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Bet you can remember your lunch box. You may not remember what was packed in it, but you can recall in vivid color what cowboy, astronaut, teenybopper idol or TV character was embossed and printed on the tin lid.

I'm reminded of them every time school starts up, which it did in our area this week.

Looking at the lunch boxes was one of the best parts of school shopping. I always wanted a new one but never needed it - my mom took such good care of mine and saw to it that I did, too, that they never wore out.

Too bad mine was plain-Jane, with a basket of flowers on the front, compared with my friend's Popeye or my other friend's so-trendy Barbie box.

Theirs would be collectible today. Certain lunch boxes from the '50s to the '90s are bringing megabucks from those who consider them a compact look at American kiddie culture. A 1962 Dudley Do-Right box in excellent condition and complete with thermos bottle is worth about $1,150; a Jetsons dometop box from '63 would fetch $1,500, recent price guides show.

From the singing cowboys to the Partridge Family, from the Flintstones' Dino to Barney the purple dinosaur, and from NASA moon-shot scenes to Star Wars' Jabba the Hutt, what kids cared about is all there in mostly square, tin, full-color glory. (For a lunch date with the past, check out the web site www.lunchboxpad.com)

Today, it's hard not to pity kids who carry their lunches in plain canvas backpacks. I know it's the style, and any self-respecting, third-grader sees the Cartwright brothers on a Bonanza lunch box as totally uncool. But for us, it was nice to have enough innocent, bold faith in our heroes to tote metal boxes emblazoned with their faces and think we were making a statement.

Still, while our lunch boxes looked good, what was inside wasn't always good for us. Not that our moms were to blame - they seemed to be just as frustrated as today's lunch packers. I asked a few friends, and peanut butter and jelly, or bologna and cheese five days in a row seems to be the normal memory of the era; only the add-ins were different. Peanut butter cookies, Oreos, potato chips and celery sticks with peanut butter filling must have fed half of American school kids at the time.

Some moms got creative and put soup in the Thermos, but in South Florida, that was a rarity - our schools weren't air-conditioned.

The lunch had to compete with the cafeteria food, too. A lot of trading went down: Kids around my cafeteria traded their tuna sandwiches for the coveted beef-a-roni when they could find willing lunchmates. Some kids preferred the brownies in the cafeteria and would give away their Oreos and throw in a bag of chips to make the deal.

One unusual kid in our class loved green beans - he'd trade his entire lunch for the little dish of beans they served hot.

I remember watching my next-door neighbor pack four lunches, assembly-line fashion, in 10 minutes on a Sunday night for her brood. She set out 10 slices of bread, smeared them all with butter and put a slice of baloney on each one. A slice of American cheese and a little mustard right down the line. Then the second slice of bread, and she wrapped the sandwich neatly in waxed paper.

An apple for each box, a fistful of potato chips bagged from the huge Charles Chips can, and the lunches were complete for four. The three girls each got one sandwich, the boy, two.

They were stored in the fridge overnight. During a death in the family, I stayed with them and got the same lunch. The potato chips tasted like apples because of her method - these were the days before air-tight baggies and plastic lunch containers.

A little lunchtime history for you: Congress passed the National School Lunch Program Act in 1946. Schools were given money to help feed needy students and ensure that every child had a hot meal once a day. That's now been built upon so that breakfast and even after-school snacks are available at most schools as well as lunch.

The lunch program cut into lunch box-carrying. It became "cool" to eat at the cafeteria rather than out of a box. The variety was better, too. But lunch boxes didn't go away. It was still cheaper to feed a large family with homemade lunches.

When the lunch box changed from tin to vinyl sometime in the early '60s, and then to ecologically correct washable cloth bags in the '80s, the printed lunch box sales took a dive, except among the kindergarten crowd.

But the "retro" movement and nostalgic Baby Boomer parents have brought back the printed box. They're tracking down old ones and using the retro-new ones for their own lunches - though the safe-food canvas bags are packed inside, with gel packs.

And now, instead of PB&J, and bologna and cheese, we're packing fruit and brie with baguette, or a pasta dish with fresh tomatoes, or a tortilla wrap of fresh tuna, greens and balsamic vinaigrette. And, to drink, some bottled water.

Times do change, and change us as well.

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