NOTES & DISPATCHES
World’s Most Wanted MARY SCHENDLINGER
Who knew my dad’s old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?
O
ne day last November, I dropped my dad’s fountain pen on the floor. Actually it’s been my fountain pen since my dad died half a century ago, but I still think of it as my dad’s pen. Right away I could see that the nib had gone a bit wonky. No good could come of messing with a pen I loved and that was at least seventyfive years old. So the next morning I wrapped it up like a baby and took the bus to my favourite notebook-and-pen
8 Geist 108 Spring 2018
store and asked about fixing an ancient fountain pen. It was a busy morning, but a young woman at the counter, who perhaps recognized me as a profligate shopper in the store, went off to fetch Rose, the one who knew about repairs, while I lifted my dad’s pen from its swaddling clothes. When Rose came over, she was smiling but already shaking her head: “I’m sorry, I’m not really doing repairs any more, so . . . oh my gosh, is that,” she said,
“that’s a Parker 51!” She drew it from its nest with reverence, noted the wonky nib, thought for a moment and said, “I’ll take it out back and see what I can do.” On her way she showed the pen to another colleague, who ooh’ed and aah’ed and touched the brushed-silver cap—“Sterling! And in such good shape.” By the time Rose emerged from out back, word had got around and a couple of customers were waiting to get a look at my dad’s pen. Rose had coaxed the nib a bit closer to where it belonged. She said she could nudge it a little more, but it might snap. Should we take the chance? On a bit of test paper I wrote “Dad’s pen with wonky nib” and drew some curlicues, which worked well enough that I decided she should stop there. Off she went to do a bit of cleanup on the pen, but not before showing it to one more worker—a young man, who had never before seen a Parker 51 “in person,” and who I’m pretty sure had tears in his eyes. The pen had been a gift to my dad from the Chicago Cubs. He worked for the Cubs as a statistician from the early 1930s to the mid-’40s (with two years of military service overseas during World War II), and they gave him the pen, with his signature and CHICAGO CUBS inscribed very subtly on the deep-blue barrel. The details of the occasion are lost now: perhaps the pen was presented to mark some accomplishment or milestone, or given to him as an essential tool, since his job consisted mainly of attending ball games, at home and away, and writing down everything the players did and didn’t do, along with the attending circumstances. All my life, from when I was a kid growing up in the late ’40s and early ’50s to when I went to university in the mid-’60s, that pen is the only one I ever saw in his hand.
