Unfinished Business

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Here’s another one that came home by way of Jerome Lobner:

In addition to being just freaking gorgeous, with those wine-colored veins, it’s got a great imprint for a brand I’ve been hunting for some time:

“Dixie / Non-Breakable / Libertyville, Ill. Pat.”  A few years ago I had a Dixie fountain pen with this enormous imprint, and I always thought it would be cool to have one of the pencils.   Note the reference to a patent on the imprint-- the pens have the same imprint, and there’s nothing really unusual about the way this pencils works, so I don’t know what that’s all about.

The Dixie was a brand produced by the Michael George Company, named (in reverse) for its namesake, George Michael Kraker - that’s the same Kraker that got himself sued by Walter Sheaffer over the patent for the lever-filler fountain pen.   Kraker’s companies had several of their own house brand names - Pencraft was his earliest, dating to 1918, followed quickly by Yankee and also Dixie.

Kraker also manufactured pens and pencils for The United Drug Company’s Rexall stores, such as Monogram and Belmont.  These house brands shared elements of the Dixie imprint, but manufacture of these would have started while Michael-George was still in Grand Haven, Michigan:

With Kraker’s involvement in the company, several of my friends have written so much about his movements that most of the research I was going to do for this article has already been done.

The best reference is a series of articles the late Dennis Bowden and Jineen Heiman wrote for The Pennant, part one of which was published in the spring 2010 issue and part two in the fall 2010 issue.  Bowden documented in great detail Kraker’s activities after Sheaffer’s legal victory over him in 1917: first in Chicago in 1918, where he organized the Pencraft Company in 1919, then in Minneapolis from 1921 to 1923, then (briefly) back to Chicago, where the Michael-George Company name is first found, then to Grand Haven, Michigan until around 1929.

But there’s one last chapter to the story, reflected in the last paragraph of Bowden’s second article: “Part III of this article will discuss George Kraker, the Michael-George Company and its pens in Libertyville, Ill. 1929-1932.”

That, unfortunately, would be Bowden’s last words on the subject: he passed away suddenly in December, 2010, leaving the Libertyville chapter of the Michael-George story undocumented.  Given Bowden’s research from the first two articles in this series, I can only assume he had a similarly detailed amount of information to share about the company’s Libertyville years.  Unfortunately, if that research was ever committed to writing, I don’t know what became of it.

So, I’ll try to pick up where Dennis left off.

Bowden’s article indicates that corporate paperwork planning Kraker’s move to Libertyville was finalized in September, 1928, but his cliffhanger suggests that he had not moved until 1929.  The earliest reference I found to the Michael-George Company being in Libertyville was a classified ad the company placed seeking a gold pen grinder, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on April 17, 1929:

I found a post-mortem reference that the company’s factory was located on East Church Street in Libertyville.  The product lines offered were initially the same as those the company manufactured in Grand Haven, Michigan - all of the pencils I’ve pictured above match the ones Bowden shows in the second of his articles.

As for the Dixie, I know from my own experience it was offered as both a fountain pen and a pencil.  However, I found a reference from 1931 that it was also offered as a combo pen and pencil, “as modern as air travel,” which was given away as a prize according to this ad, from the November 17, 1931 edition of the Sikeston (Missouri) Standard:

Bowden suggests that Michael-George’s run ended in 1932, and that’s consistent with what I’ve been able to find.  On October 20, 1933, The Pittsburg Press included an advertisement by Gimbels offering “Bankrupt Stock Michael George Co.,” blowing out leftover Pencraft pens for 99 cents:

Three years later, a new tenant moved into the factory building formerly occupied by Michael-George:

I find no references to indicate that Michael-George survived bankruptcy in 1932, or that George Kraker continued in the pen business after its failure.  What I have found is evidence that in Michael-George’s last days, the company was no longer manufacturing its own products.

Note:  this story continues at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/03/as-kraker-neared-end-of-line.html