Day Five-Forty-Four - Cigar Boxes

Where I grew up there were three elementary schools.  I went to Raguet Elementary in first grade.  Then we moved to the other side of town so I went to Fredonia Elementary in second through fifth grade.  At Fredonia, there was a pencil machine.

Probably all schools had them but I really liked getting pencils out of that pencil machine.  They cost a nickle and they had different NFL teams names on them.  Anytime a kid got lucky enough to get a Cowboys pencil they held onto it like it was gold.  If you were lucky enough to have a Cowboys pencil, you only sharpened it when you had to so that you wouldn't sharpen it down past the silver lettering that spelled out Dallas Cowboys. When I put my nickle in the machine it always dispensed a stupid Cincinnati Bengals pencil.  You never had to worry about your Bengals pencil getting stolen out of your cigar box, it was always safe.  We didn't have backpacks back then. Some kids had book bags. But usually only girls had them.  I had a couple of different book bags over the years.  But I never really liked carrying one.  Even then, I knew it was a little dorky to carry a book bag.

But we did have cigar boxes.  The week before school started we would always go down to Community Grocery and ask Mr. Hucklebee for a school box.  He'd have a stack of them under the counter that he would pull out and we would choose the one we liked the best.  They were all the same, so I'm not sure why it mattered.  But it did.  The key to finding a good cigar box was to open it up and smell it. A really good cigar box would keep that cigar scent all year long no matter how much glue spilled in it or was intentionally squirted inside.


On the first day of school you'd arrive with your cigar box, filled with pencils, crayons, scissors and various other supplies.  It would then be stowed in your assigned desk for the remainder of the year. When the teacher said "get your pencils out", 30 cigar boxes would be pulled out of the desks storage areas and open up.  Once a pencil was found, the cigar box would go back where it belonged and we would get to work.

The first few weeks of school, the crayons were stored in their own little box neatly and possibly even in order based on color and placed in the cigar box.  But by October, they were rolling around in the cigar box and the crayon box was a distant memory.  Then when it was time to color something, your entire cigar box had to sit out on your desk with the lid open so that you could chose colors to use.  If you were trying to decide which color to use, you might color on the inside of the lid to see what it looked like.  But that never really worked that well since the lid had a glossy sheen to it and the wax of the crayons didn't do well on a surface like that.

By the end of the school year the cigar box had been colored all over, the lid was probably missing and there were pools of glue in various spots inside.  But surprisingly, it usually lasted the entire year without any need to replace it.  There were a couple of kids at my school who had store bought cigar boxes that they called pencil boxes (snobs).  I'm sure their mom paid a dollar or two for them.  What a waste!  And they didn't even have a picture of King Edward to draw an eye patch on!

I can't remember if my mom had to pay for our cigar boxes.  If she did it was probably a nickle.  Back then everything was a nickle.  I think I had the same cigar box for 1st and 2nd grade.  In those early years, it just sat in your desk all year long.  But in 4th grade, we began changing classrooms for some classes so you carried some of your stuff with you.  The cigar box took a beating when you moved from classroom to classroom.  So in 5th grade the cigar box was replaced with one of those notebook zipper bags.  I hated those things.  It was plastic and went inside a 3 ring binder and all of your pencils, map colors (because by then you were too grown up for crayons), scissors, glue, erasers and even pens went in there.  A few months into the year, the holes would tear and it would start falling out of your notebook as you walked, or it would get a hole in it and you'd be dropping pencils as you walked down the hall.  Then you'd have to go to the office to buy a new pencil and you'd end up with a crummy Bengals pencil.  The only chance you had of someone picking your pencil up in the hallway and returning it to you was if the one you dropped was a Bengals pencil.

The bad thing about having to buy a pencil that you hadn't counted on needing to buy was that you had to do without milk that day since you had to use a nickle of your milk money which was 6 cents for the pencil! There was no disposable income back in the day.  If you needed 6 cents for milk each day, your mom didn't send you to school with a dime.  You went to school with 6 cents.  So there was no saving that 4 cents a couple days in a row so that you could roll the dice on the pencil machine in hopes of getting a coveted Cowboys pencil.  Some kids came to school each day with milk money AND ice cream money.  Lucky bastards!  Mom gave us ice cream money some days.  But that was pretty limited.  Now that I think about it, the fat kids were the ones that usually had ice cream money every day.  If you had to buy a pencil that meant that you had a penny of your milk money left over.  I always saved my penny in my cigar box.  So there were usually a couple of pennies sliding around in there by the end of the year.  They were in there next to the the two inch long former Cincinnati Benagls pencil that had been sharpened so much that it now only read "gals".

Have a happy Wednesday!  I'm going to spend the rest of the day on a Royal Caribbean webinar.