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Remember your old metal lunchbox from childhood? The one with Superman and the robot on it that always smelled vaguely of peanut butter. The one you whacked your sister over the head with. Yeah, that one.

If you still have it, count yourself lucky. And if you don't, you could have saved all your milk money from kindergarten through grad school and you still wouldn't have enough nickels to buy it back. Recently, that Superman lunchbox by Universal brought in more than $13,000 at auction.

Joseph Soucy of Westerly has that lunchbox. And he has about 500 others. In fact he reportedly has the largest collection of mint vintage lunchboxes in the nation.

It all started in 1988 when his wife, Lois, bought him a Disney Schoolbus lunchbox for Father's Day. Soon after, he and his wife were out antiquing and he spotted a Beatles Yellow Submarine lunchbox. The woman wanted $200 for it. Soucy offered $75. He got it for $90 and learned shortly afterwards that it was worth at least $350. The thermos alone was worth about $120.

"That was it. I was hooked," Soucy says, surrounded by shelves lined with his tin treasures.

Soucy shops online (particularly eBay), goes to antique stores and flea markets and taps into a network of people who know what he's looking for. Each lunchbox in his collection has a story behind it, or simply has personal appeal to him.

"The Westerns from my childhood. That's what stimulated my interest," he says.

This segment of his collection includes three varieties of the 1953 Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Double R Bar Ranch lunchbox made by American Thermos in Norwich and a 1950 Hopalong Cassidy, the first picture lunchbox made by Aladdin in Nashville, Tenn., plus Annie Oakley, Zorro and Gunsmoke.

Many of these are displayed in built-in bookshelves in his living room and are arranged by theme. A shelf over the window, for example, has an outer space theme with Star Trek, The Jetsons and Lost in Space lunchboxes. Downstairs, the walls, a large table and two rotating store display racks are filled with lunchboxes. There's Mork and Mindy, Bobby Sherman, G.I. Joe, Canadian Mounties, Dukes of Hazzard, Indiana Jones, Peanuts and Snow White (this 1938 item is the earliest in the collection).

He has two versions of the Disney Schoolbus: a Spanish one with one of the Three Little Pigs descending the bus stairs and an American one with Jiminy Cricket stepping off. It's those subtle differences that keep collectors such as Soucy intrigued and collecting. As consumers and dealers have gotten savvy about the collectibles market, most of the good stuff has been bought up. But the thrill of the hunt keeps Soucy going. He's spent a decade or more tracking down some of the rarer pieces in his collection.

"It's that one time that you hit that one piece, the rush is so great," he says.

Among the hard-to-find items are the aforementioned Superman, prototypes that never were mass-produced, such as American Thermos' Trident submarine lunchbox with the USS Ohio on one side and the USS Philadelphia on the other. And just about anything by lunchbox manufacturer Universal, which was based in New Britain. Unlike Aladdin and American Thermos, the big two of lunchbox manufacturing, Universal didn't mass-produce their boxes and were in the business a short time. That makes their lunchboxes more valuable.

"They are the cornerstone of any good collection," Soucy says of the hard-to-find Universal lunchboxes.

While Superman and the robot is Soucy's favorite, it is not his rarest. He keeps this artifact, a Davy Crockett at the Alamo thermos, under a glass dome. There are just 12 of these in existence, he says.

And while Soucy fully appreciates owning these hard-to-find pieces, he gets pleasure simply from collecting the relics of pop culture. "The artwork, the fact that it relates back to so many people's childhoods, the nostalgia," he says ticking off the reasons he loves lunchboxes so much.

His collection, which spans six decades, includes the last metal lunch box made. It features Rambo, the killing-machine movie hero. Soucy finds this amusing since a group of parents in Florida pressured manufacturers to stop making metal lunchboxes because they deemed them dangerous weapons in schoolyard tiffs. Out went the shiny metal models and in came vinyl and plastic, and soon production moved overseas to China. Today, no lunchboxes are made in the U.S.

But don't feel too bad if you didn't save your lunchbox, and you don't have the money to buy the original. You can get a look at Soucy's collection next month when Harper Collins publishes the coffee table book "Lunchbox Inside And Out" by Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett. The book looks at the golden age of lunchboxes from 1950 to 1980 through Soucy's collection. The book will hit the shelves Aug. 10 and will retail for $16.95, a fraction of what it would cost to buy one of those rare classics. You can also catch Soucy and the book's authors on the Today show on Sept. 2.

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