Charlotte County Florida Weekly

Vintage lunchbox purse has reader saying, ‘It was mine!’

COLLECTOR’S CORNER



A reader says this decoupage lunchbox purse may be one she decorated, then donated for a rummage sale decades ago in Connecticut. PHOTOS BY SCOTT SIMMONS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

A reader says this decoupage lunchbox purse may be one she decorated, then donated for a rummage sale decades ago in Connecticut. PHOTOS BY SCOTT SIMMONS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

If there’s one thing of which I have been reminded lately, it is this: You cannot put a value on a memory.

But memory and, by proxy, association, are much of what may validate a collector’s desire to acquire or to hold onto heirlooms.

It especially hit home for me after readers responded to a column published in Sept. 25-26 editions of Florida Weekly.

In that column, I featured a lunchbox that had been decorated in decoupage, with clippings from magazines of the day — pictures of lipstick and makeup cover one side, mod headlines spell out “Love” and entreat the reader to “Be a Shapely Girl.” Simon & Garfunkel cover one end of the box and surfer boys ride waves across the lunchbox lid.

It all speaks to another era, and it clearly looked familiar to one woman.

“I just now sat down on my couch and opened up last week’s edition of Florida Weekly that my husband picked up at Ski’s House of Breakfast and I’m totally astonished to see the decoupaged lunchbox that I made in Connecticut in the late 1960s!” wrote Paula Fee of Punta Gorda.

 

 

I will have to allow Ms. Fee to see the purse in person to learn whether it is indeed her creation.

What’s the likelihood of that?

Regardless, decoupage was an art form in which folks of all ages engaged — I still remember the retired women of my neighborhood turning out plaques and purses.

Ms. Fee, a teen at the time, was no exception.

“Way back then, my sister and I did crafts, and ‘decoupaging’ was but one of many,” she wrote. “I can visualize the bottle of decoupage medium and recall the not unpleasant scent!”

The pocketbooks stand out in her memory.

“My sister made a decoupage purse out of a cigar box (adding a rope handle), and the metal lunch bucket, which our dad once used and had stored in our basement, was my purse project,” she remembered.

A half-century of time has yellowed the varnish that seals the designs on the lunchbox I bought, but it would have been quite colorful when new.

 

 

“I received many compliments on my unique creation, but it couldn’t hold as much stuff that I ‘needed’ to carry once I was in college,” Ms. Fee wrote. “Ultimately, I donated it to my church’s rummage sale and it seems to have taken a trip to Florida!”

Another reader gave me some additional context.

“This was the CRAZE back in the late ’60s maybe early ’70s! You cannot believe how well the hardware stores were doing because everyone was running to buy them (no Target, Walmart or Amazon in those days)!! They were selling out of the lunchboxes as soon as they were put on the shelves!” Nancy Sturman of Fort Myers mused in an email.

She also pored through magazines for images to use on her lunchbox purse.

“We used Glamour, Seventeen, and all the other popular magazines of those days,” she remembered. “I loved

Yardley makeup, so I am sure mine had

Yardley makeup ads on it.”

Ms. Sturman said she held onto her purse for many years but feared it was discarded during a move.

But at least it exists in memory.

“I just sent this article to my friends, since we all made one,” she wrote. “And, yes, we lined them with felt. On mine I put a chain, so I could use it as a shoulder bag.”

Oh, so practical.

Like so many heirlooms, these creations come from objects that have little value — on its own, a lunchbox might bring a few dollars in a resale shop. But combine that ordinary lunchbox with imaginatively placed images from 50 years ago, and you have a time capsule of sorts, one that looks back to when its creators were young and had their lives ahead of them.

How sweet are the memories! ¦

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