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You might guess, correctly, that the peak time for lunch box sales in the United States is just before the mad back-to-school rush. But did you know there's a second peak? It's in October, said Sean Brickell, co-author of "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes." He said he heard about this phenomenon from lunch box manufacturer Aladdin.

"When people took a box to school and they felt like maybe this wasn't a cool box to have," Brickell said, "they demolished them so their mom would have to buy them another one. So they did a whole other run of lunch boxes in October, once people realized that they messed up. God help you if you took the wrong lunch box to school because that was a social nightmare."

There was a time in American history when the lights went out.

Children pouted, collectors cursed, and nostalgiaholics wept.

Schoolchildren would never again know the pure joy of toting their ham salad sandwiches to school in a shiny new Charlie's Angels lunch box.

It was 1985, and the Thermos Co. manufactured what was widely regarded as the final metal lunch box. Or so we thought.

Sean Brickell calls the following metal-free years "the dark ages."

"When they were gone, they were gone," he said. "Somebody cut the faucet off, then that was it."

Many of us remember the brighter times, times when kids proudly showed off their bologna-and-Fritos-packed treasure chests: Pufnstuf and Pele, Hopalong and Hee Haw, Atom Ant and Adam 12.

Brickell admired the colorful boxes so much he started collecting them; eventually, he and fellow lunch box enthusiast Allen Woodall published "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Metal Lunch Boxes."

And now, much to Brickell's delight, the metal lunch box has made a comeback albeit a minor one. It's doubtful the new metals will overtake the hard plastic and nylon-type lunch kits that kids carry these days.

Still, America's cafeteria tables have witnessed quite an evolution from pop art metal and vinyl to pop art plastic to utilitarian nylon and, finally, back to metal again.

Hopalong: the granddaddy

So how did we get here?

Although the first children's lunch pails date to empty tobacco and cookie tins of the 1800s, collectors consider one 1950s item to be the granddaddy of the modern-day lunch box: a Hopalong Cassidy, the first licensed TV-character kit, made by Aladdin in 1950. From then on, it was time to cash in on television.

The box ended up celebrating all forms of pop culture, from Paladin to Twiggy to Jonathan Livingston Seagull to Hong Kong Phooey to the Care Bears and beyond.

"Our lunch boxes were far more than a utilitarian vessel for food," Brickell and Woodall wrote in their "Encyclopedia." "No, they were our endorsement of something cool.' And by association we, too, informed the world we were part of a select group."

In all, according to Brickell and Woodall, about 450 designs for metal boxes were created, the bulk of them by a dozen manufacturers. Three giants were Aladdin, Thermos (also known as King Seeley Thermos) and Ohio Art.

Lunch kits were popular in the '50s, said collector/dealer Larry Aikins of Texas, but not ubiquitous.

"In the '50s, I carried a Karo syrup bucket to school," Aikins said. "I don't remember my buddies having them."

They were probably in greatest demand in the '70s, Aikins said.

That all ended with a bang.

In the early '70s, the lore goes, a group of concerned mothers in Florida lobbied to put an end to the metal box because schoolchildren had apparently taken to bashing one another with them.

Some say they were then gradually outlawed by state legislatures, but others maintain they died out for financial reasons.

"I think it boiled down to economics," said Aikins. "And plastic was easier to clean they just looked more sanitary and you're not going to dent the corners of it. (The metal box) is kind of a brutal item."

And then there were none

Brickell, who is based in Virginia Beach, Va., thinks the real truth involves a little of both explanations.

"The reality is that maybe manufacturers also found it less expensive to produce them through an injected plastic mold with a decal on them," he said.

"The change may have been ignited by some concerned parents, and there might have been some economic impact that ultimately shaded the decision."

So one by one, starting with Ohio Art in 1978, manufacturers stopped producing metal boxes. Thermos was the last to cease metal production, in 1985. Perhaps fittingly, it was a Rambo lunch box.

During that time, collectors like Nelson Plain of Lexington, Ky., were haunting flea markets and garage sales, scarfing up all the metal boxes they could.

"I even bought one that had a sandwich in it," Plain said.

He has now branched out into dealing and has a spiffy Web site www.nelsonplain.com that shows off his wares.

"Never in the world when I left IBM did I think I'd be doing something like this," said Plain, who retired from his full-time job in 1987.

He hears mostly from nostalgia buyers, people who seek him out because they want to moon once again over their Jonathan Livingston Seagull brunch bag. (I remember the dusty blue vinyl bag and the little white zipper like it was, sigh, 25 years ago.)

"In one case," he said, "a woman wanted a box because her mother ran over her lunch box when she was little."

Plain said old metal and vinyl lunch kits vary widely in their value: from $25 for some of the more common ones to the $2,000-plus range for rare breeds like Thermos' Toppie, which was a promotional box for a trading stamp store.

Collectors such as Plain, Aikins and Brickell actually helped spark a resurgence of the metal lunch box.

In the last few years, Thermos and other companies have again been putting the pedal to the metal. But why?

"We had a call for it," said John Lanman, vice president of marketing for Thermos.

"Kids were still interested, and it felt like it had been away from the market for long enough."

But then they came back

But the decision also was driven by dealers and collectors who didn't want a finite hobby.

So Thermos brought a few back at a time evergreens such as Superman and Spiderman and it's mushroomed from there.

But let's face it: No matter how retro-mod-cool it looks, you can't squish a metal Barbie box into your already jam-packed backpack.

Samantha Ortiz, 9, of Georgetown, Ky., said she uses four lunch boxes at Western Elementary School none metal. They're all of the squishy variety one features the cartoon Arthur.

It doesn't surprise Thermos' Lanman, who said metal kits account for only about 10 percent of Thermos' lunch box sales.

Still, Brickell said that although metal offers the chance to do the most interesting graphics, the demand for lunch boxes isn't driven by the material.

It's driven by the artwork and the character on the box. If it's a cool-looking Scooby Doo, he said, "You could make it in lead, and a kid's gonna pick it up."

When picking one out, he said, kids ask themselves: "Is this lunch box some kind of a cool reflection of something that's neat in my life?"

Samantha Ortiz's older sister, Nicole, a student at Scott County High School, doesn't use lunch boxes anymore, but at 15, she remembers the days fondly.

She used to take them all the time, and despite her tender age, she sported a metal Barbie hand-me-down.

The important thing, Nicole Ortiz said, was to be current each year.

"You couldn't ever carry the same lunch box one year to the next that just wasn't done," she said.

Not in 1974, not now.

Lunch boxes have evolved, devolved and revolved, so there's no reason to think they won't be with us by the time today's Britney Spears fans are burping their own babies.

"My kid's just as happy with his vinyl Pokmon box as I was with my Roy Rogers box," Brickell said. "So I don't think they're missing anything on the excitement-o-meter.

"I think they were great pop art, and that's the underlying reason for their popularity. They reflected neat things in our pop culture. They were marketed extremely well, and that's the reason they endure."

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