E. Bryant Crutchfield was the inventor of the Trapper Keeper, a binder with folders inside that was extremely popular with middle school and high school students in the 1980s.
- Died: Sunday, August 21, 2022. (Who else died on August 21?)
- Details of death: Died in Marietta, Georgia, at the age of 85.
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Trapper Keeper
E. Bryant Crutchfield was the Director of New Ventures at the Mead Corporation. Through market research, he noted that the sales of folders for students were increasing each year and that students were not going to take 6 or 7 folders with them at once. Using research and focus groups, he came up with the Trapper Keeper, a binder that has multiple folders inside that have a snap at the top (later velcro) to hold papers inside. You could drop a Trapper Keeper, and nothing would fall out. Jon Wyant, Crutchfield’s research and development manager came up with the name. Mead rolled out the Trapper Keeper nationally in 1981 and it was a huge hit. The binder had fun designs on the cover featuring sports or dogs. Eventually the Trapper Keeper would license pop culture figures for covers such as Garfield and Sonic the Hedgehog. The peak popularity for the Trapper Keeper was from the 1980s until the early 1990s. The binder is still sold today and has had a resurgence of popularity due to shows like “Stranger Things,” which is set in the 1980s and features the students using Trapper Keepers.
Notable Quote
“We rolled it out, and it was just like a rocket.” “It was the biggest thing we’d ever done. I saw kids fight over designs in retail.” – Crutchfield in a 2017 interview with Mental Floss
Tributes to E. Bryant Crutchfield
Full Obituary: Legacy.com
