A PARKER 51 STORY
This story begins on November 13, 2013. That was the day I wandered into the Three Sisters Antique Mall in Blue Island Illinois. I am a collector (or gatherer) of fountain pens at the present time (among other things) and will travel far and wide to an antique shop I haven’t yet stripped of it’s fountain pen inventory. From where I live, Blue Island is far for sure, like 41 miles far. Three Sisters is a pretty spacious mall with many vendors and takes time to scour. After spending close to an hour just browsing I stepped up to the main front desk to ask if indeed they knew of any vendors with fountain pens, having seen none. The nice lady behind the desk pointed to a spot which I hadn’t seen that was hidden behind something else and indicated that there was a box of old pens on a table there.
OK, well, let’s have a look. It was a grungy-looking kind of cigar box thing that held a bunch of equally grungy looking and well-worn old pens and pencils, most of which were not worth a second glance. It was the kind of box you hesitated to put your hand in unless you had some hand sanitizer with you.But I did see what appeared to be a pen with a gold-colored cap. I pulled it out and was surprised to find this gold-capped Parker 51 among all the junk. Like finding a diamond ring in a dumpster. It looked like it had some miles on it but hey, it was a Parker 51 Aerometric, probably from the 1950s. The lady told me that everything in that box was 75% off. There was also a yellow Sheaffer cartridge school pen so for the princely sum of about $8.00 I left with both pens.
When I got the pens home my first task was to clean and polish up the Parker, and to see if it actually worked. While cleaning the exterior I noticed that someone's name had been stamped into the barrel. Finding old Parker 51 pens with names stamped in is not uncommon. But this time it was a first, middle and last name, which immediately triggered the genealogist in me. I wanted to know who this person is/was and where she was if still in the “is” category. I called a friend at a local public library where I used to work and he searched the SSDI (Social Security Death Index) and he could not find her name, meaning that she was still alive somewhere. But where? Scouring the internet I did manage to find her, who she was married to (deceased) and her three children.
As an aside, yes, the pen was in remarkably good condition and was able to be cleaned out and refilled. And it wrote beautifully, silky smooth, no skips or false starts. Much like the day it was purchased. A little polish and the gold cap gleamed brightly despite an array of small dings that only added to its character.
Now that I’d found proof of this lady’s existence, I still had no idea where, as this particular website did not disclose anyone’s whereabouts. Then the thought occurred to me that if I did find her I could return her pen. As the pen had her maiden name I assumed the pen was a gift for some notable event, perhaps a birthday, probably a graduation (she was born in 1939 so if it was a college graduation it’d be about 1961) Who puts their own name on a pen anyway?
With a little help from someone who has access to Lexis/Nexis, I was finally able to nail down her current address. It was a nursing home. Oh, oh. She is only 74 years old, say it ain’t so. So with her own pen I wrote her a letter explaining how I came to have a pen with her name on it. Then I offered to write the final chapter in this Parker 51’s travels and return it to her, where it rightfully belonged.
A week or two passed with no response. Then on January 10th of this year my phone rang and it was a call from one of her daughters responding to my letter. I explained how I’d come by the pen and she told me that her mother was indeed incapacitated and had no recollection of it, and not much else, either. Her daughter, the woman I was speaking to, did not remember ever seeing it before but was certain it was her mother’s maiden name on the barrel. She offered to buy the pen back but I told her to forget that and that I would be ecstatic to just return the pen to the family, hopefully to be passed to succeeding generations as a reminder of who this woman was who spent most of her adult life as a teacher of biology. Her daughter agreed and two days later the pen was wrapped carefully and sent via Priority Mail back to it’s home. The circle had been completed. Hopefully some family member would appreciate it’s significance and maybe, just maybe, be curious enough to see what it feels like to write with such a pen.
Allan Zirlin
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