A Long-Lost Cousin

I believe this one arrived in a boxload of stuff from the “catch up” Chicago Show in September 2021:

It’s a good thing that I am so obsessive in examining newcomers as closely as I do; otherwise, this would have been cast off as a kinda nice but unmarked pencil and gone right back into a junk box full of remainders. Even with the assistance of a china marker I had great difficulty bringing out enough detail for a photograph:

“Rite Away” it reads, with a diamond in between those two words. There are no other markings that I can find, but that was enough to send me plowing through American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953, so I could share with you the wonderful story of the Rite Away pencil.

It isn’t in there. Therefore, I’m going to tell you the other wonderful story about it.

The features that make this pencil stand out in the crowd are that great mottled hard rubber and the unusual shape of the top. As I perused the rest of the museum looking for similar characteristics, I found one:

There’s the Rite Away posed next to a General Manufacturing Company “Kaligraf,” one of the mostest holiest of holy grails known to pencil collectors. Kaligraf pencils accompanied the company’s Snap-Fil line of fountain pens, and it is the only “lever filled” pencil design known.

Well, it wasn’t exactly lever filled. You pull the lever up, and as the lever is pushed down again it scoots the lead forward a little bit. If you have seen one example, count yourself lucky – I don’t think you’ll ever see as many of these in one place as when I shared an image of the examples Joe Nemecek and I had put together in “Back to Sioux City” (January 5, 2017: Volume 4, page 334):

Now there is one big difference you can see between my Rite Away and a Kaligraf: the Rite Away has no lever. That meant I needed to take it apart and see what was happening inside: the noses on both the Rite Away and the Kaligraf unscrewed easily, and it was clear at least to me that both were made using the same machinery.

With the nose removed, you can see there is a rod inside the barrel that moves up and down by turning the cap at the top.

Does that sound familiar? It should, and if it doesn’t, hold on to your hat. The other day, I wrote about my suspicion that hard rubber Lead-O-Graph pencils were manufactured by the Eagle Pencil Company (see “Welcome Distraction” posted on September 4, 2025). Even before I found one in what I believe is an intact portion of Eagle’s factory archive, I thought that, and I told you why:

Because that hard rubber looked so much like these hard rubber Eagle Pointer pencils. The Leadograph pencils were based on another Eagle product, the Simplex; guess how the Eagle Pointer works? 

Exactly like the Rite Away . . . and Eagle held the patent on the mechanism by virtue of Alfred Michael’s patent number 1,406,056, applied for on March 26, 1921 and issued on February 7, 1922. Michael’s patent was assigned to the Eagle Pencil Company.

That’s not all.

I mentioned earlier that no trademark for “Rite Away” appears in American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953. I know why:

These painted wood pencils were made by the Eagle Pencil Company, and guess what they were called:

Both of these lines were called the Eagle “Ritaway.” There’s no trademark registration filed for the “Ritaway” name either, which is a bit odd for Eagle – the company filed a LOT of trademarks, so the absence of one . . . in this case, in these circumstances, with this theory tumbling about in my head, tells me something. I’ve got some new theories now:

1. Did Eagle make the Rite Away? I think that is a reasonable conclusion.

2. Did Eagle make the Rite Away for sale on its own account, for the General Manufacturing Company, or for someone else? I don’t have enough evidence to draw any conclusions on that point.

But here’s the big one:

3. Did Eagle manufacture the General Manufacturing Company’s Kaligraf pencils?

I think that is a distinct possibility.