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Collecting lunch boxes used to be a secret activity. Few people did it. Those who did didn't talk about it. For 20 years, James Danaher, a PG&E salesman, bought metal lunch boxes at flea markets in the San Luis Obispo area. Boxes with Roy Rogers on the cover. Holly Hobbie. Dr. Doolittle. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. G.I. Joe. The Beverly Hillbillies. Snoopy. He didn't talk much about his lunch boxes -- just squirreled them away in the garage, crannies and cupboards.

"He was a secret collector," said his daughter Barbara Schlein of Fremont. Danaher had good precedent for keeping quiet. "As a kid, he collected baseball cards and his mother threw them out," said Schlein.

Before Danaher died at 71 last May, Schlein promised her father she would care for his collection. "He never said how many he had -- nobody realized the extent of the collection," Schlein said. So she was amazed when it took two cars and a Volkswagen van to bring them all home.

He had bought 300 boxes. In "boxing" terms, that made him a "middleweight."

Schlein's first task was to clean the boxes, mostly metal. "They smelled like old lunches," she said, wrinkling her nose. Then she took part of the collection for a library display at Oliveira School, where she teaches reading. "The boys liked Rambo, which was the last metal box made," she reported. "The girls liked the Care Bears. It's a cutesy box -- boys wouldn't like it."

Prizes in her collection include a black 1965 Smokey The Bear, worth $350, and a 1970s Banana Splits vinyl box, worth $400. Schlein thinks the most beautiful is an Astronaut dome showing space colonization, 1960-66, but she's also fond of a Popeye box, 1960-64. "This was the biggest seller of all time," said Schlein, lifting a bright yellow domed Disney school bus. The bus, with Goofy at the wheel, carries such passengers as Pinocchio and Huey, Louie and Dewey. Made between 1961 and 1973, 9 million buses were sold.

As with other collectibles, there are rarities to lust after. Lunch box aficionados talk yearningly of the 1932 Mickey Mouse box, the Jetsons dome box, the Beatles Yellow Submarine. "Beatles can go up to $600," Schlein said.

Vinyl lunch boxes arrived in 1959. They were cheaply constructed -- basically plastic shower curtains, heat sealed over cardboard. Because few survived, they are prized today. Barbie was the best seller in baby boomer vinyls.

The man who brought pizzazz to lunch box collecting in 1988 is Scott Bruce of Cambridge, Mass., who has written two books on the pop-image mystique (and prices) of lunch boxes.

Bruce is especially hard on mothers who forced their children to carry red plaid lunch boxes instead of popular TV character boxes.

"In the blackboard jungle, the lunch box, reflecting one's identification with a fashionable character or show, was a passport to either social acceptance, or, in the case of Red Plaid, oblivion," Bruce writes.

An informal local survey of former peanut-butter-and-jelly carriers gives high nostalgia marks to lunch boxes they wished they'd saved: pony-tailed Barbie, "Lost in Space," The Flintstones (with Fred, Wilma, Betty, Barney and Dino), Evil Knievel, "Stars Wars," Davy Crockett and the Harlem Globetrotters.

Bruce hands on these history tidbits:

The first licensed character was Mickey Mouse in 1932 on what is technically considered a lunch pail, a small two-handled container without a Thermos.

The first licensed TV character kit -- a lunch box and Thermos -- was Aladdin's 1950 Hopalong Cassidy box with a four-inch decal on the front, followed soon by American Thermos's full-cover, lithographed Roy Rogers box.

Metal lunch boxes went into a decline after 1972 Florida legislation banned them because kids bashed each other on the head with them. A mother brought suit, calling a metal lunch box a deadly weapon. After half the states passed such safety laws, manufacturers turned to injection-molded plastic lunch boxes of today -- a bore to collectors.

Since Schlein inherited the collection, she has started buying lunch boxes too -- including a Dick Tracy. She's bid by mail for new acquisitions, searched for them at flea markets and traded up with school children.

What lunch box did Schlein carry to school herself?

Money was tight, she said, so hers was plain blue. "I wanted a Hopalong Cassidy one, but we couldn't afford it. So my mother glued a decal on mine. It was a Dutch girl."

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