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Children won't stash peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in William Poole's lunch boxes. Poole, of Shadyside, amassed more than 1,000 antique metal lunch boxes with pop-culture characters ranging from comic-book heroes to television cowboys. After selling most of them to help put his son through college, he has about 50 remaining.

His interest in lunch boxes began in 1986 while browsing for antiques with his wife, Bonnie, an antiques dealer.

"We dragged our son to auctions. It gave us a common interest. He would help us search for the boxes," says Poole, a health care consultant.

They found a book, "The Official Price Guide to Lunch Box Collectibles" by Scott Bruce, which listed more than 1,000 lunch boxes. The family soon made it a goal to find one of each lunch box listed in the book.

"There's a finite number," Poole says. "You can collect all of them."

He did -- finally amassing one of every metal lunch box ever made, he says.

Gary Sohmers, known as the "King of Pop Culture," says lunch boxes came into vogue in the 1950s when characters first started appearing on the covers. The Hopalong Cassidy box, created in 1951, helped popularize lunch boxes to a larger audience.

One of the draws of the lunch boxes is nostalgia, Sohmers says. Nostalgia creates demand.

"The people who collect them are competing with the person who wants something to help them remember their childhood," says Sohmers, an appraiser and dealer in Hudson, Mass. He appraised products for nine seasons of "Antiques Roadshow," the popular PBS series.

Poole searched all over the United States and Canada to find lunch boxes, going to auctions, garage sales and flea markets.

For three years, he searched for the 1954 Superman lunch box, to no avail. Then one day, he stumbled upon the "dream lunch box" at an auction -- four 1954 Superman boxes in the shipping cartons.

He paid $525 each for the lunch boxes, selling three for $1,200. He sold the fourth for $8,000.

Although he started collecting for fun, the hobby paid off. The Pooles made enough money through selling the lunch boxes to pay for two years of college for their son. Poole also sold 40 of the boxes to the Henry Ford Collection in Dearborn, Mich., in 1999.

"It did a whole lot better than any mutual funds we've had," he says of his collection.

Poole says the best way for these collections to pay off is to always buy in top condition.

Bonnie's advice to collectors is to start out of joy for the hobby, not to make money.

"This was a fluke," she says. "If you make money, it's just an added bonus."

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