Milk, Honey, and Cheap Gas

This article has been included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 7, now available here.

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Since it’s a lazy Sunday, and since I was just mentioning Eric Magnuson, I’ve got another story that involves both Eric and another lazy Sunday: the Sunday morning drive home from the Chicago area after the Fred Krinke auction.

Whether it was the excitement of a weekend finally away or getting a weekend to play with pens and pencils a little, neither Eric nor I had the foresight to bring the things we meant to trade or sell to each other when we met up for the auction.  Fortunately, my newfound favorite way to get to the western suburbs without going through Chicago was going to lead me back down I-39 towards Bloomington, and I was going to pass within 10 miles of Eric’s new home in Ottawa, Illinois.  

It would work out perfectly - Eric said to take the back roads and stay off that infernal tollway, and besides . . . gas was at least thirty cents cheaper per gallon where he lived.  I could pop in, see the house, swap some stuff, fill up, and be back on the road.  A pit crew couldn’t ask for any more.

This was one of those rare times I was glad Janet wasn’t with me, because I did something that absolutely drives her up the wall.  In the days before cars predicted how many miles were remaining on a tank of gas, I was the type who never worried if the needle on the gauge pointed to the area below empty . . . it was how much below empty that concerned me, since I had a feel (from experience) of when I would run out completely.  When technology provided a computer estimate of how many miles I had left, that gave me even greater cockiness in passing up a gas station if it wasn’t convenient.  I’ve never run out of gas (knock wood), but I did run it down to 2 miles once – just for fun.

Sunday morning as I left the hotel in Elgin, I calculated that I had just enough left in the tank to limp all the way to Eric’s, and as soon as I made it to his promised land of milk, honey and cheap gas, I’d pull over then and save myself . . . let’s see . . . thirty cents times 23 gallons . . . $6.90.  Plus I'd save a $3.00 toll.

Yeah.  I know it’s ridiculous.  I had just dropped thousands at that auction, and I even spent more than that on my first whisky at dinner after it ended.

Nevertheless, I was determined to prevent that greedy tollway and those money-grubbing Chicago gas stations from getting even one more penny.  I set off for Ottawa in the densest fog I’ve driven through in some time, fed by warmer temperatures and mountains of melting snow.  I wound through suburban roads for the first half of the trip, watching for that precipitous drop in price, but even as civilization gave way to farmland, prices remained steady at every gas station.

I drive a Nissan Titan these days.  Unlike the Ford I used to drive, when the fuel level gets low enough (usually below 50 miles), the estimated fuel range is replaced with “- - -“ and all sorts of warning bells start going off.  One of the first settings I changed when I bought the truck was to silence the soothing voice that would repeatedly remind me “fuel range low” or something like that.   I got tired of saying “I know” in response.

As I continued across the plains, the fog would lift just slightly every so often to reveal the car just a couple hundred yards in front of me.  Green and red lights of fueling stops emerged from the mist less frequently, but as they came into focus, the numbers they displayed remained steady and, against my better judgment, I pressed on.

Ottawa sneaks up on you when you approach it from the north - especially through fog.  I coasted into town, and the GPS guided me to a quiet street lined with impeccably preserved, nineteenth-century mansions.  Eric is right to describes it as being just like the older sections of my home town, Newark, Ohio - but if the houses had been maintained.  I sputtered up in front of Eric’s house on fumes; I’m sure that soothing voice would by then have been frantically warning me of how dire my fuel situation had she not been muted, and she would have breathed a sigh of relief as I turned off the ignition.

The Magnuson manse is just loaded with great details, like the mosaic tile on the porch:

And the parquet wood on the floors:

We had already caught up the day before, so we headed up the massive staircase to Eric’s pen room:

I won’t show you his pen room, because Eric made the move to Ottawa so recently that he hasn’t gotten things organized yet (more on that to come).  He knew right where that one thing was that he had been keeping for me, though:

Eric had turned up a first generation Ronson Penciliter in the box, complete with price band and instructions.  We hadn’t talked price yet, although we both knew I’d be taking it home with me.  Negotiations were swift, but my cash on hand proved also to be on fumes – I had just enough cash left on hand after the auction. . . well, to bribe someone for a lift to the closest gas station had I run out on the way to Eric’s, I suppose.

Eric’s Penciliter had one other feature which made this one appealing to me . . . the screw bolting the lighter mechanism to the side identifies this as one of the earliest ones, as shown in Louis Aronson’s original design patent issued on August 14, 1934 (see Volume 5, page 145):

As a bonus, the one I got from Eric is a different color from the one in my last article:

The price band indicates the retail price for the first Penciliters was $3.50.  That seems cheap, given all the technology involved and the dual function of these articles, but since they came out in the middle of the Depression, I suppose they had to keep the price down if they were to sell any at all:

“It Lites! It Writes!”

I was really looking forward to flattening out those instructions to document them.  There isn’t much interesting information in there - but I’ve never seen a Ronson instruction sheet before:

I did pick up one other thing from Eric - there’s a story there that I’ll share a bit later - but the Ronson was my main reason for the visit (in addition, of course, to seeing his fantastic new house).   As I left, I asked where the closest gas station was.  He said there were a few close to the highway.  

No, you don’t understand, I said.  Close. As in close enough to walk to from the end of your street.  He directed me into town instead of towards the highway - past the town square with a statute commemorating the location of the first presidential debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas.   I saved the sightseeing for another time, limping white-knuckled past the statue on my way to the promised land.  

The gas station was old and weathered, and the price . . . well, it was exactly the same as the price at the gas station next to my hotel in Elgin.  To the penny. 

After I got home, unpacked and took pictures of everything I’d picked up on my trip, including the Ronson.  Then, because I have a pencil addiction, I started trolling the online auctions - and what should I see, but this:

Whaddaya know – only the second boxed Ronson I’ve seen.  This one, however, had the later pivot point at the base of the lighter mechanism rather than the earlier screw:

I did bid on it, because if it went cheap I wouldn’t mind having a second one.  I didn’t bid enough, because I already had the pivot-style Ronson, and I didn’t want to be greedy.  Mostly, I was curious and was doing a bit of market research, to know whether Eric and I had negotiated the right price for the one I got from him.

When the bidding closed, two bidders had run the price up to an amount which was eight dollars less than what I paid Eric for mine – and with the eight dollars in shipping, the buyer paid exactly what I paid. 

To the penny.

Of course, they might have saved the shipping charges, if they were close enough to make the drive. 

And if they weren’t holding out for cheaper gas!