About three years ago I picked up David Nishimura at the airport when he arrived for the Ohio Pen Show. As I was driving him to the hotel, we talked about the area surrounding the venue. I grew up in that area, and it is vastly different than it once was – not in a good way. David said something that has stuck with me . . . something I thought was very wise.
“With age and experience we develop the ability to see things both as they were and as they are at the same time,” he said. Or something close to that.
I have thought about David’s statement in many different contexts since then. It’s true that I vividly remember riding a bicycle around that part of town, and I visualize exactly how things were. At the time, I was only perceiving my surroundings in the moment. With fresh eyes sitting next to me forty years later, I was describing what I remembered as I looked through a crumbling urban area.
On reflection, I think there is a corollary to the Nishimura Theorem: first we see things as they are, then we see them simultaneously as they were and how they are. Later in life, though, we grow weary of seeing things as they are. We long to see things as they were.
Unless those things were terrible. Those are the things we try to forget.
An annual fixture on my calendar every August is the DC “Supershow,” the largest pen show in the world. I’ve only missed one Supershow in the last 25 years.
By the time I started this blog in 2011, I had been collecting for more than ten years and I had developed an established routine for my annual pilgrimage, which I wrote about during the first year of the blog in “Eastward Ho!” (August 10, 2012: Volume 1, page 298).
The article was wiped from the Internet in the Great Google Catastrophe of 2018, but it lives on in print. From Newark, Ohio, my first stop was always the antique mall in Barnesville, Ohio, followed with a wave at the “Marsh Wheeling Stogies” sign in Wheeling and a pass through the Wheeling Tunnel. I would stop again at a tiny antique mall in even tinier Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, then arrive at the Sheraton in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, late in the day.
That routine changed when a busy work schedule had me leaving for DC at different times, and I would often pass by Barnesville and Bruceton Mills after the antique malls had closed. John Hall and I would make those stops once in a while, until his illness confined him to his scooter. After John passed, Janet resumed her copilot duties but we never managed to make the Barnesville stop; as for Bruceton Mills, she would ask me, if there’s never anything new in there to see, why bother?
The “new” bypass around Wheeling now diverts traffic away from the route through town which passes the Marsh Wheeling Stogies sign and the Wheeling Tunnel. I refuse to use it until the day comes when I’m arrested for taking my old route through town. I don’t need no stinkin’ bypass. It’s part of the experience.
So for these last few years, other than the occasional stops for snacks and facilities, the drive to DC has been just a road trip punctuated by a sign, a tunnel, and wistful smiles as I pass the Barnesville and Bruceton Mills exits. I never found anything significant at either of those malls – I’ve just missed that part of the experience.
Since the Pandemic, Janet has been waving off attending DC so that Dad and I can have a “guy’s weekend.” My schedule has also changed again: it took me a few decades to realize that since I am self-employed, nobody will fire me if I am not back in my office at 8 a.m. the Monday after a show. Since I’m rarely worth much the day I return anyway, I have adapted well to decompressing and relaxing at the hotel Sunday night, then driving home fresh on Monday.
Dad and I departed for DC at 6am on Thursday this year, which is a real sweet spot for the journey: the last ten miles on the Capitol Beltway determine how long the entire trip will take, and that early departure puts us on that busiest stretch of asphalt at just the right time. We didn’t make any stops, partly due to smooth traffic and partly due to our anticipation of arriving at the show, and we were browsing vendor’s tables in DC by 12:30pm.
I wasn’t looking for pencils, believe it or not. I was feeding a new obsession.
In June, Janet and I were taking our time traveling home from the book awards in Philadelphia, and we stopped in an antique mall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I found a neat piece: a “Fount-O-Ink” porcelain desk set with a celluloid sleeve over its inverted ink supply and matching pen. I bought it because I liked the look of it.
Of course I had to learn more about it. They were patented by Carey Gregory and sold beginning in 1935 by the “Gregory Ink Company,” which was later renamed the “Gregory Fount-O-Ink Company.”
Of course that process fueled my collector’s instinct. The Pen Collectors of America’s online library contains three of the company’s catalogs, dated 1941, 1946, and 1949 - showing a wide variety of interesting products.
Of course I began trolling online auctions and picking up more examples. By the time Dad and I were on the way to DC, I had put together a nice little collection:
I found nothing. No bases, no dip pens – not even a single person coming up to me to talk about these things.
The show was remarkably successful in other respects . . . I bought three collections of pencils at the show which added a couple hundred items to my collection, and there’s a lot of new stories that will come out of those. Today’s story, however, is about the day after Casey’s first strike at bat on the “Fount-O-Ink” front. It got me to thinking, as Dad and I prepared to leave for home on Monday morning . . . collecting these Fount-O-Ink pens and bases through online auctions is not very satisfying, and apparently nobody wants to bring them to pen shows, as big and bulky as they are. I wondered how many pens and bases I had passed at antique shows and shops over the years without noticing them because they were not on my radar at the time.
I also wondered, since I had not been to the antique malls in Bruceton Mills and Barnesville for several years, what it would be like to see them simultaneously as they were and as they are now. Dad was game for the experience: he also collects things other than writing instruments (he has been dragging me to antique shops since the 1970s). We left around 9am, and by noon or so we were in Bruceton Mills:
It looks exactly the same, and it still has no public restrooms (a necessity at the moment, so we diverted back to the truck stop at the exit before we explored). Nothing had changed – down to the same run-of-the-mill Parker 51 set proudly displayed in the case at the front of the shop, complete with the same exorbitant price tag, a bit more yellowed. Yep. At Bruceton Mills, as things were and as things are were one and the same.
Casey’s second swing on the Fount-O-Ink front was another miss, but I did find a couple interesting numbering machines used to stamp consecutive numbers. Yeah, in addition to staplers and typewriters, that is another closet fascination of mine.
It didn’t take long to get through the Bruceton Mall, so we were back on the road in no time with Barnesville and Casey’s last swing ahead. Through the Wheeling Tunnel we went, craning our necks to see the Stogies sign behind us as we emerged, and by 3:30 we arrived at the Barnesville exit. The familiar route took us five miles up into the hills, past the Dickinson Ranch and through some unexpected construction on the only two-lane road into town, only to find . . .
. . . closed on Mondays. “I should have looked that up for you online when you said you were stopping there,” Janet said. The Barnesville Antique Mall . . . on the Internet . . . I’m guilty of seeing things only as they were, back in the days when we drove willy nilly all over God’s green earth hoping a place would have an “open” sign hanging in the window. No matter – it was rejuvenating to see the place is still there, still full of stuff and promise. Janet and I have resolved to make a special trip some lazy weekend in the future.
With that third failed swing, Casey had indeed struck out – at the DC Show, in Bruceton Mills, and at least for now in Barnesville. There was some small consolation though: at home, I was greeted both by Janet and also with a little pile of packages that had arrived:
Yeah, I know I said that finding Fount-O-Ink desk sets in online auctions isn’t as fun as it is “in the wild,” but it’s still pretty fun.
Since I knew I had another one of the dog desk bases on the way, I bought the sailboat ornament so that I could take a hand at replacing this dog with it - and it worked perfectly:
The cap on my sailboat base as shown here came from that really scuzzy looking double set at the back of the group shot: I bought it just for those well caps, which often go missing, but it cleaned up really well.
So well, in fact, that I went back and bought another example online, just so my bases don’t have to share custody of the caps.
Huh, you may think. An entire article at Leadhead’s with no pencils. Perhaps someday I’ll find the evidence or an example establishing that the Gregory Fount-O-Ink Company also offered a pencil, and I’ll circle back and tell you the entire interesting story of the company.
Or, perhaps you once saw me as just a pencil guy, but now you now see me as both a pencil guy and a Fount-O-Ink guy.
And a numbering machine guy.
And did I mention typewriters . . .
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