Tupperware × Airstream

Announced May 16, 1961, at Tupperware's Orlando headquarters, the Wanderlier Galley Set began with the Wally Byam Caravan Club's 1959 run from Cape Town towards Cairo. Byam's report to members was blunt: tinned goods survived Africa and paper packets did not. Caravanners had been keeping Wonderlier bowls in their galley lockers for years. Byam wrote to Earl Tupper asking for a set that would fit the curve of a trailer and would not rattle on a washboard road.

Tupper, in one of his last jobs for the company he had sold to Rexall, drew the containers from the plan view of an Airstream. Two D-shaped canisters fill the half-round ends. Between them sit three stacking boxes and a nest of four Bell Tumblers, which is the Party Susan idea stretched into a trailer. Costello's men at Jackson Center built the case from the same 0.032 in Alclad as the trailers, with a single belt line of buck rivets and draw latches copied from the Globetrotter's baggage door. Tupper would not trust a latch with the dust. He added a clear polyethylene inner lid that snaps over the case's rolled rim, so the pantry closes twice. The factory hands called the inner lid the burp.

It was sold two ways, which neither company had ever allowed: at Tupperware Home Parties, and by Airstream dealers alongside awning kits and water pumps. Dealers complained that the polished case showed every fingerprint and that the demonstrators kept burping it in the showroom. Caravan Club members stamped their rally numbers into the base with a nail punch, and many surviving cases still carry them.

Every piece has a moulded rib 3/16 in high, set so that with the containers in place it lines up with the case's rivet row. Tupper said it was so a gloved thumb could find the burping tab in the dark. Collectors check it first, because the replacement lids Tupperware supplied after 1963 left the rib off, and the belt line breaks.