Last time you talked about your home next to a golf course.
Right. And on the other side of that golf course was my elementary school. How about I recall a couple of memories about it?
Okay.
Well, that was back in the late 1930s. So things were a bit primitive contrasted with today. For starters, our desks were already old.
They had inkwells: Holes in the upper-right corner, a leftover from when they held ink bottles. The kind a student would have to dip a straight pen into.
Yes, I’d say that’s old.
However, by that time we students were using fountain pens.
We would pull a lever on the side to collapse a bulb inside, dip the point into an ink bottle, then close the lever to suck ink up into the pen.
They’re collectors’ items now, aren’t they?
I think so. The fellow in front of me had a pen with a very fine point. I kidded Frank by calling him “Pinpoint.” My point was broader, and he would call me “Mudbrush.” All in good fun.
You didn’t use ballpoints?
They hadn’t come along yet. Actually, some companies had experimented with them, but they weren’t common until a fellow named Reynolds advertised his invention.
What was that/
One Sunday morning at the breakfast table I opened the newspaper and there was a full-page ad for the so-called Reynolds Rocket.
It was a ballpoint that used a different kind of ink and had a different way of feeding ink to the point. The big promotion was — and I quote — “It Writes Under Water.” Not that anyone cared about doing that, but apparently it managed to write on wet paper.
And it was promoted pretty heavily.
Anyway, that was the start of writing with ballpoints, and we’re still doing it today. Not at the prices they wanted for the Reynolds Rocket, which was pretty expensive. Prices have come down quite a bit.
They’re even given away to promote a product or service.
Right. And it all started with the Rocket.