I seem to have no memories of toddlerhood, but I have pondered my earliest memory of fountain pens. My dad was into fountain pens - and into them in a strange way because I don’t remember him actually using them. My earliest pen memories are from about ’55 or ’56, and I suspect my parents were fully converted to ballpoints by then. But my dad had a box of fountain pens, maybe 20 or so, that he got out now and then and showed me, admiring them but not letting me touch them.

Because 30 years later I inherited that box, I now know they were all Wahl-Eversharps, high quality models from flat-tops to Skylines, but at the time they all looked the same to me. Even so I knew he was an Eversharp kind of guy because I also remember a dinner conversation between him and my mom where he was praising Eversharps but my mom said no, she liked Sheaffers better. She was just being playful with him because I assure you my mom could never have picked a Sheaffer out of a group of pens, even with the white dot screaming at her.

With that fountain pen background I felt well-prepared a few years later when my teacher passed out those Sheaffer school pens to the class and we began the brief penmanship training that would disappear entirely from most schools in a couple more years. I immediately recognized this as my opportunity to score one of the pens in “the box” as my own. My dad was a champion of education and was always exhorting me with mini-lectures like, “get all the education you can, that’s one thing no-one can ever take away from you.” I wonder sometimes if he still believed that when, at 30, I was still consuming education in a Ph.D. program and throwing his words back at him when he asked when I planned to get a real job.

I used his support for education ruthlessly at times to manipulate him into giving me my way by simply tying it to school somehow. Now that the school was teaching penmanship, how could he not want me to have a better pen than the other kids? My goal was one of the iconic pens from “the box” but instead he offered to buy me a new one. I hadn’t counted on that. But I kept pressuring for one of the old ones with the gold nibs and finally he relented.

I remember getting the box out. “This one! No. This one! No. This one? No.” Somehow in that box of Wahls he found a Sheaffer. I don’t know how or why that interloper got there because there sure weren’t any Sheaffers in the box 30 years later when it became mine. Now, I don’t actually claim to remember him saying, “You’ll probably just loose it anyway so here, take this damn Sheaffer.” But I have to believe he was thinking it.

I can’t even accurately describe the pen today, and I have no idea what happened to it. I’m sure it was a balance model, probably standard size. And I remember it being blue but no Sheaffer I’ve seen since rings a bell. But I clearly remember using that pen for years. I did all my homework, even math, with it. What I know now and didn’t know then was that the lever filler wasn’t working at all. I’d fill it from my bottle of Skrip and enjoy working the lever. Then I’d write a page or so and “fill” it again with no thought that I was just writing with the ink in the feed. I even had to take my ink to school with me and so earned pen nerd status at an early age.

I’d say I used that pen from about age 8 to about 13. With all sorts of other things kicking in at that age, I have no idea what happened to the Sheaffer. I honestly never gave fountain pens another thought till my dad died 25 years ago and “the box” became mine. I suppose it was my early indoctrination to Eversharp that made me the Wahl collector I am today. But for sure, that Sheaffer was the pen that started it all.

How can I not say it was the most significant pen I have ever owned? Even though I can’t even see it clearly in my mind, I think of it often. And it makes me think of my dad. And it makes me sad because he would have loved to have been a pen collector like I am, but in his world there were no pen collectors and even if there had been he wouldn’t have had the time or the means. But he was able to appreciate pens and I’m sure to him they represented something like education and art and style and class. Things he probably didn’t think he had much of but he was wrong.

I’m actually not sorry I no longer have the Sheaffer. I’m not even sorry I don’t know for sure what color it was. The mystery of it magnifies it beyond any special display case I could put it in if it were here. That pen has risen to the status of legend for me. And I think I’m even glad that it didn’t work. Because of that pen, by the time I was 12, I had filled a lever-filling fountain pen a couple thousand times. The seed was deeply sown. It was just what I needed.