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. 

Lost, Found . . . and Lost Again

 Everything that had become old and stale became new again in recent months. After years of finding nothing that interested me in many of the antique spots I used to frequent, I developed a new obsession that had me dipping my toes back into places in which I had long sense given up hope of finding anything.

No, I’m not giving up on pencils. Call this an additional obsession rather than a new one. In June, I became fascinated with the Gregory Fount-O-Ink Company’s products, and by last month I’d picked all of the low-hanging fruit in the online auctions. 

As the Fount-O-Ink rabbit hole bottomed out online, I branched out sideways. Morriset stands, Sengbusch, Carter, Regal . . . in for a penny, in for a pound. But as with pencils, or pens, or anything one chooses to collect, picking up new examples gets more difficult after the easy ones are all on the shelf at home. I began to wonder how many times I had looked right through these things “in the wild.” Three weeks ago, it was time to satisfy my curiosity at an off-Extravaganza Springfield Antique Show. 

By “off-Extravaganza” I mean one of the ordinary shows that runs every month through the year. Janet and I quit going to the usual ones because it seemed to always be the same dealers with the same stuff, month after month. Unless we are really bored, the only Springfield shows we usually attend are the “Extravaganza” events in May and September which are easily ten times as big, held mostly outdoors. Since we have other commitments this month for Extravaganza weekend, we didn’t have anything else going on, and I had this little itch that told me I didn’t know what I didn’t know at the time, off we went.

The Springfield show was . . . a bust. I spent more money on a pair of corn dogs for our lunch than on anything else. No pens, no pencils, and no inkstands. We had made the rounds so quickly that we decided to stop by the Heart of Ohio Antique Mall an exit or two away from the fairgrounds. There, I had more luck than expected:

Front row, from left: a milk glass Zephyr Swivodex, a Morriset and a Carter “Stylewriter.” In the back row are a pair of Fount-O-Ink sets, and the one on the left with the airplane really made my day. I had seen pictures of it in the company’s catalogs - “for the air-minded” is how they were described - but had never seen one in person. And the little propellers even turn!

The airplane set was the last desk set I found in the mall, and with just a couple rows left to peruse I nearly called it a day . . . and yet, I would have beat myself up in the weeks since wondering what I had missed. I ended up beating myself up anyway, but not for that. In the last row I found a fully stocked counter display filled with a brand of ballpoint pens I have only seen once and I couldn’t wait to write about here again. The staff retrieved it from its locked case and I followed her to the front to cash out.

It had been so long since our last visit to the Heart of Ohio that I did not know they had also shifted to the “cash is king” model. Credit card service is offered, but the fees are added to the cost. Nope, I’m too cheap for that and besides, I brought cash in case I found anything at the show . . . but not quite enough. Were there any discounts, I asked, and yes - the two most expensive items, the airplane desk set and my pen display, gave me just enough room that I was able to pay cash for the whole pile.

I was nervous as she started packing things up. I had spent too much time hunting for that airplane, and I didn’t want it stuffed in a bag even if it was wrapped in paper. I requested a box lid instead, and she was happy to accommodate me. We drove home, I unpacked the desk sets and posted that picture to Facebook, and we went to bed.

I woke up in the middle of the night. I didn’t remember unpacking that pen display. The next morning, I checked the back of the truck to see if I had just forgotten to bring it inside. 

Nope. And it cost me nearly a hundred bucks.

Fortunately, I had an itemized receipt I was able to retrieve from the recycle bin, and it had the item described in detail, the date and time of my purchase, and even the cashier who helped me. I called the Heart of Ohio Mall to ask: it was a longshot, but did they have the item?

Believe it or not, they found it. I asked if I could pay them by credit card to have it shipped to me, since I was the dummy who didn’t notice what I was missing. He declined, saying that it was their fault rather than mine. He took my address and said it would be on its way.

Even after such a nice call, my experience at my day job interfered with my ability to get my hopes up. Lawyers have a distorted view of the world, someone told me many years ago, and I believe it is true. People don’t typically come to see me because someone has done something nice for them, and as the years at my day job go by it becomes harder and harder to fathom that there are people in the world who do.

That’s probably part of why I enjoy my pen and pencil friends as much as I do. We do nice things for each other all the time.

Just like this guy from the Heart of Ohio Antique Mall did for me. 

My Kontour ballpoint pen display, much like my dwindling faith in humanity, was once lost and has been found again. I had written an article about the Kontour pencil many years ago . . . it was the only one I had ever seen in all of these years since, and no sooner had I unwrapped the pen display than I was in the museum to pull the pencil out to take what I was sure would be a greatly needed updated picture.

And . . . it isn’t where it is supposed to be – not on the fabled wall o’ pencils. No, I don’t think I demoted it from the wall, but I checked the printer’s cabinets which have housed more overflow as things became more crowded. Not there either. I have two small boxes of items worthy of keeping but not yet written about, but since I’ve already written about the Kontour I was sure it wouldn’t be in those, and it wasn’t.

It will turn up - like my faith in humanity, it will eventually come back and I’ll laugh about it. 

That did not, however, stop me from delving further into the Kontour story. Much has changed since I wrote that last article, and the rest of the story is just begging to be told now . . . er . . . tomorrow.

A Saturday Night Special

I live in a town small enough that when someone does something as odd as write a book on mechanical pencils, it's front page news.  It's also small enough that when the front page of the local paper had my picture on it holding a copy of my new book, people were surprised that they didn't already know one of their neighbors had a stash of thousands of mechanical pencils.

My in-laws have a family friend named Jerry who has known my wife literally since the day she was born, and he's known me since I first started hanging around my wife.  He and my father-in-law joined the local Elks lodge decades ago, and I see him regularly on Saturday nights when Janet and I go down for the weekly drawing -- usually at the same table, usually in the same chairs.  When it's not the same table or the same chairs, that itself is a topic of conversation.  It's a comfort thing, I suppose.

"I never knew you collected pencils," he said to me after the article appeared in the paper.  "I've got some I'll bring down to you to see what you think."

That much I've heard from dozens of people since the book came out.  Only a couple actually followed through and appeared on my doorstep, and Jerry was one of them.  He had a pretty nice bunch of things, and I paid him well for them -- after all, if I didn't pay more than fair prices for the things he brought me, that would really be a topic of conversation on Saturday nights.

Here's one of the things he brought me . . .

NOTE:  This article is now included in the print version of The Leadhead's Pencil Blog, available anywhere you buy books, or also from The Legendary Lead Company.

To order, here's the link:  Volume 1 at Legendary Lead Company