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Think back.

Way back. Before expense account lunches.

Before your own salad days.

Farther back than brown-bagging turkey on rye and a can of juice. You had a plastic or metal or maybe vinyl lunch box, and every day you lugged your peanut butter and jam sandwich, carrot and celery sticks, Oreos and thermos to school in it.

The lunch box became dented. It cracked. It faded. But it was yours, as the name written in ballpoint on white adhesive tape inside attested.

Character boxes were popular.

You probably wanted whatever image was hot and not what was not.

So you opted for anything from the 1962 Pony Tail Tid Bit Kit to the 1971 World of Barbie box (depicting Barbie in bellbottoms with fishing pole) to the 1978 Charlie's Angels stand-up zipper pouch with matching thermos.

Boys' lunch boxes, and these were unabashedly gender specific, featured Hopalong Cassidy (the first hero on a lunch box), G.I. Joe (green character, army drab background) or Roy Rogers and Trigger, close-up on box with action scene on thermos. You were 7, 8 or 9 then and objects, their feel, their smell, their appearance, mattered.

And then you didn't care anymore.

Frankly, it smelled.

So you tossed it.

This was a bad move.

Particularly bad if you once carried the 1961 vinyl Ballet lunch box, the 1969 Dudley Do-Right Box or the 1960 Dream Boat box, now valued at $1,250, $1,200 and $840 respectively, mint condition.

A 1955 Hopalong (Hoppy) Cassidy box recently sold at auction for $3,000. Vintage Star Trek and Beatles boxes attract not only lunch box collectors but Trekkies and Beatlemania hounds as well.

Lunch boxes are hot collectibles, with at least 20 committed collectors in the Northwest and thousands more nationally.

These collectors are predatory.

Some, like Hillsboro resident Fred Carlson, are besieged with calls from lunch box entrepreneurs.

"I've cut back," Carlson says, "but until recently I probably logged 800 minutes a month in long distance calls from traders. My phone bill was always hundreds of dollars." Collectors are, of course, acquisitive.

Carlson, who compares collecting to smoking, "easy to start, impossible to give up," recalls that at his zenith he owned more than 5,000 boxes." But it was getting out of control," he says, "so I had to weed out the extraneous ones." His collection now numbers 4,000, one of which he displays every day at the Hillsboro Post Office where he works.

"Some collectors," Carlson says, "keep separate rooms for their lunch boxes. You should see a room with 1,200 boxes in it. That just really knocks you out."

For collectors, the fun is in capturing the rare box at a flea market, garage or estate sale. The payoff is taking the box home, polishing it and displaying it on a shelf, and then letting other collectors know what you have. Then the hunt begins for the next rare lunch box, with the intention of lifting it from junk status to vintage acquisition.

"I sink all my spare money into this," Carlson concedes.

"No one is in it for the profit."

But undeniably, there's gold in collective memories.

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