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"Lunch kits are nothing but the history of television," says Larry Aikins, of Athens, Texas, author of Pictorial Price Guide to Metal Lunch Boxes & Thermoses.

"They start with the first television series - Hopalong Cassidy - and then Roy Rogers, Annie Oakley, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, the whole series, to Charlie's Angels and The Dukes of Hazzard."

By the 1960s, movies as well as TV shows were featured on lunch boxes.

Today, even toys and books, such as the Goosebumps series, get cover treatment.

And while the purchase of a lunch box for a child may be almost an afterthought of the parents, it well may become a collectors' item in relatively short order.

Metal lunch boxes were made from 1950 until 1985, when schools began to ban them. Now they are collectors' items, as are some of the hard plastic and soft vinyl ones that replaced them.

Lunch kits, which include a thermos, are also in demand.

A total of about 600 designs have been manufactured by Aladdin Industries, the first company to produce a box decorated with a theme licensed by a television show, as well as American Thermos (now King Seeley Thermos) and a few smaller companies.

Aikins, 56, author and lunch-box authority, is one of the largest dealers in lunch kits. He added a warehouse to his home to contain his collection.

Though he has bought and sold thousands of lunch boxes, Aikins can't find ones like he used as a boy: He used to carry his lunch in a syrup or lard bucket with a wire handle. It was something other kids teased him about.

Also, although Aikins doesn't have any fond memories of lunch boxes, he understands the collecting passions of nostalgic Baby Boomers.

If he can't fill a customer's request from his collection of more than 3,500 lunch boxes, he sends out word to his worldwide network of scouts.

"I had a call from a person in Hong Kong who wanted me to overnight a lunch box with Charlie's Angels on it," says Aikins. "It cost $172 just to overnight it. The box itself was $160."

Aikins's most prized box is the prototype for the lunch box.

Aladdin had hired artist Robert Burton to paint Hopalong Cassidy in watercolor on the box to present to the board of directors. The idea was approved, but that original box was left behind in a Chicago warehouse after Aladdin moved its facilities to Nashville. Aikins bought it for $3,500. He said he turned down an offer of $16,000 for the box; he estimates it is worth $20,000.

"The first box was just a decal picture," Aikins says. "Then they realized that the TV screen is rectangular like the lunch kit, and they needed to fill the whole front to make it look like a TV. Then all the kids had their little TVs with their favorite shows at lunchtime."

Aikins's hobby started by accident in the early 1980s. As a contractor, he had a cabinet shop in Houston. He started collecting antiques to decorate the large showrooms. He happened upon a few of the lunch boxes and liked how they decorated the cabinets.

He realized that he could find mint-condition boxes at five-and-dime stores, so he began collecting them. He enlisted the help of friends who were traveling salesmen.

But for Maggie Rose of Henderson, Ky., lunch-box collecting is "a blast from the past." Rose and her husband, Barry, stumbled onto the hobby while collecting memorabilia of The Brady Bunch television show. "I grew up with The Brady Bunch," she says. "My life philosophy is if it didn't happen on The Brady Bunch, it didn't happen in real life."

In the two years it took the couple to find a Brady Bunch box, they began to notice and collect others. Now their collection has 26 boxes, including Family Affair, Scooby Doo, Partridge Family, Hardy Boys, Flintstones, The Fox and The Hound, Snow White, The Muppets and Captain America.

They found a Brady Bunch box and a thermos for $75 each.

Their best find, which came in a St. Louis antique shop, is a Woody the Woodpecker box they bought for a little more than $40, then told the clerk it was worth $110.

According to Aikins's price guide, some of the rarest in the themed collection are 240 Robert, worth $1,800; Toppie, $1,600; Home Town Airport, $1,200; Jetsons, $800; and Star Trek, $525. The market for sales of new lunch boxes is concentrated in a five-week period during back-to-school sales, said Aladdin's Tina Rich, assistant production supervisor.

The company averages sales of up to 5 million boxes each year. The target market still is children age preschool to second grade.

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