Consider the unassuming molded plastic chair. Available at local discount stores for $10 to $40, or even less during end-of-season sales, it is a low-cost, ubiquitous and often overlooked staple of summer.

Bryan Ropar of Hempfield loves the chairs, also called resin chairs. He has collected nearly 90 of them, some in colors, which he stores in stacks in the bedroom of the home he shares with his parents and sister.

"I've loved chairs all my life, basically," says Ropar, 25. "It's not like I picked (this type of collectible). It picked me. That's the thing about autism."

Several years ago, Ropar was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.

"They call it 'the little professor syndrome,' " says Cindy Waeltermann of McCandless, director and founder of the Autism Center, which has three suburban Pittsburgh locations. "Kids with Asperger's are absolutely brilliant. They talk like little professors."

Also among the characteristics of Asperger's are an inability to grasp social skills, such as making eye contact, and having a intense focus on particular things, like trains and Transformers. "That's what we collect," says Waeltermann, whose son, 9, also has Asperger's.

Ropar's interest in resin chairs began six years ago in high school. But his mother, Vickie, says her son's interest in chairs in general began years before, when he became inordinately interested in his place and seat in his elementary-school classrooms. Plastic chairs, though, are easier to lift than desk chairs. And they stack easily.

Now, Ropar searches for collectibles at flea markets, garage sales, hardware stores and even roadsides. His collection, which includes several child-sized seats, features chairs not only in white but also dark green, red, blue and gray.

Ropar has carried his favorite chair, manufactured by Grosfillex, a France-based company with North American headquarters in Robesonia, Berks County, to a variety of places the Ropars have visited. He has photographed that chair at such locales as the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia and the Indianapolis 500.

"I have no idea why it's my favorite," Ropar says. But he likes it so much, his mother and father, Joe, allow him to park it in the living room from which he watches television.

"I'm not crazy about it, but we tolerate it," his mother says.

Fortunately for Ropar, others in his life are tolerant, too. He has occasionally contacted the president of a local resin chair company, Adams Mfg. of Portersville, Butler County, to discuss resin lawn chairs and other subjects.

"He's one of the few people that understands resin chairs are the high point of manufacturing furniture," says Bill Adams, president of Adams Mfg., one of the largest resin chair producers in the world. "He has an extraordinarily analytical mind. He just understands -- the resin chair, which, unlike other furniture, is 100 percent recyclable."

Ropar owns chairs from faraway places such as Italy, Taiwan, Mexico and China. The chairs come in various shapes, like bistro or Adirondack chairs. Ropar even made a few Adirondack chairs himself, out of wood. But he distinguishes between wooden and plastic chairs.

"You sit on a wood chair; you sit in a plastic chair," he says. He disdains attempts to embellish resin chairs with cloth covers, saying, "I think they're elegant enough the way they are."

While he shares his bedroom with the chairs, Ropar says he doesn't feel cramped by stacks of them.

"It doesn't bother me," he says.

Vickie Ropar has no trouble talking about the condition of her son, one of two children. The other is a daughter, Sarah, an engineering student. Vickie Ropar says it's important to get the word out about children with Asperger's because "they're one out of 160 births." Waeltermann says the Centers for Disease Control is about to change its statistics for Asperger's to 1 in 100 births. No known cause of Asperger's and autism exists, Waeltermann says.

Bryan Ropar was tested over the years for his unusual behaviors and diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, until he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's. He attended Hempfield School District classes and later the Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville, for students with special needs, until he was 21.

Last October, Ropar graduated from Triangle Technical Institute in electrical maintenance and even had a job offer, which was subsequently rescinded during the economic turndown.

But Adams says he's been encouraging Ropar to go back to school and earn a degree in electrical engineering, because he has already shown a great ability to work with electricity. Ropar's interest in electricity extends to his Jacob's ladder device that produces an electrical arc.

"He's a very intelligent young man," Adams says. "He'll e-mail me about the things he makes. He just has a phenomenal ability. It's so nice to see people who actually like to do things, and Bryan likes to do things," like creating electrical cranes out of Legos that can lift objects.

While Ropar has some problems with tasks involving subjects that do not interest him, he can wax eloquently on ones that do.

"Plastic chairs are quite interesting since they touch everyone's lives and are spread throughout the world," he wrote in preparation for an interview on his collection. "Yet nobody notices them; they (sneer) at them and let them fall into disgrace. For some reason, these chairs always end up in the background of photos of family events. I believe they are the most comfortable chair, mainly because of their flexibility."

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