A Fountain Pen Among Ballpoints: My Old-School Dad

Dad Said it Best
Age-Old Truths for Modern Times

“There’s no school like the old school.”

I have no idea who coined this phrase but my father certainly embodied it.

Incredibly, Dad would have been 105 this month. He was born in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson was president and the hottest music on the radio was the Havanola Fox-Trot. 

The year Dad was born, people were driving $500 Model T Fords. Congress had declared war on Germany and joined the allies in World War I (hoped to be “the war to end all wars”). The Great Depression was still 12 years into the future. No one at the time could conceive of WWII.

In 1917, California’s minimum wage was 16 cents an hour. At the corner grocer’s, Americans were paying 48 cents for a dozen eggs, 45 cents for a gallon of milk, eight cents for a loaf of bread and 30 cents per pound of coffee. Less than a quarter of homes had electricity and there was only one telephone for every 113,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Running water and indoor plumbing wouldn’t become widely available for another decade or so.

With all this in mind, it’s no wonder my father always seemed like an old man with an ancient soul to me. It’s worth mentioning he was 50 years old by the time I came into the family, so Dad was a fountain pen among ballpoints as I was growing up in the ‘70s. 

Set in his ways and proud of it, he insisted on using antiquated implements decades after they had fallen out of fashion. His chosen tools were fountain pens and manual typewriters long after ballpoints and personal computers had come onto the scene. I guess that was only fitting for a history professor.

That mindset held true across the board. Dad took “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” to the highest level. He rejected the notion of becoming an early adopter to technology or following the latest fads. He believed the old ways were the best ways and there was no need to jump onto modern bandwagons. They wouldn’t hold up like back in his day anyway!

He even dressed the part: a quintessential tweedy old professor in a bow tie and driver’s cap. Dad may not have been a trendsetter but he was the genuine article. He valued the process as much as the end result, which may explain his penchant for fountain pens. He believed one’s worth was a reflection of one’s character, so “the only job worth doing is a job well done.”

It takes patience, practice and skill to write well with an old-fashioned fountain pen and a bottle of ink. If you rush the process, you can get too much ink on the tip and ruin the page with dark blobs of ink. If you don’t use enough ink, you’ll rip the paper as you drag the stylus across the page. But once you’ve mastered it, there’s no smoother experience in writing. It just flows.

So, maybe Dad was on to something. As much as I appreciate modern conveniences, sometimes “there’s no school like the old school.”

Photo by ERB