It’s about time to hang up the swimsuit and draft your list of back-to-school supplies. If you were like other kids headed back to the classroom, that also meant picking out your new lunchbox – or even looking forward to some of your favorite school-provided lunch items, served by women in hairnets (sometimes kindly, sometimes surly) who wielded ice cream scoops

A while back, we covered vintage school lunch boxes, but I’ve always enjoyed those meals supplied to hungry kids thanks to school lunch programs. These programs are likely older than you’d expect – we can trace their beginnings to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they were organized and executed by school-affiliated volunteers. Since this was a volunteer effort, the offerings in those days were humble, cost-effective, and produced in large enough quantities that they could feed many, with soups and stews with rolls often on the menu.

School administrators and teachers alike began to take notice that students who ate their midday meal tended to learn better, so they ramped up their efforts and incorporated more variety, with larger cities like Boston and Philadelphia taking the lead. 

These school lunches didn’t just feed hungry stomachs and thus boost brain power; they also were an effective way to introduce staples of the American diet to the growing number of the nation’s children from immigrant communities.

During the Great Depression, schools were able to feed hungry students with the help of the federal government, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal offering to pay workers to cook and serve food at schools. This helped local farmers, too, since they often had a surplus of crops but fewer buyers. Roosevelt’s New Deal ensured much-needed income to these farmers by buying their crops and also created jobs in school districts nationwide.

The school lunch program, only possible in previous decades thanks to the time, resources, and generosity of myriad communities, became permanent when President Harry S Truman signed the National School Lunch Act into law in 1946. For the next 40 years, the quality, variety, and nutritional value of school lunches entered a golden age. Well-funded school lunch programs had finally become the standard for the American education system, not just an act of charity. Schools began to offer breakfast, too, in 1966, an initiative born of the reality of food insecurity in poorer urban areas.

If you were around in 1976 for the Bicentennial celebration, you know how just about everything that year was drenched in shades of red, white, and blue.

A century before that, when our country marked its first 100 years of existence, similar celebrations sprung up around the country, but the themes of growth and change were much more pervasive. That makes sense in an historical context. In 1876, a presidential election year, Americans showed their patriotism at the polls, with a staggering 82% of the voting-age population coming out to vote. It remains the highest voter turnout in our history.

The country’s Centennial anniversary overlapped with the very first World’s Fair. For the fair, it only made sense that Philadelphia be selected as one of the exhibition cities. Outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant decreed that the original Declaration of Independence, housed in Washington, D.C., be displayed in Philly for the occasion.

When it arrived, visitors to the exhibit couldn’t help but notice the document’s poor condition. Public reception to its decay was so noticeable that the heads of the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Depart-ment of the Interior convened and eventually created the National Archives, tasked with the collection and preservation of the country’s most precious and historically significant treasures.

Meanwhile, new inventions from some of America’s greatest minds were on display, too, such as the first telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, as well as Thomas Edison’s automatic telegraph. These giants of technology showed us the best our country had to offer the modern world a century after its founding.

The invention that had the lion’s share of the attention – and stood as a testament to American industrialism and craftsmanship -- was the Corliss steam engine; though it had been invented more than two decades prior, a special Corliss Centennial Engine had been produced by the Corliss Steam Engine Co. This special engine with rotative beams powered nearly all of the exhibits on display; President Grant and the Emperor of Spain switched on the engine during the fair’s opening ceremony, and the device stayed on display for the entire duration of the six-month event.

By the time of America’s 100th birthday, the Civil War had been over for more than a decade, and many saw the celebrations that popped up around the country as symbols of an America on its continued path to healing. The fair’s exhibitions, too, were proof of America’s forward movement in the aftermath of its darkest days.

The rhythm and blues standard “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” has been sung by motorists (and high school jazz choirs) since 1946. But no matter how many renditions of it exist, from Bobby Troup’s original to Bing Crosby to the great Nat King Cole, singing the song isn’t quite as thrilling as actually driving the world-famous highway – though it certainly does get you in the mood for it.

This year on Nov. 11, Route 66 celebrates 100 years of satisfying our wanderlust for traveling west. One of the original highways in the U.S. Numbered Highways System, it weaves through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Cali-fornia. And though it faced decline as the Interstate High-way System began the nation’s traffic to run through its cement veins starting in the 1950s, portions of Route 66 have survived, being rebranded as a National Scenic Byway under the official name “Historic Route 66.” We, of course, have other names for it, including “The Mother Road”

 Route 66 is a physical manifestation of the country’s triumphant arrival into the modern era, a place where adventure exists not only at its ending point but also in every town along the way, culminating in sights we’d only heard or read about. Case in point -- advertising from the road’s early days encouraged us to take Route 66 to the 1932 Summer Olympics in California, where you’d see dazzling feats by athletes who would go on to become stars of the big screen, such as Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. Route 66 would also go on to be immortalized in American author John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl classic “The Grapes of Wrath.”

For midcentury American travelers, the Mother Road held wonder by the roadside, wherever you were headed. Motels shaped like Native American teepees. Full-service filling stations. Greasy spoon diners and cafes staffed by waitresses with beehive hairdos. And neon signs beckoning you from every direction (by the way, if your travels take you through Tulsa, OK, be sure to stop by the Route 66 Neon Sign Park and treat your eyeballs to a slice of colorful retro roadside delights; there’s a neon sign park in Roberts, MO, too).

Get your favorite cat’s eye polished, because in this issue of Discover Vintage America, we’ll be doing a deep dive into the history of marbles (and, in case you didn’t know, the phrase “lose my marbles” in reference to losing one’s mental faculties, originated in the late 19th century, about the same time as glass marbles themselves). But before we do, let’s take a quick look at other popular American games in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As work hours decreased in the 19th century, Americans began being able to enjoy a bit more free time. During the Civil War, board games began to fill that gap, taking the nation’s collective mind off the conflict at home. The machinery developed in factories during the Industrial Revolution allowed for more board games to be produced – and with increased speed of production, those games became more affordable to the average American family (in the decades following the war, physical activity options increased as well, with basketball being invented by Dr. James Naismith in 1891). Checkers, chess, dominoes, and backgammon were widely popular.

One might consider the second half of the 19th century to be the golden age of board games, in fact, with the earlier games based on Christian themes of morality and faith; others still were based on nursery rhymes and fables. With the Gilded Age, meanwhile, came board games that placed a focus on building material wealth.

Other games of the late Victorian era were designed to refine one’s habits and behavior in a civilized world. For instance, card games made to help young men and women in the early stages of courting were equipped with topics of conversation to be used as icebreakers, taking some of the awkwardness out of dating and helping the players to become more witty and even flirtatious.

In popular culture, the game Hoop and Stick endures as a symbol of a 19th-century child’s limited, boredom-inducing options for play; in the late 1800s, however, it was popular with America’s children.d across the U.S.).

Contact Corbin Crable at editor@discovervintage.com​

It seems like there’s a day and a month designated to just about every cause, awareness, and activity out there. This month, we honor the handmade with National Handmade Day, which is celebrated each year on the first Saturday in April. So grab your glitter and yarn, roll up your sleeves, and get ready to create.

National Handmade Day is a time to honor the tradition of making unique, one-of-a-kind items with both your hands and your heart. Whether it’s toys, soaps, pottery, jewelry, baked goods, or woodworks, they are material expressions of an artist’s talents, made to bring a smile to the faces of family members, friends, or customers. These handmade products could be the continuation of a family tradition or a hobby you just decide to adopt on your own. Either way, they’re completely unique, creative items you’ve brought to life with the utmost care.

National Handmade Day was first celebrated in 2018, so the observance is still pretty new. The practice of creating goods by hand, however, has been practiced by our ancestors for millennia. In the centuries before the birth of Christ, potters and metalworkers in Greece created ceramics and items in bronze, each of them signed by their maker.

In the Medieval era in Europe, guilds formed, bringing these artisans together, everyone from weavers to carpenters. These guilds were founded to regulate prices and quality of product. During these years, crafters made making and selling their creations their entire livelihood.

Everything changed during the Industrial Revolution. Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, inventions such as the power loom led to factories opening and the shuttering of smaller craft stores. Machines – and with them, the ability to produce a greater number of items in a shorter time span -- threatened the livelihood of artisans whose income was dependent on sales of their one-of-a-kind items.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, figures such as American craftsman and furniture maker Gustav Stickley promoted the benefits and quality of handmade pieces over mass-produced goods, joining a movement designed to breathe new energy into handmade creations and to lessen the power given to machinery and automation (today, of course, authorized dealers of Stickley furniture can now be found across the U.S.).

Contact Corbin Crable at editor@discovervintage.com​