I had to check with those who were involved in this story to be sure everyone thought it was as funny and worth retelling as I did. They do.
A few weeks before the Chicago Show, I had purchased a huge collection of . . . er . . . high quality ballpoints and pencils from the estate of a collector in Kansas. I didn’t make the trip out west, though. Dan Schenkein lives in Kansas, and he was my boots on the ground. I sent Dan some money to spend, and spend it wisely he did - eleven large priority mail boxes landed on my doorstep packed to the brim with stuff. For a couple weeks, you couldn’t see our kitchen table while I sorted through everything.
After I had neatly packaged everything by brand and taken what I wanted for my collection, I texted Rob Bader to see if he wanted to buy everything else. “Should I bring a trailer?” he asked. I told him he should bring a Zeppelin. A grand purchase warrants a grand entrance, I said.
That Thursday morning in Chicago, Rob docked his Zeppelin on the roof of the hotel and came down to the ballroom, where we did our thing – he took piles and piles of stuff, and I took a few pieces of paper from him.
This year’s Chicago show was the busiest I can recall – so much so that I was pinned down at my display by a frenzied crowd of pencil folk for almost the entire weekend. I didn’t have much time to get around the room, but during one of my brief excursions around the room, I saw that Rob had a box full of big, colorful flattop pens on his table, dumped unceremoniously out on the table in true Baderesque fashion.
I really wanted to do a deep dive into that pile, but it was causing quite a stir; I couldn’t get close enough to Rob’s table to see anything with the frenzy of buyers, and I didn’t have time to wait. By the time things quieted down, Rob had said his typical Irish goodbye and the Graf Bader turned south and floated away before I had the chance to see what I was missing.
Raleigh (the Triangle Pen Show) came a few weeks later, and Rob was back with what was left of that big, beautiful box spilled out in a smaller but still enticing pile awaiting a thorough pillaging. This time it was quiet enough that I could spend some quality time seeing what there was to see. Most of it was parts only – caps and barrels without nibs, sections or feeds, but this little guy leaped out of the pile and into my hands:
Rob and I share the same sickness that keeps us perpetually buried in pens and pencils. The reasonable and normal thing to do when you find something you like in a pile of stuff is to ask for a price on that one item. Rob and I are neither reasonable nor normal: when we find one thing we like in a whole mess of stuff, we assume there’s got to be a whole bunch more good stuff in there and we want to know how much to buy it all.
At least Janet knew I was wired that way when she married me.
Usually, Rob and I don’t use money in our transactions. When I find things on his table, he’ll tell me to take it with me and he’ll swing by later to pick out some things to take in trade. This time, however, he was fully laden with the things I sold to him in Chicago, and he wanted to lighten the load a bit and get back some of those pieces of paper he had given me the previous month.
How much would I offer? I threw out a number – five hundred bucks. You have to start somewhere, I figured. The Graf Bader must have been sagging pretty low at that moment – done, he said. Everything was dumped back into the box, and back I went to my own table. I hadn’t set anything out yet, so I spent the first couple hours sorting through everything to see what I wanted to keep and what I might leave out on the table during the rest of the show.
I pulled a few things out of no real significance - there were quite a few large Waterson pens in there, just caps and barrels, but I’ve got a soft spot for that rascal Mr. Kelly (see “The Banker and the Specialty King” on June 25, 2021: Volume 7, page 285). There were a few other odds and ends I kept, but most of it I laid right back out on the table.
In my mind, I got my money’s worth just out of the couple enjoyable hours I spent going through a fresh box of stuff. As for the initial object of my affection, it remained the first thing I had pulled out of that box. I didn’t look at it very close, but I knew from the clip it was made by DeWitt-LaFrance, one of my pet obsessions around the museum, and on closer examination it had an imprint even better than I had hoped:
DeLaCo was one of DeWitt-LaFrance’s earliest trade names: I know from the pencils, all of which are marked Patent Pending – the ubiquitous Superite pencils came later, when the imprints were changed to “Pat.” on both the barrels and clips. As with nearly everything else in that box, it was missing a few parts – there was no nib and the top piece had gone missing.
I knew that these parts were missing when I bought the box, but I didn’t think it was a big deal - Superite nibs are still relatively easy to find, and I figured any old generic black plug would finish it nicely. On that second point, I was wrong. On closer examination, the plug on the barrel end isn’t black – it’s a dark olive green with black zebra stripes.
That’s a tall order to find a correct replacement, although hope is always springing eternal that the peanut gallery might help me out with finding that part some day. I still thought I got my money’s worth.
I didn’t know how right I was.
I had an appointment at the Raleigh show to meet Robert Speerbrecher (“Speerbob,” for those who have seen his listings on eBay). Bob was running low on inventory, so I had told him the Graf Leadhead would be landing in Raleigh with a few of my own ballast boxes and we could help each other out. Bob came looking for pencils, but when he saw a few rows of big, colorful flattop fountain pen parts, his focus shifted immediately.
Bob asked what I wanted for the pens, and I invited him to make me an offer for what he wanted. He offered an amount per piece for all of the flattops, and that number was low – at that per unit price there was plenty of money to be made, if like Bob you have the parts needed to make complete pens out of them. For a moment I thought about whether I might do the same thing, but I don’t have a stock of spare fountain pen parts and heck . . . there were so many of them that when Bob’s unit price was multiplied by the sheer number of them, I would triple my money on what I paid for the entire box. The Graf Leadhead jettisoned that box of ballast in exchange for some much lighter pieces of paper. It was a good day for both of us.
Later in the show, Rob Bader asked me how I made out with his box, and I couldn’t resist telling him a good story. Rob laughed, because he had an even better one: “I paid a hundred dollars for that entire box, and I sold nine hundred dollars out of it in Chicago before you bought what was left,” he said.
I didn’t want to write about this until I shared the punchline with Bob Speerbrecher – fortunately, he thought it was as funny as Rob and I did. Everybody came out a winner on this one, and Bob is already well on his way to recouping his investment, too.
It’s like my father-in-law used to say: that’s why they put the backs on playing cards.
And then, just two months later, I would have even more reason to be thrilled that I had been involved in the grand Zeppelin flotilla of 2025 . . .
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