Floyd Paxton

Floyd G. Paxton (March 7, 1918 – December 10, 1975^[1]) was the inventor of the bread clip, a notched plastic tag used for sealing bags of bread worldwide.^[2] It is manufactured by the Kwik Lok Corporation, founded by Paxton.

Bread clip

Floyd Paxton was known for telling the story about how he came up with the idea of the bread clip. As he told it, he was flying home on an airliner in 1952 and opened a bag of peanuts, whereupon he realized he had no way to reseal the bag. He rummaged through his wallet and found an expired credit card and hand-carved his first bag clip with his small pen knife.

When a fruit packer, Pacific Fruit, wanted a to replace rubber bands with a better bag closure for it new plastic bags, Paxton remembered his bag of peanuts. He hand-whittled another clip from a small sheet of Plexiglas. With an order in hand for a million clips, Paxton designed a die-cut machine to produce the clips at high speed.

Despite repeated attempts, Paxton never won a United States patent for his clips. He did win numerous patents for the high-speed "bag closing apparatus" that made the clips, inserted bread into bags and applied the clips for the finished product.

Other pursuits

Paxton was best known in the state of Washington for his very conservative political views. During the 1960s he was national president of the John Birch Society. He made four unsuccessful runs for Congress. He founded a conservative newspaper, The Yakima Eagle, which did not attract a subscriber base and soon folded. Paxton and his wife, Grace, had a running battle with the Internal Revenue Service over a family trust set up to avoid taxation, resulting in years of litigation and appeals with the IRS—with the Paxtons ultimately losing. ^[3]

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