Where Would You Buy A Fountain Pen In The 30's And 40's

[rwilsonedn]

Thanks to everyone for their response!

 

I recently bought a Parker Challenger from 1938. A little research shows the pen was marketed as a "school pen" and retailed at $2.75. It seems to me that spending $2.75 during the depression would have been quite a luxury for a student!

 

When a loaf of bread was going for $0.05 and a gallon of gasoline was not much more than that, yes, that was quite a school pen.

ron

[virgilio]

It would have indeed. Walthams sold for about a dollar as I recall, and they had sales for something like 50¢, if I remember an ad I saw once. But even 50¢ wasn't exactly cheap. At the depth of the Depression, the prices approached those of the pre-Fed era, that is before any noticeable inflation. The inflation of the roaring 20s was almost completely wrung out of the economy, at the cost of 6 to 8 million dead in the US. You could buy a perfectly good automobile for $250.

 

The fountain pen factories, like many other businesses, sold their goods at under cost, just to avoid laying all their workers off, who would have starved to death otherwise. I grew up listening to tales of the Depression. The old folks would shudder, and hope it would never happen again.

 

In the southern mill villages, shut down for months at a time, my Daddy saw whole families dragged out of their tiny little homes, dead of starvation. Things like that also happened up North. It was hushed up by the media, at the request first of Hoover and then of Roosevelt.

 

We have people living like that now in the US in public parks and so on. No one seems to care much.

[jar]

It would have indeed. Walthams sold for about a dollar as I recall, and they had sales for something like 50¢, if I remember an ad I saw once. But even 50¢ wasn't exactly cheap. At the depth of the Depression, the prices approached those of the pre-Fed era, that is before any noticeable inflation. The inflation of the roaring 20s was almost completely wrung out of the economy, at the cost of 6 to 8 million dead in the US. You could buy a perfectly good automobile for $250.

 

The fountain pen factories, like many other businesses, sold their goods at under cost, just to avoid laying all their workers off, who would have starved to death otherwise. I grew up listening to tales of the Depression. The old folks would shudder, and hope it would never happen again.

 

In the southern mill villages, shut down for months at a time, my Daddy saw whole families dragged out of their tiny little homes, dead of starvation. Things like that also happened up North. It was hushed up by the media, at the request first of Hoover and then of Roosevelt.

 

We have people living like that now in the US in public parks and so on. No one seems to care much.

Speaking of the mill towns...

 

http://www.fototime.com/9BBD3045B391113/medium800.jpg

 

http://www.fototime.com/D34DC872BF5E1B4/medium800.jpg

 

But one of my luckier finds was a small family run upstate drug store that still had the soda counter and a glass cabinet in the corner with self after shelf of pre-70s fountain pens. The owner was closing the store soon and so sold me quite a few of the pens. He still had a whole card of Waterman CFs and over a dozen Sheaffers and a like number of Parkers all dating from the 40s to the 70s.

[DaveBj]

^{Those in uniform could purchase quality fountain pens at post exchanges. My father told me that when he first started writing to my mother (several years before I was even a twinkle in their eyes), she wrote that he was having trouble with her pen, so he went to the PX, bought the best Waterman that they carried, and sent it to her.}