Three Names From the Past

Fads come and go in many areas, including school supplies. Loose leaf notebooks and composition books have come with many different things on their covers, from super heroes and cartoon characters to psychedelic patterns. Each generation has had it's own favorites depending on what was then in vogue or popularity. Even gender was a factor in what the student chose for their own personal use with girls choosing Barbie covers and other female characters. It was not always so. I remember in first grade there was but one option, a three ring binder usually had a blue canvas cover and composition books invariably had the picture of a horse on the cover and the name, of course, was Blue Horse.



The Blue Horse brand of products included loose leaf binders, writing tablets, composition books and loose leaf paper. The Blue Horse also served as a coupon which could be saved to obtain a host of things, similar to the then in vogue S & H Green Stamps and Community Coffee coupons. One of the contests held was for a bicycle pictured in the loose leaf filler above. The ones who sent in the most coupons were eligible for a limited number of bicycles to given away. However, there was one popular item that only took a few coupons to receive and that was the Blue Horse Beanie.

Let's now jump ahead a few years to the early 1960's and another product that was in vogue for a while. How many remember the name Nifty? That was the name of an innovative loose leaf binder that used a magnetic closure device instead of the more common spring closure device. in fact the full name was the Nifty Magnetic Space Saver binder. There were two models; one featured top loading paper and the other the more common side loading. It took some doing to locate them but here are two pictures showing a version of each.



Now that two names are accounted for what is the third one you may ask. Well, we had to get those Nifty binders from some place and one of the more popular places was the local T G & Y. Every city back then had at least one local outlet and it was the place we often went for a host of things, from model airplanes to school supplies. Many a teenagers allowance was probably spent at the Local T G & Y for a host of things that teenagers are wont to buy.


Ah, the memories. They're all gone now except for those few bits of ephemera that still survive. They were part of our past and now are part of our memories.