Talk about creative retirement.

For almost 25 years, Debbie Clarke has collected lunchboxes – enough to fill a museum. So after the chatty former junior high teacher moved recently from Sonoma County to Clear Lake, she opened a lunchbox museum and collectibles shop.

Her retirement plan is now playing out in Nice, in a former firehouse just across Highway 20 from the lake.

With her husband, Duane, 62, Clarke runs a place that's wall-to-wall memorabilia, a fun-house waltz through a half-century of pop culture paraphernalia.

Displays of Clarke's almost 700 prized lunchboxes pop up in cases and shelves safely above the reach of shoppers browsing for the toys, collectibles and assorted bric-a-brac on sale.

The Lunchbox Museum, as she calls it, has been open only a few weeks.

"I tell people this is my second 50 years," said Clarke, 52. "I'm open four days a week. We hike. It's beautiful up here. We're happy. This is a beautiful place to retire.

"I remember my grandmother sitting in front of the TV when she was my age. But I'm one of those people who have to stay active. We've learned from our parents. We need to stay active to be healthy. People are living longer. I want to stay busy."

Her energetic outlook is shared, as it turns out, by all but 11 percent of baby boomers, according to the AARP: As the baby boom generation ages, it's not going away quietly. New retirees intend to repurpose themselves into second careers and reinvent themselves into unexpected new lives.

Clarke's new life as a curator and shop owner began with '70s teen idol Bobby Sherman. It was 1985, and she was looking for relief from the stress of teaching rambunctious eighth-graders.

As she and her husband unwound by combing through a flea market one weekend, she found a metal lunchbox emblazoned with the onetime sensation's face.

"Do you remember Bobby Sherman?" she said. "I had his poster over my bed."

He was the first. Then came too many Barbie lunchboxes to remember, as well as hundreds more lunchboxes tied to every TV show imaginable – "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza," "The Partridge Family," "Welcome Back, Kotter" and beyond. Far, far beyond.

The collection is a visual synopsis of advertising and pop culture influences from the last half of the 20th century.

She likes to tell customers that she invested in collectibles instead of the stock market.

"People come in, and they're blown away because there's so many lunchboxes," said Clarke. "Then they start to look for the lunchboxes they owned as kids. They say, 'It's like walking back in time.' "

The collection grew slowly at first – and then Clarke discovered eBay, the source of 250 of her lunchboxes. She's become a member of eBay's passionate collectors group, and she's also a power seller, making more than $1,000 a month on the auction site.

"The first thing I sold was a Hello Kitty key ring holder that went to Japan," she said. "I was like, 'That'll pay for my Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm lunchbox.' It's like trading."

Before the Clarkes sold their Petaluma house, she displayed her lunchboxes at home.

The vehicle lunchboxes, shaped like fire trucks and school buses, lined shelves in her son's room. (All three of the Clarkes' children are grown.)

Food-themed lunchboxes went in the kitchen; the TV-related ones were in the living room.

With the museum and shop, she said, she just wants to make people smile.

And they do.

"I think this is charming," said Rose Marie Petkovich, a Granite Bay resident browsing through the museum on a visit to Clear Lake. "You can't walk in and just walk out."

Wendy Morgan runs the hardware store next door to Clarke's Collectibles and Lunchbox Museum, open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays through Sundays at 3674 Highway 20 East.

"It's very cool," she said. "I'll tell people, 'Go next door, and you'll find something.' It's wonderful. I hope it brings more people in to check it out. I'm very excited for Debbie. I've seen it from the ground up."

Call The Bee's Anita Creamer, (916) 321-1136.