Basic Script Question concerning assign new values to objects

Good afternoon all,

 I am completely new to Max and Maxscript, please bare with me.  I have purchased 3ds Max Maxscript 2nd Ed and am on my way to learning alot right now.   I'm looking for some general direction to my project not for anyone to do the work for me.  What I would like to do:

 Create several boxes.  Be able to assign those boxes a Channel number.  Have a dialogue box where I could say Channels 1 do , channels 2 and 3 do y.  Right now I have written a script so that I can select boxes only, I have a spinner ready to change the Channel # of the selected box.  My lack of knowledge comes in here.  How do I assign a channel number to each box and more importantly how do I keep that info  in the scene once it is saved and closed.  

 This is only the first part of a project I am working on.  Right now I just plan that when I can assign each box it's own channel, be able to change the world Y pos of each box based on channel selection.  The end of this project involves being able to select large numbers of lights based on channels, for now since I am so new I have limited my attempt to boxes and movement along the world Y axis.

 If you have any suggestions I would appreciate it.  I will be posting my work as I reach various levels of success.  Thank you for your time,

JamesCG