I got it to work!
You go to windows/settings-preferences/hotkeys and then open up "modeling panel " catagory. Click on "displaywireframe" in the commands column, hilight the scripting in the bottom window and copy it. Now hit the new button to the right, fill in the fields and paste the text from "displaywireframe". Edit the script by changing anywhere it says "wireframe" to "boundingBox". This worked on Maya3.5 for the mac.