Jackie Harris was sitting in her kitchen one day in 2022 when her mother called.
A man named E. Bryant Crutchfield died, and reputable news outlets such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and NPR referred to him as the inventor of the Trapper Keeper.
As far as Jackie and her family knew, however, her father Jon Wyant created the popular school supply. And he was still alive.
“She’s like, ‘This is terrible,’” Jackie told This American Life in 2023 of her mom’s reaction. “She was on fire.”
Tested by Mead in 1978 in Wichita, Kan., and released nationally in 1981, the Trapper Keeper made organizing homework simple and stylish. The folders, Trappers, were stored in a binder, the Keeper, which had cool designs on the cover that included everything from sports cars to Garfield.
So, who invented it?
In a 2013 interview with Mental Floss, Crutchfield recalled identifying a need for the Trapper Keeper after researching students’ complaints about limited space in their lockers. He credited Wyant, the company’s director of new product development at the time, with the Trapper Keeper name and logo.
Known to his friends as Trapper Jon, Wyant claimed he’s responsible for the Trapper Keeper’s diagonal pockets and a notebook with a built-in pencil clip, according to an extensive editor’s note Mental Floss published in 2024 in response to its original 2013 article.
Wyant, not Crutchfield, is named on a patent for the diagonal folder granted in 1975. Wyant and another Mead employee Paul Seaborn are on a patent for the notepad with the pencil clip granted in 1976.
“I just looked at it and thought, well, I know the truth. So what could I do?” Wyant told This American Life upon learning that Crutchfield took the credit. “I mean, I was not about to sit down and write a rebuttal and send it to The New York Times.”
Harris reached out to This American Life about the controversy. Phia Bennin worked on the story and was able to contact Crutchfield’s children, Ken and Carol.
Carol acknowledged Crutchfield had help creating the Trapper Keeper. But she believed her dad had no malicious intent when taking sole credit.
“I don’t think he would lie about it purposefully because my dad wasn’t like that,” she told Bennin. “I think his brain just kind of twisted facts to meet his own ego needs there towards the end.”
Through her reporting, Benin concluded that Crutchfield played an important role in bringing the Trapper Keeper to market. He certainly deserved credit – just not all of it.
Mead has sold more than 75 million Trapper Keepers, according to Mental Floss.
“The only certainty is that the Trapper Keeper would not exist as we know it today without the efforts of both Jon Wyant and E. Bryant Crutchfield,” Erin McCarthy wrote in Mental Floss.
