Justice at Last

In yesterday’s installment, I was excited to recover a store display of Kontour ballpoint pens, which I had left behind as I checked out at an antique mall. They found it and they were kind enough to mail it to me:

They are kind of neat, but the real reason I had to bring this home was because I had written about a Kontour pencil many years ago, and it is the only one I had ever laid hands upon in all the years since.

I smile and cringe at the same time whenever I open up Volume 1 of this blog. I had just published my first book, The Catalogue of American Mechanical Pencils (2011), and I originally started the blog to post updates and corrections to the book. Those early articles are filled with wonder, contagious excitement, and a complete lack of experience in researching combined . . . all combined with a relative dearth of available resources upon which to draw.

I’ve thought about pulling that first Volume from the website, because it looks so crude overall in comparison to what I have done in the years since. I can’t bear to do it, though – campy as it is, “God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you,” as Rascal Flatts once put it. It is the start of what has been a wonderful journey.

“A Saturday Night Special” (April 27, 2012: Volume 1, page 184) was more about the circumstances that brought that Kontour pencil to me. One of Janet’s parent’s friends from our local Elks Lodge had read in the newspaper that I had written a book about . . . what? . . . mechanical pencils, and he had a few laying around the house he brought to me.

The clip reads “Kontour” in plain block text, but the barrel has the Kontour name pronounced with triangular-shaped “o”s:

The triangle motif is carried forward with the small trangular indentations on the triangular-shaped barrel.

I did what I could at the time with what knowledge I had, what research I knew how to do, and what tools were available with which to do it. Proudly I announced the results of my findings: that Kontour logo seen on the barrel had been the subject of a federal trademark:

I reported that Trademark Registration number 1,238,340 (serial number 73,382,975) was filed on September 1, 1982, the date of first use reported was in February, 1957, and that the registrant was Tobias T. Kaplan, dba Kontour Pens, 172 Sharpe Avenue, Cleveland, Mississippi.

That, in those early days of this blog, was accomplishment enough. I called it a day and went back to my Saturday night excursions at the Elks Lodge.

With fresh eyes now, there was so much more that I could have told you. It is time to give justice at last to an obscure brand I haven’t thought about in a long, long time.

On June 16, 1966, the Bolivar (Mississippi) Commercial published a retrospective of Tobias (“Tobe”) Kaplan’s career: he was born in St. Louis and came to the Mississippi Delta area in 1918, landing in Alligator, Mississippi, where he ran a local store commissary until 1931. He then moved to Cleveland, Mississippi, where he operated a chain of dry goods and menswear stores, which he ran until 1964, when he sold them.

According to the article in the Bolivar Commercial, Kaplan claimed he was inspired to get into pens by a relative of his who was in charge of a hospital that treated arthritis patients. Kaplan had an epiphany on the spot and thought he could go into the pen business because – get this – “[t]he patients could assemble pens as part of their therapy.”

The Kontour story is full of inconsistencies, and this is one of them. Two later articles, one in 1977 in the Hattiesburg (Mississippi) American and a 1982 article in the Clarion (Mississippi) Ledger mention that the Kontour pen had been made the “official” writing instrument of the American Arthritis Society, an honor that would not have been bestowed upon Kaplan for the exploitation of arthritis patients for cheap manufacturing labor.

No . . . these 1977 and 1982 accounts tell a different story: the 1977 account claims that Kaplan wanted to design a pen that would be easier for his relatives suffering from arthritis to use. The 1982 article contains an even more embellished back story: he claimed that the idea came upon him after a visit in the 1960s to an arthritis research center in Arkansas.  He says he was trying to help a young arthritis patient draw, but the lad was having trouble holding the crayon. Kaplan says he found some clay and pressed it around the crayon. After the boy used it for awhile, “[t]he triangular shape left by the youngster’s fingers on the clay-covered crayon prompted Kaplan to try and design a pen that people with arthritis might find easier to use.”

These later reports makes him sound much more like the Dalai Lama than the founder of a forced labor camp offering “therapy” for the disabled. All of these reports, however, appear to be works of fiction.

As I mentioned earlier in that previous article, Kaplan’s trademark registration for “Kontour” claimed that he had first used the name in commerce in 1957 – seven years before he says he sold his store chain to go into the pen business. That part was easy to verify: the Daily Illini reported on March 12, 1957 that “we have kontour pencils which taper off to fit the writer’s fingers greatly easing the pangs of ‘writers cramp.’”

Newspaper advertisements for the new pen appeared beginning in 1959 - long before these alleged visits to arthritis hospitals and five years before Kaplan sold all of his stores to devote his time exclusively to his pen business. This one, showing a pen identical to those on my store display, was published in the Scott County Times on June 3, 1959. Note that the advertisement touts the pen’s “patented design”:

Another more rudimentary announcement appeared in the Delta Democrat-Times on June 24, 1959. It includes a short writeup about the Kontour Pen and Pencil Company, which it says is owned by Tobias Kaplan of Cleveland and James Harold Burdine, referred to here as “J.H. Burdine,” of Greenville.

This is where things get really messy.

Burdine was a successful construction contractor in Mississippi who was involved in several different businesses. On July 1, 1960, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published an interview with Burdine in which he claimed that he had invented the Kontour pen because “he got tired of wearing calluses on his fingers signing payroll checks.”

Calluses on Burdine’s delicate fingers are an interesting twist on the story, because calluses were the least of his problems. A bizarre story concerning Burdine made the press in February of 1960: Burdine claimed that he had picked up either one or two hitchhikers in Cleveland (he was in such bad condition he could not give all the details). 

Burdine apparently allowed one of them to sit behind him in the rear seat, who proceeded to stab Burdine in the chest. Burdine managed to fight off the assailant, but he crashed his vehicle into a bridge a few miles down the road. He was unaware that he had been stabbed when he was found; the entire incident was reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on February 2, 1960.

His assailant was never found and five months later Burdine had recovered to give his interview regarding how invented the Kontour - in July, 1960. However, two months before Burdine made these claims, it was Tobias Kaplan – and not Burdine – who filed a design patent application for the Kontour on May 6, 1960. It was granted as Design Patent 190,263 on May 2, 1961:

Burdine would not live long enough to see the patent issued: on March 6, 1961, he went to check his boathouse on Lake Ferguson in Greenville. When he didn’t return, police dragged the lake bottom and found his body between 25 and 30 feet underwater. A coroner’s jury determined that it was a case of accidental drowning.

After Burdine’s passing, on May 22, 1962 the Delta Democrat-Times reported that articles of incorporation for Kontour Pen, Inc. had been filed with the Mississippi Secretary of State. Since the company was privately held, there’s no reports of who the shareholders were:

An interesting piece published in the Memphis Commerical Appeal on July 19, 1970 reported that Kontour Pen, Inc. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Kemmons Wilson Organizations, a privately owned family firm headed by Kemmons Wilson. The report indicates that Wilson was “heavily oriented towards construction,” which might tie in with J.H. Burdine’s construction connections. Wilson’s biggest claim to fame was founding the Holiday Inn chain of hotels, building the first location in Memphis in 1952.

In 1963, Wilson’s blossoming chain of hotels reached an agreement with Gulf Oil: Holiday Inns would accept Gulf credit cards, in exchange for which Gulf would build service stations on Holiday Inn properties. That detail likely explains why Gulf Oil advertised that the Kontour pen was available at Gulf stations for 39 cents – because, as the ad states, “At Gulf. We want you to be comfortable.”

I’m having difficulty fitting together the parts of the story, but here is what I believed happened. Kaplan and Burdine co-owned Kontour in 1959; after Burdine’s death, Kontour Pen, Inc. is incorporated, and by 1963 the Gulf Oil advertisements suggests Kemmons Wilson Organizations already owned Kontour outright. The 1977 report indicates that Kaplan had sold his chain of stores in 1964, and by 1966 there’s “Mr. Kontour” in the Bolivar Commercial, with no mention of Kemmons Wilson or anybody else owning “his” pen business:

Four years later, Kemmons Wilson Organizations is the owner of Kontour in 1970. Perhaps by that time, it was more appealing for Kontour to look like a small local concern rather than owned by a hotel magnate. There’s no further mention of Kemmons Wilson in connection with Kontour; perhaps Kaplan bought back the company after 1970. 

At some point before 1978 the Kontour’s clip was changed to the plain block text clip seen on my example of the Kontour pencil - this advertisement was published in the Columbia Record on September 2, 1978:

After that, the trail goes cold. Tobias Kaplan passed away on June 2, 1991, and his obituary was published in his hometown, in the St. Louis Jewish Light on June 5, 1991:

There was one more place to check, or in this case recheck: that trademark registration I found in my original article:

Registration certificates often contain a wealth of information, and five years after that last article I had refined my trademark research skills and published American Writing Instrument Trademarks 1870-1953. 

If any of these events occurred prior to 1953, I’d have much more to report. However, trademark information after 1953 is tremendously more complicated – that’s why my book ends where it does. The Patent Office was no longer concerned about what category a name was registered after the passage of the Lanham Act in 1946, so after 1954 the Patent Office had one massive index to search rather than sorting things into individual categories. Making matters worse, the specific way in which a word was portrayed no longer mattered either, so when I followed up on the registration number I reported earlier, it was for the name only – not the font:

So where did I get that image of the Kontour name with its triangular o’s? From the summary page, which indicated that the mark had been abandoned because the USPTO had no statement on file that the mark had been in use after the trademark was granted in 1983:

Since the cancellation occurred in 1992, after Kaplan had died, it is likely there was nobody left at Kontour to object. Now that there’s a great story with some loose ends, I’ll keep a closer eye out for these lowly but distinctive pens and pencils.