played like it was a picnic. We usually ate at our desks. I felt so lucky to get a sandwich made of store bread and lunchmeat. The girl who got my peanut and jelly sandwich bread felt just as lucky to get Mom’s scrumptious homemade bread too. There was only one piece of cake. I was too shy to grab it, but I surely wanted too. Such fun memories!!!
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