While business isn't bad, Stacy Samuels can't help longing for the boom days of the early '90s.

If your memory is fuzzy, that was the time of the last big propeller beanie craze, most notably in Baltimore, where the multicolored hats morphed from being geek chic to a must-have item for the city's youths. In one incident that grabbed national headlines, police arrested a 10-year-old boy for holding up a 9-year-old at gunpoint to relieve him of his rainbow-hued hat.

"Everyone was buying them, kids, gang members, church-goers," says Samuels, who serves as "chief flight commander" at Interstellar Propeller, a propeller beanie maker in Berkeley, Calif.

While such beanies might not exactly be in vogue these days, they remain an enduring symbol of all things techie. You don't have to look into too many cubicles at many high-tech companies to spot a propeller beanie of one kind or another. Meanwhile, the term "propellerhead" still says scientist or engineer to most people, and has been incorporated into the names of everything from software companies to alternative music bands.

Interstellar Propeller, which employs from five to 10 people - depending on the season - claims to be the leading maker of these lids, having spun out 1.5 million over 27 years. The company, which says it is "changing the way America flies," sells its hats through a slew of outlets, from CompUSA to theme parks to science museums to shopping-mall carts to, of course, high-tech companies. Interstellar awarded Bill Gates a golden propellered hat in the mid-1990s, and more recently, basketball stars Shaquille O'Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon sported the twirly caps in a TV ad Spike Lee produced for a fast food restaurant.

The company got its start in 1976 shortly after Samuels concocted a propeller beanie as a birthday gift for Wavy Gravy, who made a name for himself in the 1960s as a political and social activist, and more recently as the namesake for a discontinued Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor.

"People really reacted to the hat, so I got into the business of making and selling them," says Samuels, who is hard to miss at Oakland A's baseball games and San Francisco 49ers football games, what with his long beard, superhero cape, banjo and propeller beanie.