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Clark Ellefson has dozens of pails, but no favorites. You were what you carried. Some boxes were in, some were not. Everyone in your class knew the difference. Choosing the wrong one in September could damage your social standing all year, and the worst situation of all was getting stuck with a hand-me-down from older brothers and sisters.

There were always the unfortunate few who managed to drop theirs on the sidewalk. You could count on a crowd, and suspense ran high as the owner opened his box to check the thermos. If the news was bad, folks passed it around in order to hear the little chunks of glass rattle inside.

Most victims had replacements by Monday. A few carried paper sacks for the rest of the year. Clark Ellefson remembers.

"I found it at my mother's in a cupboard someplace. Thirty years had passed, but my name was still glued to the bottom by a dirty piece of adhesive tape. When you come across an object like that, it makes you want to stop and rediscover your childhood," says Ellefson.

"There was Trigger again, looking real good. The box had a classic kind of composition, three elements: a horse, the scenery which was very minimal and the name "Trigger." I don't know why I had this one. Roy Rogers was big; Davy Crockett was big. It was probably something my parents picked out and said, 'Here, take it to school,' you know? I carried mine so long that eventually I was ashamed and hid it behind my legs so the big kids couldn't see."

Ellefson is the "Clark" of Lewis & Clark, a Columbia firm which designs and builds custom furniture and provides product design and interior design.

In fact, Ellefson may even have your lunch box. He has dozens in his collection rescued from yard sales, flea markets and attics. There are no favorites. After all, how can he weigh the social impact of Popeye or Evel Knievel against Miss Piggy?

His collection includes sexy boxes ("Charlie's Angels"), space boxes ("Battlestar Galactica"), rock boxes (Kiss), Broadway boxes (Annie), fantasy boxes (Cinderella), power boxes ("The Incredible Hulk") and a family section (The Osmonds, "The Brady Bunch," "The Waltons," "The Partridge Family" and "Little House on the Prairie").

"We're talking here about design elements of an era," Ellefson explains. "Some are cartoons of life, and some are cartoons of cartoons. You always wind up with the question, 'Why did society choose one image over another for lunch boxes that year?'

"Look at this one of Flipper. You've got Dad, two kids, the porpoise and a beach ball. To me, it didn't make a simple statement with all those things just crowded on there together. I started to paint it, but friends wouldn't let me. They said, 'It's a wonderful lunch box. It's pastoral and romantic.' So I kept it around and finally moved past the limits of my own preference. That's one of the requirements of art: To some it is this way; to some it is that way.

"Another interesting one in my collection is the Scotch Plaid (1955). Why in the middle of an image-conscious society would anyone want a metal box with scotch plaid, which had nothing to do with anything? But then look at the popularity of holograms on cards. Maybe they are the Scotch plaid of the '80s."

Ellefson pays between 50 cents and a dollar for most of his acquisitions. Someday he might put an ad in the paper to search for more, but he worries he could wind up with so many duplicate boxes, he might not have "the cash flow to handle it".

He is certain of one thing: "I don't have any goals for this collection. People look at it and say, 'Gee, those are going to be worth something someday.' I hope not because then I won't be able to keep doing this. When something passes a dollar in value, to me it is no longer a fun little pastime; I've moved into the realm of serious collecting."

Some boxes are valuable. An Annie Oakley in good condition will sell for between $36 and $50, perhaps because it was one of the few "high adventure" boxes available to little girls of the '50s.

A "Julia" won't bring that much, although it marked the first serious marketing effort toward black children. The box featured a picture of Diahann Carroll (who starred in a television show of the same name in the early '60s), but it seems that so many black families wanted the box, there are still quite a few around.

Ellefson doesn't think many boxes from the '80s will be worth collecting because fads come and go so quickly now. "Kids don't care as much as they used to. They are so jaded with video madness and all of this stuff going on, you really have to hit them hard to get their attention with visual devices.

"Look at this Kiss lunch box, which isn't that old. When we were young, our parents wouldn't even carry something like that, much less think about letting us have it."

Ellefson says adults buy old lunch boxes for "any purpose except the one for which it was intended."

He discovered that by accident while making a wedding gift for a friend. "I didn't want to give the same old thing, so I played around a little with one of my duplicate boxes. I took it and drilled holes around the rim, like marquis lights, and then put a bulb inside. So many people said they wanted "Lunch Box Lamps" that later I made around 50 and sold out of them in an afternoon.

"The only bad part was that the box I chose for my friend was 'The Fall Guy,' and then his marriage didn't work out too well."

Ellefson says that among adults the most popular lunch box is the black hump-top box you "used to see workmen eating bologna sandwiches out of at construction sites." He has seen such boxes decorated in a variety of ways.

"I know one man who painted his with stars and stripes. He chained handcuffs to the side and uses it to store car keys and cigarettes. Now, that's a statement. I've also seen them done in pink and left at a lady's door with a rose and a note inside."

What does a collector do about the "ones that get away"? According to Ellefson, "You keep looking, and your friends keep looking. I don't have a Zorro or a Batman yet, and both of these would be great to have. I don't know if there was an Elvis lunch box, but maybe I'll come across one. As far as getting a Beatles box, don't even ask. You can't find one. All of those things are sacred.

"What matters most to me isn't the picture, anyway," Ellefson adds. "The real excitement comes in finding a little bit of history.

"Not long ago someone gave me a Roy Rogers box. I could tell that the owner probably went through what I did with Trigger because Roy's face is covered with a Band Booster sticker, and his name has almost been rubbed out with a pencil eraser. I wanted to take the sticker off because Roy's been underneath for 30 or 35 years, and I wondered what he looked like. But the date on it said 1954, and I couldn't touch it because time was just kind of frozen there on the side."

But why lunch boxes? Ellefson explains, "Some people feel best around what they cannot touch. I'm different. The world of objects is it for me. When I look at Mickey Mouse or Superman or Strawberry Shortcake, I realize that what I'm really doing here is trying to save a nice slice of life."

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