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Want financial security? Wondering how to put the kids through college? Forget mutual funds. Invest in lunch futures.

It's a simple plan (one would almost say elementary). First, roam the schoolyards next June and collect all of the abandoned lunch boxes. Then remove the garbage; scrape the jam off of Jem. Finally, stack the kits in the basement and forget about them for 20 years.

Congratulations! You can contact Harvard now.

If collecting children's lunch kits sounds preposterous, let Scott Bruce explain: "A Jetsons' box that sold for $2.59 in 1963 might go for $100 today, dents and all. And that's just for the box, not the bottle."

Bruce, of Somerville, Mass., is one of an estimated 200 active collectors who search flea marts, yard sales, thrift shops and antique auctions for old boxes, mostly from the 1950s and '60s. His collection, which began inauspiciously two years ago with a 1974 Kung Fu kit, has climbed to 1,000, including duplicates. The boxes have already usurped two rooms of his apartment.

"I'm stockpiling for the future," says Bruce, 32. "I'm a baby boomer, and every boomer had a lunch box. I want to make them one of the hottest collectibles." To that end, Bruce has written a text on the history of the kits from 1950-70. The book, to be published next year, includes photographs of 150 boxes-from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet to "The Man From Uncle"-as well as a "boxography" listing the model number of every American-made lunch kit during those years.

In addition, Bruce hopes to hold a boxorama, or convention, for collectors who subscribe to Hot Boxing , the quarterly newsletter that he publishes. Many of them swap boxes by mail, occasionally in complicated three-way deals. Bruce thinks there are hundreds of closet collectors around who have no idea that such a network exists.

Bob Carr, of St. Louis, Mo., hoarded old lunch kits for eight years before he realized he wasn't alone. Finally, in 1978, he advertised for boxes in several antiques magazines and received 100 responses. Now he keeps close contact with 150 dealers. "A lot of people are squirreling them away without knowing that other people collect them," he says.

Carr's collection, perhaps the largest in the world, numbers 1,200 and includes 600 different models, dating back to a 1930 metal kit with a lithograph of a steam locomotive on the side. His favorite, which he purchased at an antique show for $150, is an oval-shaped box from 1936 featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Horace Horsecollar. It is very rare and worth more than $200 now, says the owner.

The first U.S. patent for a lunch box was issued in 1862. However, few kiddie pails were produced before 1950, when boxes bearing Hopalong Cassidy's grin greeted the first wave of post-war, school-age boomers at the five-and- dime. The Hoppy boxes, made by Aladdin Industries, came in red or blue; the bottle had a red rubber-encased cork. By 1953, says Bruce, there were "between two and five million" happy Hoppy box-owners. Because of that saturation, the kit retains more of a prestige than a market value today.

Hopalong Cassidy begat Roy Rogers, who begat Trigger, who begat Annie Oakley and Robin Hood and every box right up to Lazer Tag. Fred Carlson, a collector from Hillsboro, Ore., estimates there were 500 different metal boxes marketed before production of them stopped last year, and perhaps 150 vinyl ones. And that doesn't include today's plastic kits, which most purists dismiss altogether.

"All the plastics have is a decal on one side," says Carlson. "The metal ones have scenes all the way around them, even on the bottom. Why, my Casey Jones has railroad tracks on the bottom, and the Bozo box has a three- ring circus underneath."

Carlson, who is 33, stores his collection in his barn - all 1,070 kits that he has obtained in an eight-year search. He, too, thought his was a solitary interest until last year. Now he barters long-distance with other "boxers" and regularly spends $100 a month on phone calls.

"I just swapped 6-for-6 with a guy in Cleveland Heights, Ohio," says Carlson. "I'm working with a woman in Scottsdale, Ariz. to trade her eight westerns including Paladin, Lawman, Chuck Wagon and The Wild, Wild West for four boxes that I need Lost In Space, Dudley Do Right, Underdog and Bullwinkle."

Carlson collects lunchboxes for fun. "But it's getting to be a pretty expensive hobby," he says. "I've paid $25-$30 for a lot of pails. If the price gets too high, I'll quit." That hasn't happened yet.

"Goodwill stores used to sell them for 29 cents," he says. "Now they're up to $1.99." Small town stores are a rich source of boxes. "I got a Twiggy off the shelf of a little store on the West Coast this summer, where it had been sitting since 1967," says Carlson. "It had three inches of dust on it." Two years ago, Carr spotted several 1974 Kung Fus in a store in Herman, Mo. "If you go into Mom-and-Pop stores in small towns, you'd be amazed at what's on the shelves," says Don Eccleston, a retired executive for Thermos Company, a major lunch box manufacturer."

I saw a Beany and Cecil kit on a shelf in Florida last year, and we discontinued that one in the mid-'60s."

Eccleston says collectors began nagging him for copies of old Thermos lunch kit catalogs about 10 years ago. "By the time I left, last year, I was getting a call a month from a collector," he says.

Bruce has employed agents as far away as Hawaii to scavenge for old boxes. The most he has ever paid is $55 for a Jetsons kit (box and bottle) at an auction in Massachusetts. "There were 12 others bidding for it," he says. Carlson almost latched onto The Rifleman, a relatively rare find, at a recent antiques show. But he got there too late. "I missed it by one minute," he says. "It was only $12; it was a steal."

Carlson, a postal worker, employs another tact. Each week, he takes his lunch to work in a different box - last week it was James Bond - and places it on the counter in full view of the customers. The box has jarred a memory or two. "I've gotten 20 or 40 of them from peoples' attics that way," he says. One woman casually mentioned that she had a blue lunch box at home with "those four guys on it." Carlson's pulse jumped. "It was a vinyl Beatles kit that I'd been looking for for seven years," he said. He bought it.

For his birthday this year, Carlson's wife gave him - what else? - a lunch box, John Glenn in Space, from 1963. Carlson's 5-year-old daughter will carry her sandwich to school in a 25-year-old Snoopy kit. That is something her father never did. "I always bought my lunch," he says.

Who are these collectors? "Men and women from their 30s on up; baby boomers who can look back and remember the heroes and heroines of their times," says Bob Carr, a counseling psychologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. "I used to be a little embarrassed about doing it, except among other collectors. I guess we have a universal neuroses."

Carr keeps a 1966 Peanuts lunch box on his desk at work. Of course, it's the one with the Lucy booth and the words, "Psychiatric help-5."

He began collecting kits in 1970, "when my wife bought one at a garage sale and used it briefly as a purse." Now, with over 1,000 boxes, his basement is a virtual time machine of sociological memorabilia, of youthful fads and fancies of bygone eras: From Barbie to Bullwinkle, and from The Monkees to the moonwalk. The jelly stains are optional.

"The kits tell us how kids' interests have changed, from cowboys to all of this stuff from outer space. They tell us how kids dressed, and what they were thinking of. And they keep me young," says Carr, who is 56.

"Besides, I enjoy the artwork; some of it is good. The Yellow Submarine is very mod and classy, with a '60s decor." The man who drew "The Man From Uncle" kit, Jack Davis, became a favorite Time Magazine cover artist.

Carr collects only metal boxes. "They had all of the charm," he says. "They had lithographs on tin, which were made with a four-color process. In the early 1960s, Aladdin even began using embossed characters that stood out. It was almost like 3-D."

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