9 School Supplies From the ’50s and ’60s You’ll Instantly Remember

Older desks still had a round hole in the corner where an inkwell sat, a leftover from the days before ballpoints were allowed. You dipped or filled a fountain pen, and if you pressed too hard the nib splayed and the line went fat and blotchy.

Ink got on your fingers, the side of your hand, and sometimes the kid in front of you. Ballpoints were creeping in, but plenty of teachers still insisted a proper hand came from a proper pen.

Wet ink didn’t dry on its own fast enough for an impatient nine-year-old, so you pressed a sheet of soft, spongy blotting paper over what you’d just written. It drank up the extra ink before your sleeve could drag through it.

Half the blotters ended up covered in doodles and backwards mirror-writing. When ballpoint pens took over, the whole ritual just quietly stopped — and a lot of people never noticed it was gone.

The Big Chief writing tablet was where you learned your letters — a thick pad of pulpy, pinkish-tan paper with wide-spaced lines and a dotted guide down the middle so your lowercase letters knew how tall to stand.

The paper was soft enough that a sharp pencil could tear it if you bore down, and it had little flecks of wood right in it. For a whole generation of kids, that cover with the feathered headdress on it just meant “school.”

Before zippered pouches there was a slim wooden box with a lid that slid off the end, and sometimes a little tray underneath that swung out on a rivet. Inside: your pencils, a pink eraser worn round at the edges, maybe a short ruler.

You knew the exact rattle it made in your desk. Some had a picture stamped on top, and the good ones smelled of cedar every time you slid the lid back.

The teacher handed down a stack of freshly run-off worksheets, still cool and slightly damp, printed in that soft purple ink. And every single kid did the same thing without being told: lifted the page to their face and breathed in.

That sharp, sweetish smell was the spirit solvent off the ditto machine, and it faded within an hour or two. Photocopiers eventually made the purple pages disappear, and with them one of the strangest little pleasures of grade school.

Good handwriting wasn’t a talent, it was a drill. Under the Palmer method you filled whole lines with connected ovals and slanted up-and-down “push-pulls,” moving from the shoulder and forearm rather than the fingers.

You did it over and over, and a teacher walked the aisles watching your arm. It was tedious, and left-handers had a rough time of it — but a lot of people who suffered through it can still dash off a signature that looks like copperplate.

If you got as far as the harder math and science classes, there was no calculator to reach for. You had a slide rule — a ruler with a sliding middle piece and a little clear cursor that you lined up to multiply, divide, and find square roots.

It gave you the digits but not the decimal point; you had to keep track of that in your head. Engineers carried them in belt holsters for years. Then the pocket calculator arrived in the early ’70s and the slide rule was gone almost overnight.

Lunch came in a domed steel box printed with a cowboy, a cartoon, or a rocket, with a matching Thermos clipped inside that held soup or milk. The latch never quite stayed shut, and the corners dented the first week you had it.

You picked the design the way you’d pick a team, and it said something about you on the walk to school. The glass liner in the Thermos would shatter if you dropped it, and you’d hear the pieces rattle for the rest of the year.

Bolted to the wall by the door or the window ledge was the cast-metal sharpener with a hand crank. Asking to use it was a fine excuse to get out of your seat, and there was a small art to it — a few turns, pull it out, check the point, a couple more.

You emptied the shavings drawer and got that woody, waxy smell full in the face. Turn too hard and you’d grind a perfectly good pencil down to a stub, which felt like a genuine tragedy at the time.