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Scott Bruce couldn't have concocted a better headline himself. "Forget Stocks," declared the Wall Street Journal on March 2. "Invest in . . . Old Lunch Boxes." Here was solid proof that Bruce's master plan had succeeded, that he had, as he puts it, "remade social consciousness." In just three years, the former sculptor, world traveler, oil rig worker and teacher of English to Iranian helicopter pilots had calculatingly and almost single-handedly elevated kids' "character" lunch boxes of the post-1940s from attic relics to kitschy collectibles.

"I invented a way of making worthless objects profitable," proclaims the 33-year-old Bruce, who is literally and figuratively a fast talker. "I've cracked the code." Bruce lives in a second-floor, two-bedroom Somerville apartment that is wholly unremarkable except for the 1,500 or so steel and vinyl lunch boxes it houses. Some of the boxes are stacked in the narrow landing outside the apartment's front door. Others are shoehorned into the tiny living room. One hundred twenty-one of the more colorful -- depicting the likes of the Lone Ranger, Bullwinkle and Rocky, Miss America and Bobby Sherman -- are carefully displayed on black painted shelves, a montage Bruce likes to use as a backdrop when his picture appears in, say, Forbes or Americana magazines. "I am," he explains, "a great self-promoter."

Four years ago, Bruce says, he didn't have a lunch box to his name. But he believed he could create a desirable American collectible if he could simply determine the proper obscure object. He wanted something that had been mass- produced, would be coveted by baby boomers, was durable and wasn't expensive. Discovering a pair of early kids' lunch boxes in a Salvation Army Family Thrift Store in Cambridge -- let the record show that they were a Looney Tunes box from the late 1950s and a Jetsons box from the early 1960s -- he realized he had found his Holy Grail. "I knew they were what I was looking for as soon as I saw them," he recalls.

In settling on kiddie lunch boxes as his commodity, Bruce had achieved the first goal of his five-point plan to control a market. The other four, all of which have since been accomplished:

2. Acquire an Esteemed Collection. Bruce says he owns at least one copy of all but 20 to 30 of the 560 metal and vinyl character lunch boxes produced between 1950 and 1987.

3. Compile the Official History. By visiting lunch-box manufacturers and authoring a 16-page "Boxography" of dates, styles and shapes, Bruce has become America's foremost authority on lunch boxes. To ensure that people don't forget this, he publishes "Hot Boxing," a quarterly newsletter whose roughly-300 subscribers include actor/director Rob Reiner and a squadron of Air Force F-16 pilots in Nevada.

4. Write the Coffee Table Book and the Authoritative Price Guide. Bruce's 120-page "Lunch Boxes of the Fifties and Sixties" will be published in November. His 2,500-entry "Official Price Guide to Lunchbox Collectibles is due next spring.

5. Mount a Classy Museum Tour. Bruce says that a privately-sponsored exhibit of lunch boxes, including many of his own, is scheduled to open in New York City next fall and subsequently to travel the country for three years.

"There were a handful of heavy lunch-box collectors before Scott came along," points out Gary Sohmer, owner of Wex Rex Records, a Hudson collectibles shop. "But Scott concentrated on making boxes a profitable item. He created a demand. He made collecting lunch boxes credible and legitimate.

Collectors like him for doing that. Of course, they don't like him for inflating prices." What's more, Bruce says he intends to sell most of his collection via a series of four mail-order auctions beginning next spring. "My wife and I want to buy a house," explains the entrepreneur, who was married three weeks ago. "And, right now, my down payment is tied up in lunch boxes."

The history of kids' lunch boxes according to Scott Bruce: More than 120 million such boxes were sold in the the United States during 1950s and 1960s alone, most in conjunction with TV shows and their stars. But there were also lunch boxes promoting movies, rock performers, special events, whatever. It was an only-in-America notion: You paid them to tote around their advertisement. But, hey: If you were nine years old and the alternative was a standard red plaid lunch box -- ychhhh! -- you weren't about to object to being manipulated.

The classic lunch box was made of steel, although such kits were eventually deemed unsafe in small hands. (Particularly when those small hands used the box as a club.) The early 1970s saw the emergence of the injection-molded plastic lunch box, which endures to this day and is currently the only material being used to make lunch boxes for children. Dome-shaped boxes arrived in 1957, but are no longer made in quantity. Vinyl models were born in 1959 and died in 1982. The latter, many of which have disappeared because of their vulnerability, are deemed to be of great value by boxophiles.

Although character lunch boxes date back to the 1930s, the first TV character box -- and, therefore, the first kit that was wildly popular -- was that of Hopalong Cassidy in 1950, yours then for $1.39. (And $45 to $90 today.) Featuring a Hoppy decal on baked enamel, it was manufactured by Aladdin Industries Inc., the General Motors of the trade. Three years later, a firm called American Thermos got into the act with a lithographed Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch box. Now known as King-Seeley Thermos Co., American Thermos became Ford to Aladdin's GM. Meanwhile, The Ohio Art Co., the other surviving box maker, is the industry's minor player.

The majority of boxes of the 1950s and '60s were created for Aladdin and King-Seely by industrial designer Robert Burton, commercial artist Elmer Lehnhardt (a onetime professional wrestler), food label designer Ed Wexler and free-lancer Nick Lobianco. No one will accuse any of these boxmen of having household names.

Several not-so-great moments dot lunch-box history. A 1954 Howdy Doody box featuring Princess SummerFallWinterSpring was yanked off the market three years later when Judy Tyler, the actress who played the innocent Indian maiden on television, ruined her image by starring in the Elvis Presley movie, "Jailhouse Rock." A 1959 Gunsmoke box misspelled Marshal Matt Dillon as Marshall Matt Dillon. A 1963 US astronaut box was pulled off the shelves when it was discovered that some of its artwork had been lifted from National Geographic magazine. On a 1966-68 "Flipper" TV show lunch box, the aquatic star himself more than passingly resembles Bob Hope.

The record number of lunch boxes manufactured for a particular character? Ten -- for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The best seller of all time? A Walt Disney domed school bus, made from 1961 to 1973, sold some 9 million units. The rarest? A 1961 plastic box with a Civil War motif that was manufactured by Landers, Frary and Clark of New Britain, Conn. Bruce says that not a single example of this box survives. Not even in his own living room.

When Scott Bruce began his lunch-box scholarship, many people assumed he was crazy. Which was both good and bad.

It was good because it confirmed to Bruce that he was doing what no man had done before. It was bad because skeptics refused to take him seriously. "For instance, the people at KST couldn't believe that people actually collected old lunch boxes," Bruce recalls. "They were so suspicious of me, at the beginning, anyway, that they thought I was an industrial spy."

But Bruce persisted, even acquiring some original lunch-box artwork. Meanwhile, his box collection proliferated to the point where his apartment looks like a cluttered, backstreet warehouse. "About a year ago, I lost count of the boxes I owned," he says. "I used to keep a computer inventory. But the whole thing has just snowballed." Bruce figures steel lunch boxes of the 1950s and 1960s are worth an average of about $50. (The vacuum bottles that usually accompanied them bring an average of $15) Values run as high as $750 for a pair of Beatles' boxes that are constantly sought by Beatlemaniacs. Vinyl boxes, Scott calculates, bring an average of about $70. If he is right about all this, his own stash is worth in excess of $75,000 -- not enough to make him rich, but enough for a down payment on that house. Bruce says he has paid as little as 25 cents for a box, and never more than $90.

He is unapologetic. True, he concedes, the profits he plans to make when he auctions his collection will come from an inflated market he has done much to create. And true, his own "official" price guide will be the yardstick by which many potential buyers will determine value. "But I've labored on this, I've done all the research," he points out. "Shouldn't I be remunerated? And anyway, there are easier ways of making money than this."

Nevertheless, Scott Bruce has another idea. Another master plan. "It will be even bigger than lunch boxes," he says of his next -- and similar -- project. Do not expect him to reveal what it is, however. "It's a collectible," is all he will say. Then he adds: "I mean, it will be a collectible."

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