Vintage Superior Steel Combination Toy Safe Bank, c. 1940–1965

The Piece

A child's combination safe bank in pressed steel, finished in a pale grey hammertone enamel that breaks the light into a fine speckle the way industrial paint of the period was made to. The form is a squat strongbox: flat top, square corners softened by the press, and four stubby cast feet at the corners that lift it off a surface. A coin slot is cut into the top. A single knurled dial in scarlet plastic sits on the face, and below it a small keyhole opening.

The instruction label is still on it, which is the part worth noting. Printed on gummed paper and pasted across the door, it reads OPEN COMBINATION, then the steps in sequence: turn left two times, turn right, press knob lightly while turning. Underneath, in smaller type, comes the line that explains why these labels almost never survive: remove label and be SURE to save combination. Whoever owned this never removed it, and never had to remember.

Beside the dial somebody has written a name in black marker, in a child's hand, reading Lucy Ann, and above it two sets of figures that are very likely the combination itself, recorded on the outside of the safe by the only person it was ever meant to keep money from.

History & Provenance

The toy safe is one of the more revealing objects of American childhood. Still banks, the kind with no moving parts beyond a slot, had been made in cast iron since the middle of the nineteenth century, and the great age of the figural cast iron bank ran to about 1930. What replaced it was this: pressed steel, painted in the same hammertone and crinkle enamels being used on toolboxes and office furniture, and modelled not on an animal or a building but on the safe in a bank branch or a father's office.

That shift is the interesting part. A cast iron elephant asks a child to like an elephant. A steel combination safe asks a child to practise being an adult with money, complete with a dial, a procedure, and a secret. It belongs to the same postwar impulse that produced toy cash registers, toy typewriters and toy filing cabinets.

The door label carries the maker's name, Superior Mfg. Co., with the location now largely obscured by wear and overwriting. Several American firms traded under that name across the period, so the mark is given here as it reads rather than tied to one company. What the object can be dated on is its making: pressed and spot welded steel with applied hammertone enamel, a moulded plastic dial, and a printed paper instruction label, which together belong to the middle decades of the last century rather than to the cast iron era before them.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Grey hammertone steel and one scarlet dial is a better piece of colour work than most things made on purpose, and at this size it sits on a shelf of books or a desk without asking for room. But the reason to want it is the writing. Somebody gave a child a safe, and the child wrote her name on it and then wrote the combination on the outside, which is the least secure and most human thing she could have done. Objects that record their owner are worth more than objects that do not, and this one records hers twice.