I was around 6 or something. My dad was writing something with some Parker. He showed it to me. I, seeing something unknown, touched the underside of the nib, and got ink on my hands.

He gave me a Vector sometime later.

I found a colection of dip pens in my fathers desk and thought they where neat. then in highschool i bought a realy cheap sheaffer caligraphy pen, and used it every day at school for the next 5-6 years. It was 4 years after that, i bought my first real fountain pen, a Parker fronteer

Got a Parker 75 Ciscele as a high School Graduation present in 1967. Still have it, dented of course, but wouldn't trade it for any other pen.

Hoy Smokes....uhm, that I can actually remember.

Middle School.....geez, that would have been in the late 60s. I bought one of those Sheaffer Cartrige pens.

Like the green one here:



-Bruce

I didn't use FPs as a kid. I liked Parker ballpoints. My mom used a Sheaffer snorkle and touchdown and my dad used an early Parker 75. I got my dad's 75 about 15 years ago and used it daily. Over the last few years I've been getting other family heirlooms restored and working- assorted Sheaffers and Parkers. I'd started to do this years ago but never followed through. With the internet coming of age and information readily available, I found out what a good starter collection I had. My mom had a first year 51 pen and pencil set, there is a green PFM IV from (I think) my grandfather, several Parker vacs, another 51 DJ and assorted other's from the 40's and 50's. I've picked up other new and vintage pens since then, but I really enjoy using the family pens- it links me back to them. Jeff

My father pulled out a fountain pen with a hooded nib to sign my very first report card. That was first grade and I was six (1954). "What's that?" I asked, reaching for it once he'd signed. He grinned, capped it, and put it back in his pocket. I looked at his signature, which was illegible, but it looked very cool with lots of line variation. The color of the ink was bluish gray and the basic line it laid down was quite fine. I later learned he used Quink Blue Black ink. I didn't get my own fountain pen until I was seven-and-a-half, a cheap lever filler. My father gave it to me. The lever fell off the second time I tried to fill it. My father passed away when I was fourteen and I never saw his fountain pen again after that. But by that time I was hooked on Sheaffer cartridge pens with translucent barrels and lavender or burgundy cartridges. :bunny1:

I remember, from about age 5, pulling out the drawers of my father's desk and finding ('way back at the bottoms some of the drawers) what I now recognize as Esterbrooks.

We were given Shaeffer cartridge pens in the fifth grade when we were taught cursive writing. I have used that pen ever since then (1957?).

My parents bought Shaeffer Snorkels at about the same time. My mother's pen is gray and has a fine nib. My mother was a school teacher and she used that pen to death. I still have it. The cap is missing (replaced with a cap from another pen that just slips on), the barrel is cracked and the o-ring in the piston is shot. She filled it with blue Skrip and used it to grade papers. She also had a green Waterman Hundred Year Lady's pen. She kept that one inked with red Skrip. I have that one too. The sac is missing. I have one of the old Skrip bottles she used. It is the kind with the ridge around the bottom and the shoulder. The cork has a composition cap with the word "Skrip" modled into it.

My father's Snorkel is black and has an M3 nib. He had his name engraved on the barrel. This pen still works well. I ink it and use it sometimes.

My parents thought a long time before they bought those pens. They were an expensive luxury for them. My father was a foreman in a machine shop and made $21 and change per day.

Paddler

When I was in elementary school, I got my first iridiumpoint FP. Before that, I always used pencils to write characters.

I remembered that the nib of the pen was hooded. The barrel was made of black plastic and the cap was metalline. I have already forgotten the model of the FP, but I think it may be the Hero 616, which is similiar with the Parker 51. It wrote smoothly, and I very loved it.

Now it had been worn out. Because of that pen, I love the Parker 51 and its analogues. And I already have more than ten Hero 100s, which are gold nib pens and also like the Parker 51. Although I have plenty of Hero, Parker and Pelikan pens now, I still yearn my first pen.

When I was 8 or so I found my dad's Parker 21, I brought it to school, it was 2000 so ballpoints were all over the place. Guess what happened, I dropped the Parker 21 on the floor, sadly the nib got bent just a little, but I have managed to get it back to its original position now.

Great stories on this post. I wish I had a good one, too. My parents had a couple of ink pens in the perennial cup near the telephone. I think they were calligraphy pens, though.

I was a ballpointer all through high school and university. I did buy my wife a Waterman Phileas cobalt blue marble, medium nib, for Christmas one year before we were even engaged. She has since commented it seemed extravagant at the time, but I didn't think so. So I suppose I was curious about the pens, but didn't get my own until I was graduated and living in Scotland.

Although I have no idea regarding what brand it was, I can remember as a child watching my mother writing many letters with a fountain "dip" pen. I was always in awe of her beautiful handwriting. It was absolutely gorgeous. I remember that in the 60's, Madame Ngu, the wife of the President of South Vietnam, and my mother communicated frequently. She also communicated quite a bit with John F. Kennedy while he was in the White House. She would dip the pen in a small, ornamental glass "jar" full of ink. I remember the jar as having a decorative relief in the glass of grapes or something like that.

My first memory is that of my mother doing the family accounts in an old ledger book, and refilling a black fountain pen with a syringe (it was a cartridge filler). It wasn't too long after that that I found myself using my allowance money to pick up my first Sheaffer No Nonsense.

John

When I was a boy, my parents had one or two fountain pens kicking around the house. I remember in particular one seedy-looking metal-capped gray-green pen that was always in the drawer of the beautiful modern white pine desk my father built and installed in the front foyer. For roughly 50 years I neither knew nor much cared what that pen had been; then I stumbled over a duplicate of it -- even to the color -- so that now I know it was a 1950s Wearever:


So far as I can remember, that particular pen was just a fixture of the drawer; I cannot recall ever having seen it used. By that time, you see, ballpoints had arrived on the scene, and my father was nothing if not a practical man. Which also may explain why the pen wasn't a more expensive one. Were it not for that desk, I might think he had no sense of beauty at all, just a functional streak a mile wide. (On the other hand, he made the desk's kneehole just barely too narrow for any chair in the house, and we never did get a chair that fit it.) I've no idea what happened to that pen; it disappeared from my ken when we moved across the country in 1962.

(Excerpted from "The Pen That Started It All" in my site's Pen Writings section)

Oooooooooh!! Veeeeerrry interesting topic here.

My first EVER contact with a fountain pen waaas...Hmmm....when I was about...six or seven, I think.

Back then, our house didn't have a study, and all the spare stationary (paper, pens, whiteboard-markers, etc etc), were all stored in this gigantic chest of drawers in my brother's bedroom.

One day, out of boredom, I was poking through the drawers...I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for...but then I found a fountain pen. It was part of a whole heap of them. These were the cheap, plastic, steel-nibbed disposable kind. The type of which you could buy a million of for ten bucks.

THAT was my first-ever fountain pen. I remember it had blue ink.

Then, about my 9th birthday, my dad bought me my first real fountain pen. It was a Sheaffer with blue-black ink, yellow plastica barrel & cap and steel bands & clip.

Other pens that followed included - Two more sheaffers, one black fountain pen with gold bands, one wooden pen with gold nib, one translucent blue fountain pen with steel bands & nib (gift to a friend, who really wasn't interested, so I took it back).

The first fountain pen that I REALLY LOOKED AFTER, however, was my Cross fountain-pen, which was my 13th birthday present...by which date, I was completely hooked.

Being intrigued by all things aged since before I can remember, I began by using the old dip pens found at my grandparent's house with bottles of Sheaffer Skrip Washable Blue ink. I have no definite memory of first seeing a fountain pen, though I would imagine it was in Grade I or so. A friend of mine, whose mother was Swiss, brought back a brightly coloured Pelikan from a trip to Switzerland.

After that I was hooked - I had my mother go out and buy me a cheap Sheaffer pen from the local stationary store and never looked back. After goign through many pens over the years, I now use Pelikans and have a large collection of them in many different nibs.

I just told this story in another PH thread, but realized it has a place here as well. If you'll forgive the repetition...

When I was a kid, there was one fountain pen in the house ... a blue one with the Lit Bros (A mow-defunct Phila department store) name on the side. It was kept in the same tin with the other pens and pencils, but my dad only used it to write checks when he was paying bills. I was forbidden to play with it. God only knows who the manufacturer was; all I remember are 1) it was blue with a silver pull-off cap and two, had a VERY powerful lever and apparently a large sac. One day when my mom was on the phone (I was probably 4 or so), I began going through the tin, finally got my hands on the coveted pen, and wondered what that little metal thing was on its side, so I pulled it up ... and squirted ink all over the kitchen wall. Needless to say, I never saw the pen again, and got a few shots on the butt besides. Never found that pen, either; I think they gave it away to prevent a recurrence. Would kill to find it somewhere, or one like it.

I think my first experience was the one that got me hooked, but I didn't get another FP until maybe 6th grade. That was a red-bottomed Sheaffer school pen, which, I believe, cost my folks all of 79 cents after I begged for it. Used it in school when I could (never for math, and we were to use ballpoints most of the time)), but, I found out from a couple other kids who had FPs, too -- that you could toss them into the bulletin board where'd they stick like darts -- except they left an ink spot. Needless to say, this ruined a number of nibs (took a while, though; those school pens were tough!), and after the third or fourth one, my parents refused to get me any more FPs.

I didn't own another until college...One of my English profs used FPs exclusively, and had a crock with perhaps 20-25 on his desk. Once, when I was discussing a term paper topic with him, I told him the above stories and said maybe I'd pick up another Sheaffer; I'd forgotten how cool FPs were until I saw him writing with one. The next day before class started, he walked over to me and handed me a black Sheaffer balance with a lever (nope, not OS, I'm afraid), said it was time I got back into appreciating FPs, and made a side comment about it improving my handwriting (never really did). Still have that pen.

And that, to quote Bogie in Casablanca, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship with FPs. Over the years interest had become less fopcused, but I always came back to them...

Hahahahaha!! You sound like my dad.

When he was in school in the 1950s and 60s, he chanced to find a Parker 51. At the time, he had no idea how valuable the pen was, and he and his friends used to use their fountain pens as darts. But not against a cork-board. Against something a lot tougher. The underside of the lid of a school desk. Needless to say, the pens didn't last long. Dad told me how after they'd ruined the nibs of their pens, none of the kids (himself included) dared to go to their parents to ask for another pen, because most of the parents (my grandparents included), didn't have to money to pay for another one. This was back in the days when the Parker 51 cost brand-new, about 10-13 dollars.

My first pen memories are of my dad correcting homework (he's a math prof) with this HUGE black thing with a glittery shiny point, when I was two years old. This was the same Mont Blanc 149 as he has now; my mom bought it for him when he earned his PhD. I decided then and there that I was going to have one, which I later bought with paper-route money.

I also remember very early on my mom writing with her Parker 75 sterling cisele pattern, and her teaching me the letter "P" from her first initial on a sticker set into the tassie on the top of the cap (the stickers were available from Parker, or perhaps from the seller).

First memories - finding a Parker 75 Cisele at the public library in my hometown. Awesome pen. Carried it for several years.

Someone stole it.

It happens when you're 13.

Never have gotten over that one, though.

In December, 1963, I received a Sheaffer (blue plastic w/ lined chrome cap) cartridge fountain pen from my parents for Christmas....I had turned 16 the previous September....this pen had to have been no more than $2-$3 dollars, but for YEARS, I thought it was a very "good" pen....knowing NOTHING about fountain pens at all. Looking back, that was a very good pen to write with...it had a fine steel nib and was the style with the slanted cap and the "stylewriter" (or something close to that word) nib style, a slightly hooded nib. My parents never used fountain pens, to my knowledge, so I am still surprised that my mom ever thought to buy one for me.

I LOVED the way my handwriting looked using that pen, and also, the way that the touch of the nib to the paper felt. It was a very pleasant experience for me to write from then on. A girl in one of my classes named Kathy (whom I greatly admired) also used a fountain pen and I noticed she had beautiful handwriting. She used black ink. Well, immediately, I bought some black cartridges and became a "black inker", too! How crisp and dramatic that black ink looked on my lined school paper. Then I discovered "college-ruled" paper and my writing even looked BETTER. There was something about that little inexpensive Sheaffer pen that made me feel very worldly and special.....I really can't explain it, but I am sure others who discovered their first fountain pen experienced some of the same feelings. Fountain pens are extremely PERSONAL.....each one speaks to us in a different way. What is fabulous for me might be HORRIBLE for you....and that is the beauty of it. We can make certain pens our own...being sure that any other person who uses the same pen is just not getting the enjoyment out of it that YOU are. The only other thing that I have felt such feelings for are big old trees and my first car ('57 Chevy convertible). Pens have different personalities, different functions, and no two are EVER alike!

I carried that litte blue pen for the next 20 years of my life, altho it quit writing after about 5 years. I am sure that the feed and nib were just clogged with dried ink and could have been remedied quickly, but for some ungodly reason, that thought never came to my mind. I thought it was something much worse. In spite of that, I carried it from apt. to house to house, etc. I was cleaning out my desk and came across it one day and my husband said, "Why don't you throw that dumb thing away? It's never going to work again!" So, with some trepidation, I tossed my little darling right into the waste can!!! I immediately regretted throwing away that pen, but it was too late.

I never owned any other ink pen my whole life, until I joined FPN, after noticing fountain pens on Ebay and online pen shops. Reading what others had to say about their writing experiences made me want to own and use a fountain pen again. I bought a Pelikan M400 White Tortoise with an EF 14kt. gold nib. That was the first "good" pen (and the ONLY one) I ever owned after all those years. Later, I bought a Hero 616 (Parker '51 wanna-be) for $9.90 (dark green with gold-colored push on cap and F nib....good little writer) and I just received another Sheaffer cartridge pen which is very thin and short (little less than 5", probably) with the "bullet" shape in the buckskin tan (or a color very similar) plastic w/chrome lined cap and something that looks like a "triumph" nib...I can't imagine that it really IS one....it's made of steel. There was washable blue ink in the section when I soaked it, so I have yet to find out if it will write, but the nib looks to be EF and I can't WAIT to try it! Isn't it funny how you can get so attached to inanimate objects?

One of these days, I hope to go to a pen show or a pen shop....I have never been to either. I know it would be wonderful to look at and try all those beautiful pens! But I think I will have to brush up on my "pen etiquette" before I attempt either!

Thanks to everyone on FPN for helping me to understand and enjoy fountain pens!

Best wishes, Leslie (Scamp65) Click to view attachment

My first memory of an FP was a grey one that my mother used. It had a gold cap and hooded nib. She wrote with a rounded script using blue ink. The nib must have been a nice, wet, medium. I suppose I was 3 or 4 when I can remember this. I didn't ever really know what it was. The pen disappeared when the house was burgled when we lived in Germany in the mid 1970's.

Last Christmas I asked my father what the pen could have been (I couldn't ask my mother as she died nearly 3 years ago). He said he didn't know, but when I pulled out a Parker 51 he said 'Oh yes, it was a Parker. Just like that.'. I don't think my father knows that Parker make any other types of pens..

Regards

Richard.

My first memory is of a pen that my mother bought in the mid 60s.

I cannot remember what it looked like but you filled it by simply standing the pen in ink.

I still have my first pen, a red Parker Senior Duofold, still looks like new and is almost 40 years old now, maybe more.

That sounds like the capilliary fill Parker 61. I don't know of any other pen where this was the case.

Regards

Richard.

Hi,

Most likely a 61, certainly. But the Waterman X-Pen and the Platignum capillary-filler (based on the X-Pen, I believe) can't be ruled out.

If I remember correctly, Parker advertisements sometimes showed users staring in amazement at the pen as it "magically" filled itself. Obviously the process made a deep impression on you!

Cheers,

Jon

In 1963 I started Grammar School and on the list of stuff I had to have was a fountain pen. Ballpoints were expressly prohibited.
My aunt always brought me a toy when she went on her annual holiday. That year she brought a black lever fill Platignum fountain pen.
My brother is left handed so when he joined me a year later he got a mottled blue Burnham because it came with a left handed nib - an odd curved device I always wondered how they made the curved slit.
Later on I got a Parker Duofold, which I still have.

After school it was a Parker 65 in steel.

I'd be 5 or 6, so that makes it '62-'63 and it was my dad's pen. A black and gold parker with a screw cap, gold nib and lever filler.
Other than that I've no idea what model it was

David

When I started school (in Germany, in 1983) we were supposed to start writing with a soft pencil, and move on to fountain pens in year two, once we could be counted on not to make a mess with the ink. However, my handwriting was so bad that my teacher thought it could only improve with a fountain pen, so halfway through year one, my mom gave twenty marks (a vast sum, for a seven-year-old, at the time), and went to the stationery store with me to buy my first fountain pen...

It turned out to be a Pelikano, now long lost in time.

I grew up in the fifties and sixties, so there must have been a lot of great fountain pens around me - if only I had been paying attention to them!

My first fountain pen was an orange Sheaffer Non-Nonsense in the early seventies. Recently I was looking through my notes from art history classes from then - and it made me nostalgic for that pen. So Doc Nib rounded one up for me, and it's a pleasure to write with it again!
Tom

Well, apparently, you learned a thing or two in English class, too! Great story.....I thoroughly enjoyed it....especially the part about the DARTS....Without knowing it to be fact.....you HAD to be a BOY!!! A funny one, too! Leslie

I would have been around 8 years old, probably around 1982 or thereabouts, started going to a new school (halfway through the year), where students were made to use FPs exclusively. Sheaffer school pens were the standard one in the class. They write quite well, but have a fatal flaw for school use: the slightest flick, and they spit out ink. Keep it in a pencil-case, where it gets knocked around, and the cap ends up full of ink, which then ends up in your fingers... yucky.

Thus began my search for The Better Pen. I ended up with a Waterman cartridge pen courtesy of my aunt taking me to visit a stationary shop in her small town, where the then-elderly shopkeepers had a display of FPs. I also ended up with a Parker Jotter (the Made in France version, not the UK ones), which to this day is one of my very favourites. At some point, my parents bought me a Targa (perfect for tiny fingers!), which I still like very much (although it's quite uncomfortable now). Relatives started giving me their unused FPs, which is how I accumulated a few Made in Canada Snorkels, including a semi-flex one (!). Fortunately, the sacs were still okay in most of them.

That was pretty much it for a good while, although I kept on using the pens a lot of the time. While in high school, I discovered a pen shop in my city, and became a regular afficionado of school pens from there - starting my love of cheap-but-good pens.

It just got worse from there. Funny thing is, looking for "pen-people" on the Internet didn't happen for years.

When I was a kid I used to like getting into everything and my grandparents had this great big wooden china cabinet with glass windows in the kitchen. In front of it was a desk like ledge below which were drawers and those drawers were no exception when it came to me getting into things. For whatever reason I was going through them and I found two fountain pens, from what I remember they were both black one with a gold cap and other other a lever filler. I remember talking the caps off and thinking they were odd. I bet the one with the gold cap was probably my grandfather's Parker 51, even though my dad told me it was brown. I was probably 9 or 10 at the time.

Then I used dip pens in school several different times. One of my elementary school teachers brought them in for us to use, which turned out to be a really big mess with ink getting spilled. Then I used them a few times in drawing classes in high school.

Looks like this post has been going for a while! Being 63,I grew up and attended school when FPs were a fact of life. My memories are mostly centered around the momentus occasion when you got your first FP! It meant that you had GROWN UP and had moved away from #2 pencils. You were not told about the ink-stained fingers and the mess of filling your-probably an Esterbrook-FP. Iused FPs the entire time I was in school from 1951-1963. Finished High school with couple of Rapidograph[sp] drawing pens that my father had gotten from the drafting room where he worked. Didn't use FPs again for a long time. Impractical I guess. Didn't realize how much I liked them 'til I got my Starwalker last year. Hooked for life I guess.

When I was about...I dunno, in grade school, though, definitely single-digit age, I found an Esterbrook Double J Icicle in my dad's desk. It might never have been inked, for all I know; it was certainly dry when I found it. I was fascinated by it still, and would push on the tines of the nib and work the lever for fun. Eventually curiosity got the better of me (as it is wont to do still), and I just had to open it up and see how it worked. In my efforts to get the section unscrewed [sic] from the barrel, I broke the thing into pieces.

I must have had it in my head that the section and barrel had to unscrew because how else would you get the refills in, right?

Anyway, years later in high school I scavenged a clear Schaffer cartridge pen from a pretty-well untouched calligraphy set given by some forgotten relative one Christmas. It was a mess. The watery ink and the cheap filler paper I took notes on were not a good match. Ink was constantly all over the section, and I spent most of the time I had it watching the ink bleed out as I held the scratchy nib still on a notebook, seeing how many sheets deep I could get it to stain. I only used that pen for about 4 cartridges, at most. I did learn the trick of flipping it over and getting the extra fine line, though.

Now (~17 years later) I've just started back with FPs with a Lamy 2000 and a usergrade P51 on order. Suffice it to say that the L2K is a much nicer experience.

Also, I've tracked down some Esties that are for all intents and purposes identical to the one I shattered. I think I might replace that one for my dad, and see if I can't get him hooked on FPs, too!

Now that is really stretching the memory cells, it was in 1959, I would be 5 years old and lived in a small village in Scotland,
A little village where no doors were locked and children played out all day long, With no worries, next door to us was an old spinster lady named Lalla Logan, I would call round to listen to her stories,
We would sit and talk! and she taught me to play cards, when she was scoring out would come this green & black mottled Swan fountain pen with this wonderful rich blue ink, her very precise scripted hand noting every point, screwing the cap on and off, became like a ritual, that after a while I used to like unscrewing the cap and handing it to her so that she would inscribe our scores,

She also read all the Dickens novels to me, No prizes for guessing my favourite one (The hint is in the name) she would gesture and live out the characters, one by one she read them to me, then upon birthdays Christmas and all other similar occasions I would receive a copy of said Dickens novel carefully inscribed in this beautiful scripted hand, from her to me, from this one and only pen filled with this beautiful Swan ink, I can just see the bottle before me now.

The whole idea of ink pens and Dickensian characters spun me into another world, this and Sherlock Holmes marked me for life with a love of that era.

When I went to school I was pleased that we used dip pens, and one of the class would be ink monitor, taking this giant bottle of ink and filling the ink wells with this watered down insipid blue uninterested ink.
When I moved to secondary school, we could provide our own pens, and all the well to do kids had fountain pens, I so wanted to use one of those myself, but my parents were poor, and I had to use what ever I could scrounge, then in my first summer holidays I collected rosehip berries which we sold to the dairy to make rosehip syrup, with the proceeds of this 8 weeks of work and fingers sore from picking berries, I bought my first Parker and a bottle of Swan ink, That second year at school I felt as good as those rich kids, and I felt like the smartest kid in the school.

As I progressed through life I always had a fountain pen in my pocket, until the event of the personal computer, when every written word I had to word process, that was about 20 years ago now.
Then 3 weeks ago, my daughter bought me a Waterman fountain pen, as I sat down shakily gripping the pen to write my name, filled with some blue waterproof ink I started to write, it was like a spider had crept over the page, not because of the lack of writing over the past 20 years, but not helped by that,
No mainly due to the results of a car accident that has left me crumpled and scared both physically and mentally, and hands that shake uncontrollably.

Still the gift of a fountain pan did stir up those memories, of a my past life, and since then I have bought 4 more fountain pens, and 6 bottles of Diamine inks, I am practicing every day again teaching myself to write once more, taking a deep breathe while I write, then pausing while I concentrate on controlling the shake, rest and shake pause and write, spending about 4 hours a day practicing so that once more I can write by hand with the noble fountain pen, and my dream to buy a Yard o led fountain pen , which to me congers up the old Dickensian feeling that once I had.
Bob

Nice topic!

Well for me, it all started when I was in grade 6... For our arts project, we did calligraphy, and the teacher required us to use dip pens... It got me started with my love for nib pens. The only thing was, that dip pen, if it wasn't hidden away somewhere, was probably lost for all time.

Then, after a couple of years, in High School, one of my friends showed me a fountain pen he had, a Monteverde Paloma. I still think he has it. I was hooked after he let me write with it.

In my senior year, I was bought a Parker Sonnet. My collection grew ever since.

And now I'm in college, the story continues.

When I was a 6 years old at school we used pencils (Fila or Faber, grade B2), then we moved to ballpoints, and fountain pens were forbidden!! Too old-looking in 1971. Later many boys and (expecially) girls used Pelikano pens anyway, mainly because of the Super-Pirat eraser. I badly wanted one (both the Pelikano and the eraser). Eventually I bought a no-name FP for some 600 Lire (around one US dollar, at the time, 1974 circa). After some time I got a good Sheaffer FP that I totally hated because of the piercing cartridge. I hated it so much I preferred an old blue Pelikan M140 (with broken nib... a nightmare) I found somewhere, still dreaming the Pelikano everybody had. Then, paradise. I bought a Parker 25, black, a marvel, and used it for 18 years. I still use fountain pens with much pleasure. Never had a Pelikano, or bought a Pelikan, but I have a working black M140 I did find in a drawer (probably it was my father's). The blue one must be somewhere in another drawer, or well stored in some hidden 'safe' place... never used it after I had the nib professionally changed

I was handed a fountain pen by an adult to keep score for a card game. when I was visiting my grandmother's house (I was about 8 I guess.)

When the thing didn't write, the adult in question told me to lightly shake it, whihc I did. It blobbed BIG TIME on my grandmothers table cloth.

Yup.

The next time I remember using a fountain pen was in Europe when I was an exchange student. Even the cheapest dollar pens with the rolled steel nibs wrote like butter. I also learned a valuable lesson about feathering when I tried to use a FP on recycled paper. I bet that problem is fixed nowadays.

Ever since, I've been hooked. Utterly.

I remember buying my first fountain pen from a grocery store. If my memory serves me correctly, it was a Sheaffer. I'm sure that I lost it many years ago.

I came back to fountain pens while I was in graduate school. Since I had to do a lot of writing, I wanted to have fun while doing it. I bought, and still have, a yellow Lamy Safari. Currently, my pen of choice is a Waterman Kultur with a left oblique italic nib.

I just updated my avatar to show a few of my favorite pens.

PTLaw

My dad was a schoolteacher and used a fountain pen to sign all of his students' report cards--he has a very distinctive signature, and for this task, he felt that a fountain pen was needed, although he didn't use one on a daily basis. This was a cheap translucent-barrel Sheaffer--I remember his was green. I probably would have first been aware of this in about 1974, when I was five. I didn't know the difference then, but I knew there was something special about such a pen, if it was only used for special purposes.

When I got to college, the campus bookstore carried those same cheap Sheaffers, and I got a clear one. I remember that it took cartridges only, and that it tended to get ink on my fingers when I took notes in class. I've had some form of fountain pen ever since, though with gradually better quality and less leakage.

I noticed many of you grew up having to use fountain pens in school...a good friend of mine told me, when she saw me using a fountain pen at work, that she had been packed off to boarding school in India in her adolescence, and that she had been made to use a fountain pen there, and hadn't been able to stand them ever since! Her loss, I guess...

My first experience of a fountain pen was in the second year of 'junior' school (about age 8), when my grandmother bought me a Platignum cartridge pen - steel nib, blue plastic body and chrome cap. It used the long Platignum cartridges. I was immediately fascinated. I got special dispensation from my teacher to use it at school and kept using it for probably a couple of years but eventually it wore out, and I went back to biros for a while. There was a brief flirtation with one of the old Platignum school pens - the ones which had a clipless short screw-on cap and a long taper on the back of the barrel, looking a bit like a dip pen or a desk pen but filled again with a long Platignum cart. Then when I moved to secondary school, I got the first of a succession of Sheaffer NoNonsense pens - I think the first one was dark blue, with a medium nib - and a selection of coloured ink cartridges for it... blue, blue-black, grey, brown, lavender... I still have some of those old Skrip carts in a variety of colours. In those days I had a dreadful habit of chewing pens and the blue NoNonsense succumbed fairly quickly. A white one followed, and then a year or so later I got a stainless steel one on the basis that it would be less susceptible to toothmarks... That was about 1979 and I still have that pen, although its nib is well and truly worn out now, having been used for the last 3 years of secondary school. It's a pity that you can no longer get the replacement nib/section units for the original NoNonsense pens...

Over the next few years I've had various pens - notably a Parker 25 and a Parker 45 flighter - but never really liked the relatively cheap Parkers much. I had a black Rotring 600 which eventually got retired a few years ago. Then about 18 months ago a chance posting on 43 Folders about Sheaffer Snorkels ('the most mechanically complex fountain pen ever made') piqued my interest - complicated mechanical things intrigue me, I still wear my father's Breitling Navitimer now and then - and started the FP collection shortly thereafter with a green Snorkel Statesman and matching pencil, courtesy of Andy Evans of Andy's Pens. Currently the collection stands at about 20 assorted vintage (Parker, Sheaffer, Conway Stewart, Wahl-Eversharp) and a couple of moderns (Lamy and Hero) and is growing at an average of one every two months...

when i was 4 years old, i used my late grandpa's Waterman to draw houses and stick people. but he made sure that i draw in front of him and not bring it somewhere.

I think I was in first grade and my dad always used fountain pens and I swiped his Parker to use at school but the paper we had was low quality so it simply soaked through and feathered. didn't use any again until highschool.

Lots of early memories, but the first was not a pen for me.

An old teacher was leaving my primary school (I was ~10) and so on our walk home at lunchtime I cajoled a couple of my friends to chip in for a gift for him. We chose a pen/pencil set, Platignum I'm sure. I ended up putting in the most, but we got the set and looked forward to giving it to him after lunch. Unfortunately I arrived late back, as the tap in the toilet was broken, only to find that they had already given him the pen set and I was told off by the teacher for coming in late.

Somehow that didn't turn out as planned.

Greg

My first fountain pen experience was when I was in my early teens (late 80's). I found my Dad's 1974 Lamy 2000, I wrote a little with it, but didn't like it so I decided to stay with ball pens (crazy I know). I then found a Cross ball pen and loved it when the ink ran out I went to a pen shop to buy a refill and my world changed. Some years later I bought my first fountain pen...a Cross Century and that was we done for life. I know own over 70 pens and i cant see it stopping.

A parker 51 about 50 years ago, but didn't know what it was at the time.

The earlies FP I can recall with high degree of certainty was my first school pen. It was a yellow plastic syringe filler with an intriguing inkview section (I think I just loved to watch the ink move in the pen...) that was given to me by my parents a half year through my first class. I then was allowed to move from writing with a pencil to writing with a fountain pen by my teacher because I apparently wrote very nicely. I recall that however nice the pen was the nib was very scratchy and in many hopeless attempts to make it write properly I ruined it pretty quickly. And so I got the same pen in blue, than in green and so on until I was allowed to write with a BP... But even so I never stopped writing with FP pens entirely though other kids laughed at me for being a weirdo. And when I started at Uni I went to a stationer's and bought myself couple of parkers sonnets, inks and lots of paper for what was my monthly allowance...

Regards, Zed

Hard to identify the earliest..... at primary school we used dip pens, but my mother had a black Conway Stewart and my sister a Burnham.
As I have recounted previously (hopefully not in this thread!!)....
My father, a head-teacher was given a grey P51 by his staff one Christmas...I found the filling mechanism very odd.
I fell in love with an Emerald Vacumatic set, but the family budget didn't run to it, so I had to make-do with a Vac clone, called a Skater which my soldier-brother brought home from Hong Kong (It was a real POS, actually, with a horrid nail-like nib ).
I used mainly a Waterman, IIRC.

60 years on, I have my '40s Emerald Vac (and a '46 P51, and a nice ...new....CS) thanks to FPN members

I grew up in the 50's and probably had other exposure to fountain pens as they were common. Around 4th grade, I began using a black Esterbrook (almost certainly a J), and Schaeffer ink as I remember the Skripwell bottle. I used it into college.

I had a very long walk on campus and had notes get wet a few times. Since Noodlers wasn't invented, I quit using the Esterbrook and it got lost. I did what many engineering students did -- used a technical pen (Rapidograph) as a writing pen because it could use India ink. Horrible scratchy pen, but waterproof notes. I still wish I hadn't lost the Esterbrook though. (I've bought a gray one, and will probably buy a black one)

Wow, I can't believe I missed this thread. My first memory of a pen is not the pen, but the smell of the ink. Both my grandmother on my mother's side and my grandfather on my father's side had fp's and they must have used Waterman ink. I remember the strong phenol smell. My grandmother had what I best remember as a Sheaffer Sentinel or Balance in the gray stripes. I know my grand father loved Sheaffer's because I have the set he carried on a daily basis - a Sentinel deluxe set in black - very well worn. But it's the smell of that ink that is first. Maybe that's why I use a lot of vintage ink?