ALMOST AS soon as we landed in New York, Beng and I ran off to one of our old haunts, the Sunday flea market on the Upper West Side. These were my two neat finds: a Waterman 412 1/2 PSF fountain pen in silver filigree from 1915 (still a bargain at $150), and a brass inkwell, in dire need of restoration but a pretty piece (at a pretty price–$10!).
IT BEING a rainy Sunday here in Manila, I thought I’d take out some of my fountain pens—vintage and modern—for some routine maintenance (read: boy plays with toys). I took this shot of the pens with my iPhone, and I rather like its antique-y look.
And while we’re at it, here are the pens in my current rotation. Can you identify them?
Penman for Monday, July 30, 2012
ONE OF the things that users and collectors of vintage items like fountain pens have to deal with is the fact that these objects were once owned by people who are now, to put it starkly, dead. Through some circuitous route, something that they once held and possibly cherished has come down to us, making its way halfway around the world and providing another lifetime of service and pleasure to its new owner.
Quite a number of the 100+ vintage pens in my collection have names inscribed on them. Since these pens come mainly from the 1930s and 1940s, and since a fountain pen (especially a gold-nibbed one as opposed to a “school pen” that kids like me learned to use in the 1950s and 1960s) would have been something that adults would have owned, it’s reasonable to assume that these names belonged to persons long gone.
Some collectors don’t like these inscriptions and engravings, seeing them as imperfections that drastically lower the monetary value of the objects they’re imprinted on. I strongly disagree. I take them as part of the pen’s provenance, a direct link to the man or woman who once held the pen in his or her hand—who wrote letters of love and joy or anger and sorrow, who signed checks that grew a business and cards that made someone’s day. Few things are more private and personal than a pen—it told your deepest secrets, and you can choose and customize a nib to write exactly the way you want it to.
When I started collecting pens thirty years ago, there was no Internet as we know it today, so there was no way short of spending hours poring over genealogical records to establish just who someone like “F. J. QUIRK”—the donor of my first Parker Vacumatic—was. By the time I got hold of a pen-and-pencil set of Parker Mandarin Duofolds belonging to “BLANCHE SAVIDGE” a few years ago, it took me only a few seconds to discover that Blanche had died at age 95 in December 2007; she had been a longtime teacher in her community in Pennsylvania, had never married, and was described as a “staunch Republican.” Or was she indeed my Blanche? Another Blanche Savidge, born ten years later in 1923, died in 2010 at the age of 87 in El Paso, Texas (curiously enough, she had also been an active Republican). The likelihood, of course, was that it was the Pennsylvania Blanche who owned my Duofolds, because I got them in November 2008, when the Texas Blanche was still alive.
This puzzle came to mind again a couple of weeks ago when I received a bunch of old pens from my sister Elaine in Virginia—pens I had picked up on eBay, with the idea of keeping a few and selling off the rest. One of the pens in the batch was a sweet little Sheaffer Balance in red-veined gray pearl and gold trim from 1934 (after you deal with these pens for a few years, you’ll know their names and birthdates by heart). I had expected something bigger—most of the time, you never really know when all you have on eBay are the pictures, with very little description—so I decided, to help recover my costs on the other pens, that this Sheaffer would go to the pile for sale, as pretty as it was.
Before posting it for sale, however, I gave in to my curiosity and Googled the name on the pen: HELEN RICHEY. The pen looked so fresh and the name was embossed so sharply in gold that it appeared that the pen had been used very little, if at all, these past 78 years. Assuming that Ms. Richey had been at least 20 when she received the pen—it was a high-end Sheaffer that a parent or a spouse might have given Helen on a graduation or a birthday—she would be approaching 100 today, were she alive.
What I found on Google and Wikipedia floored me. There were, inevitably, a number of Helen Richeys that appeared in the search, but at the top of the list were two—the first, an Australian dancer who still serves a judge on the Australian edition of Dancing with the Stars; scratch that one out. The other prominent Helen Richey was a pioneering woman aviator (or “aviatrix,” as they used to be called), the first woman to be hired as a commercial pilot by a US airline. Born in 1909, this Helen once partnered with Amelia Earhart in a transcontinental air race, finishing creditably, and was the first woman to carry mail by air and among the first to teach flying. Sadly her life and career took a tragic downturn: an all-male pilots’ union forced her out of the cockpit, and she committed suicide in 1947.
What an amazing life that was; what an education I’d had in just five minutes, and what an honor it would be if I had the flying Ms. Richey’s pen in my hand. The year this Sheaffer was made, 1934, was also the year Richey won the first national women’s air race in Pennsylvania, and the year she was hired by Central Airlines, a precursor of United. Might the Sheaffer have been a presentation gift, quickly put aside in her rush to return to the cockpit?
As fascinating as that scenario was, I then remembered that the pen came to me from a seller in Illinois, and so I Googled “Helen Richey Illinois”, and discovered yet another Helen Richey, a lady who had been born in Gerlaw, Illinois in 1919, and who had died in the area in February 2012. Suddenly it made more sense for her to be the pen’s Helen; I had bought the pen on eBay in May, a few months after her death, presumably as part of her estate. While she was no barnburner, this Helen had also lived a full life, working in a local school.
And that, I thought, was that—until I did some figuring and realized that the second Helen would have been only 15 when the pen came into the stores and into her purse; not impossible, but unlikely. Furthermore, this Helen had had two husbands—William Nicol and then John Richey—so that “Richey” was her second husband’s surname (John died in 1995). So she got the Sheaffer only after her second wedding; her eldest son George Nicol still lives in Texas and whose age is given by LinkedIn at around 60-64, putting his birthdate at between 1948 and 1952, suggesting that Helen didn’t get married until she was at least 28. Even if she was with William for only a few years before marrying John, she still would have had to be in her 30s—in the early 1950s—when she got the Sheaffer with John’s surname on it.
Given that the 1950s were flush with swanky new pen designs, why would anyone give a loved one, or even oneself, a pen from 1934? Was it possible, even vaguely, that the other, the airborne Helen, whose timeframe accounts much better for the pen, had some Illinois connection? I’ve yet to find out.
More strange connections exist: if this were the flyer’s pen, I’d give it to my son-in-law, who works in the aviation industry and who collects aviation memorabilia in San Diego, California, where a pictorial biography of Helen Richey can be found at the Air and Space Museum.
I’ll leave it to those with sharper genealogical skills and better resources to tease this mystery out. In any case, now that I know this much about both Helen Richeys, I’m keeping the pen, which has suddenly made a friend, across the years and miles, of perfect strangers.
(Helen Richey’s photo from mckeesportheritage.org)
I’m reviving Flotsam & Jetsam from Pinoy Penman 1.0, for those odd, quick-and-dirty reflections that were tweets before Twitter. Sometimes they may not even need words, like this iPhone pic I took of some pens I was cleaning up and left for a few minutes:
Since I’ve opened this new blog with very little in it yet, I thought I might as well fill the wait between my weekly Star columns with selected reposts (or, in some cases, just posts, since they’d never been posted before) from columns past—from Penman, which began in the Star in 2000; Barfly, which ran in Today from 1994 to 1999; Man Overboard, from Men’s Zone in the early 2000s; T3; and Manileño from Filipinas magazine from 2003 to 2010. So here goes.)
Penman for August 21, 2000
FOR PHILIPPINE Star readers who may not know me from my earlier incarnations (no offense meant to the Gautama; the only thing Buddha-like about this Butch is his midsection) and who may be wondering about the column title, “Penman” refers both to a story I wrote a few years ago, “Penmanship,” and to my long and abiding fascination with old fountain pens, about a hundred of which I’ve collected over the past 15 years.
Most of these beauties from the 1920s up to the 1940s came from antique fairs and garage sales in the American Midwest, where I lived for a few years, and from more exotic nooks and crannies such as a backstreet pen shop in Edinburgh and a sidewalk vendor in Saigon. Some I’ve received as generous gifts from friends (a clutch of Parkers and Sheaffers from Franz Arcellana—pens he actually wrote his stories with—and a breathtaking Japanese maki-e lacquered pen from poet Jimmy Abad).
Now and then—say, after a few months without adding a new-old pen to the trove—I satisfy my urges by getting one on the Internet or, less often, by taking a deep breath and paying full price at the local mall (although I once found a very nice pair of new Parker Duofolds selling at practically half-price in a department store in Cebu). Still even more rarely, I’ve come across some astounding bargains in my own backyard—an antique stall in Ermita (a Montblanc 146 and a much-sought-after 1959 Sheaffer PFM V for P650 each), and a stationery shop in Binondo (a rather uncommon Parker VP for P350).
Never mind what these names mean, if you know or care nothing about pens: just think of them as exquisitely lovely, useful, and—to some people who collect them for more than aesthetic reasons—quite valuable objects, some which have sold at auction for over $10,000 (no, that’s not your grandfather’s Wearever or Esterbrook, for which you’d be lucky to get enough for a movie and a hotdog sandwich). I have an awful suspicion that most of the good pens we must have once had in this country—any colony with a highly-literate bureaucracy should have been swimming in a sea of blue-black ink—would have long had their gold nibs pulled and melted down in the smithies of Meycauayan to make someone a pretty trinket or a gleaming incisor.
Imagine my surprise when, last weekend—on one of those trips to the mall where the sleepy-eyed husband gets deputized by the wife in resolute quest of a wedding present—I strayed into a tiangge stall selling the usual santos and hardwood benches and spotted, in a corner of a glass case, the unmistakable flat-top cap and gold pocket clip of a 1920s pen. I asked to see it, and my hands shook as I confirmed that I was holding a near-perfect example of a Swan Eternal No. 48, a huge fountain pen as fat as a cigar (it’s a boy thing, this pen envy) in a gold-trimmed rosewood finish and the biggest nib you ever saw, a No. 8 (most fountain pens, by comparison, sport nothing bigger than a No. 2). The patent date on the clip said “Jan. 19, 1915” although the pen itself was made, according to my trusty references, between 1924 and 1929. Hallelujah! But first I had to ask, in a dry croak, “How much?”
The man behind the counter consulted a woman who was doing the books. “Five hundred,” she said casually. I felt faint: P500 for a fancy Bic may be outrageous to you, but if they had ten of these and I had P5,000 on me I would have bought them up and retired on the profits. The pricing also told me that the sellers had probably found the pen among other effects in a large estate (you had to be very rich to own an accessory like this in the late ’20s) and had, themselves, paid very little if anything for it; many old pens come as bonuses to buyers of many-drawered antique cabinets, or even of cigar boxes, where they tended to be kept and forgotten.
I forked the money over. The man hesitated and my heart skipped a beat. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t have a small box to put it in.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” I managed to say, taking full and final possession of the Swan and sticking it into my pocket, where I was certain that God Almighty had always intended it to belong. Surely, there was more than a touch of justice here. How many times, during my months in England, had I revisited and salivated over the fabulous pens on Portobello Road, going home to Norwich with little more than a jar of bagoong and a packet of Chippy from the Filipino food store at Earls Court? Just how many of the half-dozen Pinoys who can tell a Swan Eternal from a Rubber Ducky stumble into one, in a mall buzzing with Nokia ringtones, and get to bring it home for the price of a phone card?
I treated Beng out to a lunch of noodles and siopao and proudly showed her my prize find. She herself prefers to pick up old blue and ruby-red bottles, but has developed a grudging respect for and even some expertise in my objects of choice—once spotting, at a cowshed fair in Ohio, a circa-1930 lapis-blue Parker Duofold Junior which I bought for $5 and later traded for my first Montblanc. “It’s gorgeous,” she agreed, “but you should have asked for a discount.” Spoken, I suppose, like a true shopper.
But this wasn’t shopping, Beng. This was serendipity, for which I can only thank my lucky stars and, yes, you, for dragging me out of my Sunday-morning stupor to find kitchenware for newlyweds.
Pinoy Penman 3.0 