All Over The Map: Forgotten Seattle origins of the JanSport school backpack
Nov 8, 2024, 11:31 AM | Updated: 4:28 pm
University Book Store's social media intern Anika demonstrates the JanSport backpack currently offered at the store in Seattle; the location had a hand in creation of the original student backpack more than 50 years ago. (Photo courtesy of University Book Store)
(Photo courtesy of University Book Store)
The recent passing of a man from Seattle is shining new light on a forgotten chapter of modern Pacific Northwest mythology about a ubiquitous school accessory – which was derived from a critical piece of recreational gear.
Seattle and Puget Sound are built on myths about local retailers that conquered the world. Some are true, and some are not.
Take, for instance, the bogus “original” Starbucks at Pike Place Market, which is totally fake. Or, the story about Amazon being hatched in the garage of residential home in Bellevue, which is true. And who could forget the old chestnut about the guy who returned his snow tires to a store for a refund? The staff there considered him such a good customer, they gave him his money back – even though that store didn’t sell him the snow tires in the first place.
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If you have to ask which retailer this last myth is about, you probably also don’t know that they ditched their in-store piano players a few years go.
The story of the school accessory and is not as well-known as those others. Many people read about it for the first time in obituaries published earlier this week in The New York Times and The Washington Post for an inventor and entrepreneur from Seattle named Murray McCory, who was born Murray Pletz in Seattle in 1944.
In the late 1960s, Murray and his girlfriend Jan Lewis founded JanSport (see what they did there?), a local manufacturer of recreation equipment such as backpacks, tents and sleeping bags. As those obituaries recount, it was one of JanSport’s hiking backpacks, with a few key modifications, that ultimately became a required accessory for nearly every student (and for a lot of people long past their student days).
The place where this story should be very well-known is at the University Book Store in Seattle’s U. District, right there where the store, founded by UW students in 1900, has stood for decades on the avenue.
Chris Rauls is chief operating officer for the bookstore, a position he’s held for six years. He didn’t know the whole backpack story either.
“I knew that we had this special connection to the JanSport backpack,” Rauls told KIRO Newsradio earlier this week. “I knew that we were the first to sell it, but I hadn’t seen the whole story. And we started putting a little more of the story together, and this is really special. We’re ground-zero for the invention of the backpack as we know it.”
Rauls said that Murray McCory was an engineering student at the UW back in the late 1960s. He won a design contest sponsored by Alcoa, the aluminum company, by creating a lightweight and ergonomic aluminum backpack frame with a sewn nylon pack attached. The design and materials represented a major advance beyond the old woodframe and canvas backpacks of the post-World War II era. McCory and Rauls went into business and began to manufacture and sell those packs from a loft above Murray’s dad’s transmission repair shop.
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In 1970, the couple saw a new opportunity to create a product aimed at students. Back in those days, people carried books in flimsy shoulder bags or bundled in a leather strap. Murray and Jan thought they could adapt one of their JanSport nylon hiker’s daypacks into a bag designed especially for students, but they sought advice from a trusted place.
“These students were frequent customers of the bookstore,” Rauls said. “So they came in and they talked to the manager of the bookstore at the time, who made some recommendations on how they could improve the hiking sack and make it into an actual backpack that was made for carrying books.
“So they reinforced it and talked a little bit about the dimensions that would be needed and put together what became the classic backpack that students use,” Rauls continued. “I guess it was a hit at the bookstore, and people purchased a lot of them and talked about it to their friends.”
That manager was Ed Bergren, Chris Rauls said, and before long, he wasn’t the only retailer buying the new packs wholesale from JanSport.
“Pretty quickly, it spread to other campuses,” Rauls said.
JanSport actually called that first model the “University Bookstore Rucksack” in honor of the store that inspired it. The specific JanSport model and countless copycats became a required accessory for college students in the 1970s, and eventually for K-12 kids, too.
Chris Rauls agreed that the story of the University Bookstore Rucksack should be considered a part of our modern regional mythology, and that it deserves to be better known. In fact, Rauls said this incredible origin story was once more prominently celebrated in the past at the University Book Store, but not anymore.
Why? According to Rauls, a key artifact commemorating the University Bookstore Rucksack has gone missing.
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“Everybody says that there’s this plaque,” Rauls explained. “And I can’t find somebody who knows where it is or has more information on it, but I can try to find a little bit more … because I’m curious, too.”
The fact that the JanSport story is not as commonly shared as stories about other Seattle-born companies might be related to the fact JanSport was sold decades ago, and is now based in Denver. The owner is the VF Company, the same group that also owns Timberland, NorthFace and a number of other brands.
Still, Chris Rauls said he’s committed to tracking down the plaque and, hopefully, determining its whereabouts before January, when University Book Store itself will mark a key milestone in its long retail history in Seattle.
“If I can find it, I’ll make it a focus as part of our 125 birthday celebration,” Rauls said.
You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.
