Poking the Wounded Bear

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I don’t know if it’s another weird Ohio saying or just generally good advice: never poke a wounded bear. A few weeks ago, I raised the ire of many a Parker fan by suggesting that the Parker Pen Company might have had something to do with crappy later offerings from the Conklin Pen Company, after the company had been relocated to Chicago in 1938 and likely after the shadowy syndicate that purchased Conklin had in turn resold it to Joseph Starr’s Starr Pen Company.

Unless it pains you too much to relive the experience, the article was posted at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/02/finally-enough-evidence-and-new.html.

It took some time for blood pressures to return to normal and for the angry mobs to return their pitchforks and torches to their normal household purposes.  It’s probably best at the peak of the frenzy that I didn’t follow up immediately with a second article, opening with “and another thing . . . “

These, like the “mother of toilet seat” pencil I discussed in my last article, are examples of the Conklin Minuteman – the same name was used on both of these very different looking pens and pencils.  As a proud Ohioan, I didn’t mind gathering together all of the colors they came in . . . even though Conklin had long since left Toledo and it does drive the OCD part of my brain a little nuts that the gray one is a little bit bigger than the others.

These are simply awful syringe-filling pens with similarly awful business ends, but during wartime shortages of new consumer goods, they were probably about as good as you could find at the time.

I was a beginning collector at the time, and I know in those early days I questioned whether these were made by Parker.  If I said it aloud, I’m sure I was loudly dismissed as unworthy to walk the aisles at pen shows or otherwise be seen in polite society.  Hopefully I figured out on my own that notwithstanding a similar washer clip and screw-on top to secure it, anyone could have made something similar in construction to a Duofold flattop after Parker’s ubiquitous 1916 patent on the washer clip expired.

Bear with me now.  Or bears with me, I should say . . .

Consider the Parkette Zephyr, another of the lower tier lines of Parker’s offerings.  According to Tony Fischier’s excellent site, Parkerpens.net, the Parkette Zephyr was being phased out in 1941 (see https://parkerpens.net/parco.html).

The very year Joseph Starr acquired The Conklin Pen Company.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

If I didn’t tell you those were Parkette pencils, and if you didn’t know Parkette Zephyr pens were streamlined in shape rather than flattops, you’d swear these were matching sets of pens and pencils.  Don’t deny it.

One commentator on my last article suggested that the Starr Pen Company bought all of Parker’s remaining materials and parts, put them together and resold them- a timeline that fits nicely into Tony’s assertion that the Zephyr was discontinued at the same time Starr got into the business.

But by all accounts, Starr didn’t actually make anything.  The company simply resold jobbed pens and pencils, mixing and matching stuff any way they could so they could keep serving large helpings of pen crap onto a wartime market starved for anything that claimed to be a fountain pen.

Starr bought its pens from someone else who made the pens Starr sold.

No one has ever questioned whether Parker made the Parkette Zephyr.

And to those who say Parker would never make such crap, I say yes they did.

In fact, Parker made identical crap.