The Triangle Pen Club was spawned from Deb Kinney's
notepad. Deb is the pen manager at Sharon Luggage & Gifts
(a Monday evening sort of job), and collects modern pens.
The Club met recently, and Fran brought along his digital
camera. We were missing a few steady members (Deb Kinney,
Renard DellaFave), but we had a good turn out. For PenTrace
regulars, the group visible in the picture above includes
(standing from left): Fran
DeRespinis, Doug Addington,
Ridley Kessler, Mark Anderle.
(sitting from left) Krysta Chauncey,
Daniel Addington(Doug's
son, who was given a Waterman CF for his enthusiasm), Peter
Chauncey, Ross McKinney,
and Gretchen Schlager. My son Tucker took the picture, but
he mainly hit the bookstore looking for a birthday present
for a female friend
In the summer of 1998, we decided to have a local vintage
pen show, and the upper management at Sharon Luggage offered
space at the store and a fair bit of print and radio advertising.
We set up shop on a couple of tables. I probably had 20
Sheaffers and maybe half a dozen Vacumatics, Deb had some
real pens. In a stroke of genius, Deb set a notepad down
for interested people to sign up so we could start a club.
A few months went by, but we had our first meeting February
21, 1999, at Elmo's, a local restaurant. We thought it would
be empty. Ha! We barely had space to sit and compare notes.
Since then, we've met Sunday afternoons at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham, once every other month or so. Sometimes it's more frequent. We've had special meetings - like dinner with Tom Zoss when he came to town, and around the DC Pen Show so we could show off our new pens to each other. The group is interesting and varied - all ages and backgrounds. We've often had themed meetings, like Renard teaching us how to refill rollerball cartridges or our big ink festival (will the Regulator ever forgive us?).
Our next meeting is scheduled for January 28 2001 - we'll have
a seminar in pen repairs held in my workshop. Bring along
a junker or two - we're all going to learn about tools,
knock out a few not-so-great nibs & re-sac.
Anyone interested can get on our e-mailing list by contacting Deb (KINNEY@law.duke.edu) or I (ross@rosspens.com).
