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Tim Long will give up his Rifleman lunchbox when someone pries it from his cold, dead fingers. Long, 45, owns Eugene Jeans, a vintage and retro store in downtown Eugene that's home to more than 70 vintage lunchboxes. Most of them - including Long's coveted Rifleman - are for display only, however.

"People are always coming in, looking on every side for a price tag and then asking how much," Long said. "And then I have to break the bad news to them."

With the start of a new school year, PB&J sandwiches are finding themselves lodged inside hundreds of first-, third- and fifth-graders' lunchboxes. This year's most popular models include Spiderman, Harry Potter and Shrek 2.

Tim Long holds his favorite lunchbox featuring "The Rifleman," a show he says he ran home from kindergarten every afternoon to watch on television. Long's shop, Eugene Jeans, is decorated with a collection of vintage lunchboxes.

But lunchboxes these days are an intergenerational commodity. It's hard to find a baby boomer who doesn't remember - or maybe even still owns - his or her first school lunchbox. Nostalgia runs deep.

How else do you explain the 20 or so vintage lunchboxes and Thermos bottles dangling from the ceiling at Trader Joe's on Coburg Road in Eugene?

The store display consists of its employees' own lunchboxes and is the brainchild of Michelle Weber, 40, who still cherishes several lunchboxes from her childhood.

"I just couldn't get rid of them," she said. "There's such a wash of memories when you open one up and smell - that blend of peanut butter and jelly, plastic bags and milk."

Not to mention the memories associated with the TV, movie and cartoon characters that adorn the outsides. At Trader Joe's, for example, the "Schoolhouse Rock" and "The Waltons" lunchboxes both belong to Weber.

Co-worker Annie Herzog contributed the Smurfs and Batman lunchboxes - but felt pulled to the past when she spotted the display's Garfield lunchbox. "It made me want to get some vegetable soup," said Herzog, 26, who owned a Garfield box as a kid. "I hated sandwiches so my mom would make vegetable soup at 4:30 in the morning and put it in my Thermos. And it kept it warm."

School lunchboxes saw their heyday in the '50s and '60s, when about 120 million were sold. Lunchboxes began to lose some of their cachet in the '70s, while in more recent years the growth of government-sponsored, reduced-price hot lunches has cut into sales.

The biggest sellers these days tend to be tied to a year's biggest-grossing movies, said Mike Dobbs, a vice president at Lunchboxes.com, an online company based in Los Angeles. A few models - Scooby Doo, Pokemon and Strawberry Shortcake, for example - do well year after year. The company offers more than 140 styles, including such surprising icons as Kurt Cobain, Vince Lombardi and the Sex Pistols.

Fewer than half of today's lunchboxes include Thermos bottles, Dobbs said, in part because many parents prefer to pack juice boxes instead.

At Gateway Mall's Target store in Springfield, team leader Tyler Shoun said lunchboxes with water bottles have sold well, especially among the middle-school set. Younger girls still favor Bratz (a popular doll) and a Disney Princesses box with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and all the rest. Boys still appear to like dinosaurs and athletes.

Among the few lunchbox characters not moving well at Target: Barbie and the Incredible Hulk.

At Eugene Jeans, Long said his collection grew when he and his wife, Barbara, engaged in a long battle of oneupsmanship, taking turns coming home from a garage sale or antique store with yet another vintage lunchbox. "All of a sudden we had 15, and then over 70," he said.

His prized Rifleman lunchbox celebrates the old Western TV show of the same name starring Chuck Connors. Long also owns a more obscure lunchbox that features Connors as "The Cowboy in Africa."

Long regrets that he never saved his own lunchbox from first grade - "The Man from U.N.C.L.E" - and for good reason. He recently came across just such a box at a local antique store with a price of $325. That was too steep for Long, though the price is in line with what other vintage lunchboxes can fetch on Lunchboxes.com and elsewhere.

With four kids between the ages of 6 and 13, Long would seem to have ample excuse to stock up on lunchboxes. But, in fact, he can't blame the kids for his collection-mania.

"They don't use lunchboxes," he said.

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