The Trapper Keeper (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Trapper Keeper (2017)

mentalfloss.com

64 pointsStratoscope27 comments

This line is curious:

> Folders with vertical pockets, called PeeChees (as in, peachy keen), had been around since the 1940s and were sold on the West Coast, but they had never made the leap across the Rockies—so Crutchfield was doubtful. “I said, ‘They only sell on the West Coast, and what’s the real benefit of a vertical pocket?’”

I know a lot of products are regional, but how can these things stay confined to one side of the country for decades?

I had Trapper Keepers in elementary and junior high school. When I started high school, I switched to 3 or 4 PeeChee folders duct taped together as a makeshift binder. It was a cheap way to signal how much "I didn't care."

The world was very different before the Internet.

It was different before air travel was affordable to the masses.

It was different when long-distance phone calls between states were significant expenses, and you tried to keep call length down to a minute or two.

Yeah, I remember all those things (well, I was too young to know the price of a coach ticket, but I do remember no Internet and having to ask permission before making a long-distance call)

I just looked up the maker of the PeeChee, and it was originally a company based in Michigan. Maybe the man quoted in the article was being loose with the dividing line?

A lot of products had national distribution back then, so I'm inferring from the quoted passage that PeeChee folders were just more popular on the West Coast vs. the rest of the country. But why?

Long distance, ugh, if you made a friend while on vacation you knew you weren't going to be able to talk to them much if they didn't live in your town. Dad would give us the 'death stare' if the phone bill came in with long distance charges on it.

Not in the States, but in my neck of the woods, variations on the Duo-Tang filled more or less the same niche in the '60s and '70s. They could be had with inside cover pockets in addition to the three-ring binding fasteners and with three-ring punched "spines" to be added to a more substantial binder. So you had an expandable notebook (that could hold plain, lined and graph paper as appropriate for the page) along with holders for loose scraps - and turning in your notebooks now and again for marking was a thing.

The article needs a fact check. Pee-Chees existed in the midwest ages ago. They were first introduced in Michigan.

I have no idea about the veracity of the rest, but reader beware.

Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s, I was very aware that trends from California took 1 to 3 years to make it to Milwaukee. My wife, a native Arizonan, had several fads sweep through her school years before mine (most recently, we talked about hyper color shirts, she had one in third grade, I never saw one until 5th).

We’re on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and I feel like my attitude and constitution tend to have more Gen X similarities while she tends to show more Millenial attributes (slightly). I’ve often wondered if that cultural delay affects the generation with which people on the borders identify.

National distribution in the U.S. is an immense affair. Beyond the expense of advertising in local markets, it took the intensive development of several layers of massive infrastructure projects before we've arrived at today's level of "effortless" distribution. The principle problem is that the United States has no domestic East-West waterway option. No matter how good your rail and road shipping system is (and the U.S. has among the best in the world for freight), you can fit a lot of train's worth of goods into a single big container ship. Rail also only gets you so far, as you need local trucking links, large inter-modal warehouses and so-on.

What really happened was the rise of the trucking industry in the late 70s and early 80s coinciding with the rise of big-box stores like Walmart. This built all of the secondary and tertiary infrastructure -- and capacity -- to move whatever stuff you wanted wherever you wanted, pretty cheaply.

However, there's also two major East-West barriers in the U.S., the Mississippi river, which has largely been overcome but was a major geographic barrier in an earlier age, and the Rockies, which both involve a large energy cost to get over, but also have unreliable roads in certain areas during large parts of the year.

Many many large brands exist only on one side of their respective barriers or the other. Yuengling beers for example, more or less don't go any further than the Mississippi, while Dreyers ice cream more or less go no further than the Western Rockies.

It's interesting you mention Yuengling beers. I grew up in Michigan and never heard of them. I was visiting a friend in Pennsylvania over the new years and I was introduced to this beer as one of the oldest breweries in Pennsylvania. Everyone was excited that they were were now in more areas. Coming from just a short distance away in Michigan I have never heard of them.

This topic has made me kind of interested in other regional/national school supply items. I remember my Trapper Keeper very fondly and spent quite a bit of time picking mine out when I was a child. I also grew up during the heydey of the metal lunchbox [1]

I also went to school in an area and time when there was a large influx of South Korean immigrants and I remember eyeing their incredibly cool pencil cases with quite a bit of jealousy [2]. An incredible marketing opportunity that never seemed to quite make it to the U.S. market.

What kind of ubiquitous local market school supplies were popular in other places?

1 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/PAC-MAN-vintage-metal-lunchbox-/222... 2 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/Transformers-Students-Multifunction...

I'm guessing the pencil case was more like this one, with a thermometer and a sleek black case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwdwoSkKdLw

Several of my kindergarten classmates got them, after one of them had visited their family in Japan.

My memory of the Trapper Keeper is that it wasn’t very durable and you’d be lucky if it made it through the school year. The flap was cheap and thin plastic that would tear easily. The plastic rings were also easily broken. I think I ended up just using the folders by themselves.

plastic rings?

The binder mechanism including the binder rings were plastic:

https://tedium.imgix.net/2018/01/ktyhjn3jkmcetsgini69.jpg

So they were. I guess I was remembering off-brand trapper keepers with metal rings

I remember having a trapper keeper. I don't think I noticed that the logo font seems to be the same as for the apple //e though.

Motter Tektura. Also used by Reebok shoes.

https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/10214/motter-tektura

https://gizmodo.com/why-youve-never-heard-of-this-typeface-t...

I recently excavated my much loved Trapper Keeper from 8th grade (circa 1990) and it was peak random design with zebra stripes, polka dots, colors everywhere. I actually used it for a little while because the physical quality of the product was still amazing. Good solid feel, great bendable binding, plastic coating on the outside to be rainproof, pockets, zippers and all the interior folders were uniquely designed as well. Yes, they won through shiny design for kids, social signalling and marketing, but the form factor really was much better than alternatives, too.

Of course, after nearly 30 years in a closet my Trapper Keeper's plastic and rubber bits were ready to give up the ghost and it started to disintegrate after a bit of use. But I would love to get another one, just as it was.

Please explain this trapper keeper. It looks like a re-usable enveloppe for school stuff?

Its a fancy binder for school stuff.

It's the brand name for the original 3-ring binder. The paper company Mead sold them along with 3-hole punched notebooks so that you could store and swap out multiple notebooks.

It was ultimately a way of selling more paper. It was hugely successful and is the reason 3-hole punches and 3-ring binders exist today.

According to Wikipedia, ring binders were invented in the late 1800s.

The Trapper Keeper came out after I graduated high school. But we had 3-ring binders before that - they were fabric covered (like a cheap denim) and had metal rings which made a loud snap when you closed them. They had good & bad aspects - you could draw on the fabric and customize your binder (something the Trapper Keeper couldn't do until they allowed an artwork insert years later). And bad: the metal rings would get bent and not meet up anymore so your papers would fall out.

So far as customization - the thing we'd do with textbooks is cover them in paper grocery bag material so you'd have something to draw on, as well as protect the book so you wouldn't be charged when you returned it.

The “Trapper” is a folder with vertical pockets for holding papers. The “Trapper Keeper” is a 3-ring binder for keeping your Trappers. The binder also closes with a button or velcro fastener.

Others have covered the physical aspects of the Trapper Keeper. But one thing not to be overlooked was there were the usual basic colors but also wild designs: Lisa Frank, Transformers, all sorts of ways to express individuality and identity which matters to kids who don't get many chances for that.

They were also more expensive than regular binders and the rings weren't lined up with regular folders, so being in the Trapper Keeper ecosystem was a class symbol in my school.

South Park explained everything you need to know about how cool the Trapper Keeper truly is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jSPNoA40jg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5czEGnl2Wo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park)

>... the Trapper Keeper binder is destined to gain sentience and hybridize into a supercomputer to conquer the world in the future, and wipe out all traces of humanity ...

It is a binder that holds folders-that-hold-paper instead of just bare paper.

The locking cover was like the belt and suspenders and served to show off the style of the owner.

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