General
Murray McCory, 80, Dies; JanSport Founder Created the School Backpack
He brought lightweight packs to millions of students and transformed the way they carried their textbooks to school.
Murray McCory, who founded the outdoor equipment company JanSport while still in college and whose signature innovation, a lightweight backpack, revolutionized school life for millions of students, died on Oct. 7 in Seattle. He was 80.
His daughter, Heidi Van Brost, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of congestive heart failure.
Like Starbucks coffee and Nike running shoes, JanSport backpacks grew out of the heady, creative days of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture in the Pacific Northwest.
Mr. McCory, who until the early 1980s had the surname Pletz, was a student at the University of Washington when he entered a national competition to design a new product using aluminum, an event sponsored by Alcoa, a maker of the metal.
An avid outdoorsman, he had long chafed under the stiff, one-size-fits-all wooden frames of traditional hiking backpacks. He developed a new frame using adjustable, lightweight aluminum, along with a nylon pack complete with a pocket for a water bottle. He took first place.
