Two Puzzling Details

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The Sta-Rite appears in The Catalogue on page 151.  At the time I only had turned up a few of the plastic models, and since I didn’t catch the hyphen in the name on the clip, I identified them as the “Starite.”  The metal examples I’ve stumbled across since the book was written:

Early metal ones have a nice script logo stamped on them:

While most plastic ones have the name in vertical block print, I have found one with that script imprint:

There’s two things that bug me about the Sta-Rite, one of which I’ve mostly figured out and the second . . . well, you’ll see about that.  The first is a tantalizing snippet view from the May 29, 1926 edition of Fourth Estate, which told me almost everything I want to know: the manufacturers of Sta-Rite pens and pencils were located at 158 Pine Street, Providence, Rhode Island . . . but it didn’t tell me who the manufacturer was.  The cut-off advertisement even suggests there’s a trademark filed, but none turned up in the course of researching American Writing Instrument Trademarks.

After far too much flailing around, I was finally able to generate a snippet which provided the preceding few words:  Improved Pencil Company.  Now that’s a company with which I’m familiar!  It was established in 1922, according to this announcement in the Jewelers’ Circular on January 11, 1922:

The company was on my radar for another reason entirely: in 1933, the Improved Pencil Company moved into the former facilities of The Tri-Pen Manufacturing Company, makers of Triad pens and pencils – see Volume 2, page 73. 

Now for the second head-scratcher concerning the Sta-Rite.  Recently, I brought this example home:

If that clip looks familiar, it should:

That’s a Waterman Patrician.

With the same clip, protected by Waterman’s design patents:

We know from the “closeout Patricians” that Waterman used up old Patrician parts until they were exhausted – the company didn’t sell them off to some jobber to stamp with a third-tier brand name!