A Golden Wedding Gift
One Saturday morning at a garage sale of a deceased estate, I saw a wooden box of coloured pencils. I considered they were a good buy for my youngest grandchild at $2. I then noticed that in the box was a fountain pen, a Parker, looking forlorn and dirty.
Regular readers will know that I collect vintage fountain pens, and that I have a set (pen, ball point and propelling pencil) in every coat and jacket that I own. I always use a fountain pen to write, inscribe books, sign documents and so on. I have been given many sets over the years as gifts. Click here to read my previous editorial on fountain pens.
As I cleaned up the fountain pen I realized it was a 1975 Parker model “61” fountain pen in 12-carat thick rolled gold, and the arrow pocket clip was the longer design of clip at 4.4 centimetres. Ink filling would be easily done by the unique capillary method. This was the exciting thing.
The tip of the nib protruding from the hood section was a medium point size. This pen had an emblematic grey pearl jewel-stone inset at the ends, whilst the top of the cap had the gold-plated, apex design, gold top. This was an eye catching, high quality fountain pen. Being thick rolled gold it would also have cost a great deal and would still be very valuable.
Like most other pen companies Parker had been working for decades to find the perfect filling system and when the Parker “61” was finally introduced in 1956 it was really like ‘a pen from another world’, as it was initially advertised.
It had many features in common with the predominant Parker “51” of the day, but it was slimmer, cooler and, most of all, it filled itself.
Nobody really knew how it worked, but it did. All pens up until the Parker “61” had had some sort of mechanical filling system or had to be filled with an eyedropper or syringe. Most had levers, plungers or filling buttons to be pressed.
The Parker “61” had none of that, just a mysterious gold cylinder with a small hole in it at the end. You just unscrewed the back and put the pen in the bottle for thirty seconds and … wow! ... the pen was filled. The “61” used tightly rolled plastic film with, for want of a better word, pimples to hold the layers separated one from another but still close to each other, the ink was drawn into the voids between the sheets by capillary action.
There were three downsides to the fountain pens of the 1950’s. The ballpoint pen had arrived, and the public was enchanted by this new pen that didn’t need to be filled from a bottle and didn’t cause ink stains.
There had been many different solutions for keeping hands clean. The most successful up to then was the Sheaffer Snorkel introduced in 1952. This was the one given to me by my mother in 1957 for my university studies and used by me for years, and still in good order today.
It utilised a sort of syringe under the ink feed that could be inserted into the ink and then screwed into the pen again after filling. No need to wipe a stained nib.
In 1989 Don Doman, a legendary designer who designed the exterior of the Parker “61” and many other pens for Parker, revealed that Parker during the Parker “51” era received many complaints regarding the hidden nib which made it hard to quickly determine which was up and which was down of the pen.
Don Doman had an easy and attractive solution to the problem. He proposed an inlaid arrow on the gripping section, just above the nib. While the filling system had no moving parts it required no wiping down the Teflon tube after filling. The pen never leaked in the pocket, and was always ready to sign with ink in the nib.
Since most users didn’t bother with keeping their writing instrument clean, they seldom had it washed or flushed clean of ink. Hence it eventually clogged. This was the simplest filler yet – no squeezing, no screwing, no levers, no moving parts of any description—just unscrew the barrel and drop the pen, point up, in an ink bottle for a few seconds, and a wick inside the pen draws in a load of ink, enough for six hours of writing.
As if that wasn’t enough, the “61” also cleans itself up after filling; the Teflon coating on the filler repels ink, requiring nary a wipe before re-closing. This capillary filler was probably the last word in fountain pen technology; Parker eventually replaced the capillary filler with a conventional cartridge/converter system.
The thick rolled gold polished up brilliantly. This had been an expensive pen originally, and is currently valued at US$500 second hand.
Next month my wife and I celebrate our golden wedding anniversary and we have been discussing what golden gift we can give each other. I will give her the gift I want – the thick rolled gold, Parker “61” with the magic capillary filling action that I got for $2, along with a large number of coloured pencils in a wooden box. Other people might want something new and expensive, but I am happy with my beautiful thick rolled gold Parker “61”.
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC