Fresh Towels for the Rat Pack

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas and what stays in Vegas is largely on the sheets and towels of the hotels and casinos along The Strip. In a city whose skyline is constantly evolving with newer, bigger, and taller buildings and the once majestic hotels and casinos now forgotten, one thing has remained constant – the freshly laundered towels and linens provided by the American Linen Supply Company. The idea that a business that began as wholesome as providing clean aprons to grocers in Nebraska would someday literally handle the mob’s dirty laundry seems like a stretch but that’s exactly what happened with the company that George Steiner started in 1896.

This green and white pencil with the script logo printed on it along with the 4 digit phone number suggests that this pencil has probably seen some stuff. The 4 digit phone number on the pencil suggests that it is from sometime between the 1930’s and 1960’s - probably the 40’s or 50’s based on the hotel and resort construction boom. I imagine a pencil like this wedged behind the ear of a hotel maintenance man kept after work so he had something to fill out the crumpled racing form in the pocket of his coveralls or to write down a tip overheard from one of the high rollers staying there.

What We Did On Our Summer Vacation

Since school is back in session all over the country, it’s time for Graphite Confidential to get back to what we do best – telling the stories behind the names and places on old advertising pencils!

We had an awesome summer full of adventures, road trips, rock shows, stationery, and of course, pencils and notebooks! In addition to our regular trips to CW Pencil Enterprise we visited pencil and stationery friends in Chicago and Bob Slate, a must-see spot in Boston.

First we went to Chicago to see Pearl Jam at Wrigley Field and since it’s our hometown, we always have friends to see and old, new, and new-to-us places to check out. Right after our flight landed, we stopped by Greer Chicago and found a couple amazing vintage 1940s spiral bound composition books that are in perfect condition considering their age. We couldn’t coordinate our schedules to meet up with Chandra (the owner of Greer Chicago) this trip but hope to make it happen next time we’re in town! 

Jess was meeting a friend so I had a few hours on my own so I decided to go on a Field Notes binge. I hailed a cab and headed to the Field Museum to pick up a couple packs of the green edition and then Ubered over to FNHQ for a quick visit and to give them my money in person rather than via an online order as usual. Truly, no stationery lover’s time in Chicago would be complete without stopping by FNHQ, (or Field Notes Headquarters for the uninitiated).

Next we went to Boston for a couple days to catch the Pearl Jam shows at Fenway Park. We knew ahead of time that a stop at Bob Slate was a must. I picked up a Blackwing Slate notebook and (check what pencils we got). At the second show, Jess ran into a friend who had toured the recording studio where Pearl Jam’s first album was recorded and knowing our love of pencils got us one from the studio to add to our collection. Since our time was limited and couldn’t make it to all of the National Park sites (one of our other loves) we went to Faneuil Hall to get all of the National Park stamps and some great souvenir pencils. Granted they are not vintage pencils but who can say no to a pencil with a foil embossed lobster!

Come back next week when we share the story of American Linen Supply Company, the company that supplied Las Vegas hotels with their sheets and towels and washed away what stayed in Vegas.

The Electric Chicks That Shocked A Kansas Town

Once upon a time, it took kerosene and hot water to run a poultry farm, but like Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, Carl A. Engel went electric in Hays, Kansas in 1927. This chicken-wattle-red pencil must’ve seemed mighty modern in that tiny Midwestern town of 5000 souls back in those days. They must have wondered, what in tarnation is an “electric hatchery,” just like we do now.

No, it’s not a psychedelic rock band or a drug lair. In the last days of the Jazz Age, when movies were silent and cars were Model-Ts, an “electric hatchery” was a newfangled word for what we now call an incubator, and it was cutting edge science for enterprising Mr. Engel’s birdbrained business on the corner of 5th and Main in a town founded in 1867 as a whistle stop on the Union Pacific Railroad.

The hatchery would, er, take flight quickly in Hays. In addition to eggs, Engels specialized in “started chicks,” which sounds like olden days slang for “angry women” but really just means, “baby chickens a week or so old.” Unlike day-olds, “started chicks” were less wobbly, stronger, and significantly farther along the way to being a future Friday night’s fried chicken dinner.

Eventually, Engel’s would drop the “electric” from its name, as the word lost its novelty by the '40s, but throughout the ‘50s, the company would turn up in “Who’s Who in the Hatchery World." By the ‘60s, it was a huge, three-building factory full of up to 11,000 laying hens sucking down 2800 pounds of Purina chow a day dropping nearly 3 million eggs a year directly down cooled chutes starting at 2am to reach grocery shelves within 18 hours.

We don’t know what became of Engel’s poultry business, or where the great-great-great-great-great-great grandchicks of his fine feathered birdlings are pecking around now, but at least this bright red pencil with it’s green eraser and brass ferrule is still here to remind us of the days when electric hatcheries, started chicks and five-digit phone numbers were cutting edge tech.

From Cedar Chests to Cluster Bombs

When John Caswell and Winfred Runyan established the Caswell-Runyan Company in May 1907, they had no idea that their cedar chest business would grow to 1,500 employees, have a role in both world wars, and eventually gain a presence in most American homes, pool halls, and bars through the production of radio and television cabinets and jukeboxes by the time the company dissolved in 1956.

This 1920s pencil, which was made from the same Tennessee cedar as the company's other items, is the same bold turquoise with gold print as the labels affixed to their products, with a stately old font proclaiming "Caswell-Runyan Treasure Chests." It was during that era that business was booming and the company had grown to over 700 employees at the Huntington, Indiana factory. Imagine cups full of these pencils sharpened and placed around the office and production floor used to take orders and complete fulfillment forms, mark where to make cuts on the wood, and jot notes about important details that couldn’t afford to be swept away with the sawdust and wood scraps.

When Caswell and Runyan started the company, they had around 40 employees and no advertising budget. It was word of mouth that carried the news of these heirloom quality pieces far and wide and the company they started to build cedar chests, shirtwaist boxes, and shoeboxes grew. By 1911 (only four years after production started) they built a new facility - double in size.  The increased capacity would be fully used during World War I. CR supplied ammo boxes and medical cases for the Navy and after the war refitted the machinery to produce peacetime offerings. After World War I, CR began building radio cabinets and expanded to furniture items and before long were selling floor lamps, telephone stands, and sewing cabinets.

In 1929, CR was acquired by Utah Radio Company which was based out of, you guessed it, Chicago. Although the company was now under new ownership the factory remained in Huntigton and continued to produce the cedar chests and an expanding line of furniture and radio cabinets.

CR stepped up once again to serve the military during WWII by refitting the factory machinery to build cluster bombs and most likely ammo boxes and medical cases again. In 1945, Detrola purchased Utah Radio, which included CR and its 1,500 employees at two factories. Although CR had been acquired again, they continued to produce their standard offerings and a few new items - cabinets for record players, jukeboxes, and televisions. Being owned by Detrola had its perks since CR was now producing the cabinets for the electronics made and sold by General Electric, Magnavox, RCA, Admiral, Crosley and others, their craftsmanship appeared in an growing number of American homes and businesses.

The Huntington factory closed in 1956, the contents were auctioned off, and the building was destroyed by a fire in 1962. Although Caswell-Runyan was acquired multiple times and refitted the factory twice to aid in war efforts they never stopped making the piece that started it all - cedar chests. Chances are you don't have one of these turquose Caswell-Runyan pencils, but we'd bet your mother or grandmother has one of their hope chests in the attic, made of the same cedar and built for the ages.

Lending World War Veterans A Hand… and a Pencil

Decades before penicillin, farm work could be just as debilitating as war and an enterprising one-legged Iowa man decided to put his, er, best foot forward to aid folks wounded by both causes when he founded the Twin City Artificial Limb Co. in 1904. Council Bluffs’ John F. Johnson would soon be drumming up business for his hand-carved arms and legs with the perfect wooden calling card, a simple pencil.

It’s unclear how Johnson himself lost his leg, but by the time World War I was afoot in the 1910s, Johnson was not only fitting soldier amputees with his prosthetics, but taking them into his own home five at a time for an entire month to measure them properly and fully teach them how to use their new limbs.

During the Depression, however, mystery steps into the story. Johnson’s name oddly fell off the TCAL radar after he was sued for $5000 (about $75,000 in today’s money) over a defective leg brace in 1931. His secretary wife, Blanche, apparently became owner in 1935. By 1940, Mr. Johnson was dead, but his company lived on because one of those maimed WWI  soldiers — maybe even one of the boys he helped get back on his “feet” — took over just in time for World War II.

It would likely be Edward V. Lucas, who lost both of his legs fighting in Europe circa 1918, who commissioned the circa 1940s white-and-blue pencils like the one Graphite Confidential found. Lucas took great pride in making legs good enough to put World War II pilots back in action. Personal tragedy during this era, however, turned his attention to younger victims.

Lucas had four small children when Scarlet Fever broke out following a flood in 1943. His wife Liela insisted that she and the kids take an anti-fever serum which killed her within hours. Now a widower with four children, it’s no wonder that Ed Lucas immediately started donating his, er, handicrafts to injured youngsters. In 1944, Lucas temporarily took in eight-year-old Jack Bowen, who lost both legs in a freight train accident, made him new limbs and taught him to walk again.

Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and baseball legend Satchel Page helped Twin City Artificial Limb lend hand a few years later when another boy, 10 year old Hank Steinhoff, lost his arm in a 1951 train accident. The celebs sent in personal items — clothes, golf clubs, and a signed baseball — for an auction that raised at least $2500 ($33 grand in today’s money), and not only did TCAL’s Ed Lucas bid up the clothes, he threw in the custom-made arm for free, saying “I know from experience the cost of keeping this youngster in arms until he reaches maturity."

Just two years later, the young victim of the Korean War would be helped by Twin City Artificial Limb. An American GI found legless 12-year-old Song Yong Cho crawling around a Busan depot ironically shining shoes after frostbite claimed his lower limbs at age 10 in Seoul. Brought to Boys Town in Iowa, TCAL’s Ed Lucas — who had remarried and had his own fifth child — volunteered to make him free legs until he was fully grown, giving him new limbs 1” taller every year.

We couldn’t find record of when Mr. Lucas passed away, but Twin City Artificial Limb was helping folks get back on their feet until at least 1972, when the company appears in the local school district’s assignment to teach pupils about local businesses. We can only hope those elementary schoolers used a Twin City Artificial Limb pencil like this one and got to find out about all the work they did for at least 70 years to help wounded veterans, maimed midwestern youngsters, and even the young victims of overseas wars.

The Amish Paradise Where You Party Like It's 1699

The Arcola, Illinois highway exit said, “theme park,” but the only “rides” are in buggies, there is no junk food except cheese, and who in their right mind waits in line to churn butter? 80 years of American roadtrippers, it turns out, and hundreds of them hit ye olde gift shop to snatch up the park’s coolest souvenir: a pencil with a horse and buggy on it and a vintage Amish saying, “We Grow Too Soon Oldt And Too Late Schmardt.”

Picture it: you’re riding in the back of the Family Roadster, the seafoam green one with the wood panel sides, staring out the back window watching stripes painted on the asphalt whiz by and aggressively playing license plate bingo with your sibling that won’t stay on their side of the seat. The car turns off Interstate 57 and a short time later comes to a stop. Everyone piles out of the car to go to Rockome Gardens, one of the world’s only Amish theme parks.

Signs such as “you must be *this tall* to raise a barn” and “wait to churn butter is 45 minutes from this point” may or may not have greeted Rockome Gardens visitors. But we do know that from 1937 to 2015, you could fill a whole day grabbing a snack of curds from the cheese shop before watching chickens play tic-tac-toe or piano (!), cutting a log at the horse-powered saw mill, or ill-advisedly gawking at actual Amish people in the model town, Colonial Williamsburg style.

After a long day of walking around, a buggy ride across the park would deposit you at the gift shop, where the co-owner Irene Yoder would sell you a pencils like this one, probably cash only, you know, since the whole “no electricity” thing. Irene ran the gift shop at least until she was 87 in 2005, when her son joked, "We've had to cut her down to a six-day workweek."

Our pencil harkens back to the mid 80s, about 40 years after the Mennonite Church had taken over from the original owners to build a retirement home for missionaries there. Apparently they were both oldt and schmardt, but not as schmardt as Amish/Mennonite farmers Elvan and Irene Yoder who bought Rockome Gardens in the 60s, stuck some Amish attractions on it, and officially opened it to the public. We have them to thank for this pencil.

Sadly, in 2015, Rockome Gardens was shuttered and turned into a “wildlife adventure” park. No word on what happened to the tic-tac-toe playing chickens, but this simple stick of graphite, paint, wood, aluminum and rubber will always remind us that central Illinois was once home to an oddly beloved Amish theme park.

A. Schwab Can Get Your Mojo Working

Elvis bought his underwear there. B.B. King stopped in when he was in town. Amid the bars and juke joints of Memphis’ famous Beale Street, 142-year-old A. Schwab has been a seemingly-unchanging witness to the rise of blues and rock ‘n’ roll as well as civil rights history. For decades, the old-fashioned “dry goods” store has always been where the locals of every description went for just about everything: pencils like this one, frying pans, 45s, overalls, and — for at almost half a century  — all the roots, candles, oils and other hoodoo supplies you could possibly want. After all, as you can see on the late 1960s pencil we found, their motto is, “If you can’t find it at Schwab’s, you’re better off without it.”

About 94 years after French Jewish immigrant Abraham Schwab opened his store on Beale, his son Leo went in search of something to cover up strong smells from nearby restaurants and a salesman hooked him up with some A.A. Vantine Temple incense, which worked (excuse the phrase) like a charm. Vantine began sending promo boxes of other products, much of which happened to be hoodoo related. When Leo decided to put them on display, the modest selection flew off the shelves and soon he was ordering it by the ton and Schwab’s became a respected source. People came from near and far to scoop up some “Protection From Harm” house blessing, rattlesnake root, “Money Drawing” incense, or any number of other items you can still get there at the shop just a couple miles from "Blues" Highway 61. A 1988 Spin magazine article even mentions R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter making a trip to Schwab's for “Exorcising Room Deodorizer” for his North Carolina studio. And ethnographer Tony Kail’s 2017 book “A Secret History of Memphis Hoodoo” has a wealth of other stories about how folks have used the store’s spiritual supplies through the decades.

No doubt, a shop pencil would certainly help keep track of the wide-range of other goods at Schwab’s through the years. By the time Leo Schwab discovered Memphis folks had a strong affinity for candles, oils, roots and other special stock around 1970, A. Schwab had already become the oldest shop on Beale Street, a local landmark that had grown to engulf the building next door (previously one of the first Piggly Wiggly stores) in 1924, and had not only been a go-to for a young Elvis (according to fourth-generation shopkeeper Elliott Schwab at least) but had also seen history march right by its front door.

On March 28, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King organized a peaceful march during the Sanitation Workers Strike that met violence when it reached Beale Street. Schwab’s escaped with just a broken front window and some smashed displays, but a famous photo on the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal a couple days later shows a fearful Abram Schwab (grandson of Abraham), his daughter Beverly and an employee “astonished” as Army tanks LBJ called in to quell the unrest roll by the store. Tragically, just a few days later Dr. King was assassinated just eight blocks away.

Today, A. Schwab still stands proudly at 163 Beale Street, the same address as the one on our half-century-old pencil. A sign still points the way to the store’s selection of “Mojo Hands, Music Instruments, T-Shirts, Museum Souvenirs, Blues, Magic Spells, Books/Art, Hoodoo.” They no longer carry these hexagonal yellow A. Schwab pencils and the Schwab’s sold the store to another family in 2011 (though they remain involved). But if memory serves, you can still buy modern white A. Schwab pencils from a cup near the front register. And just as they promised all these years ago on our old yellow No. 2, “if you can’t find it at Schwab’s, you’re better off without it.”

The Blues Brothers' Favorite 125-Year-Old Hardware Emporium?

120 years before Carrie Fisher rolled up in front of the shop to greet the Blues Brothers with a rocket launcher and 40 years before the famous L train tracks forming Chicago’s Loop rose overhead on Van Buren Street, Solomon Stebbins opened his hardware store in Chicago the same year Illinois native son Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Although Stebbins Hardware pencils like this one date to post-WWII rather than the Civil War era, they definitely saw the skyward growth of downtown Chicago and were handed out to any of a number of construction workers and contractors that visited Stebbins for specialty tools that weren’t readily available anywhere else.

Made between 1943 and 1963 when Chicago still had single digit zip codes, It’s easy to imagine this Stebbins Hardware pencil sharpened with a box cutter or pocket knife to make lists, marking twice before cutting once, adding up cheezeborger orders from Billy Goat Tavern, or how the crew takes their coffee from Lou Mitchell’s.

By the time this pencil came on the scene, Stebbins’ grandsons had already bought and converted an old burlesque theatre called the Trocodero in 1922 to expand to three floors plus a basement, complete with tin ceilings and newfangled linoleum floors, and the area remained iffy -- full of “men only” hotels like the Plymouth (across the street), pawn shops (around the corner) and delicatessens (attached to the bars). Nevertheless, it was heralded as downtown’s very best hardware store for decades.

It also had the dubious distinction of being downtown’s very last hardware store: ironically the store that handily survived the Chicago Fire, the Great Depression and competition from the huge national chains provided the actual tools for its own demise. Condo developments and other nearby construction built with Stebbins nails and screws ultimately made the city-owned land where it sat more coveted. In 1985, Chicago’s planning director suddenly claimed the building was becoming dilapidated and refused to renew Stebbins’ lease, all the while denying the city had any plans for the land, even though the Chicago Tribune noted that it was being eyed for a main library. Stebbins was forced to close that fall, and the last Stebbins son to run the place, 51-year-old Wallace Jay Stebbins Younger, quit the hardware business entirely and ironically decided to try his hand at real estate.

Only a few months after the red neon “Stebbins Hardware” sign went out for the last time in 1985 under the L tracks, the City of Chicago would announce its block was to become the site of the new Harold Washington Library, which was ultimately built in 1991.

Next time you are in Chicago, visit the Van Buren side of the Washington Library and think back to a time when Stebbins Hardware’s creaky 1904 building stood there, keeping 50,000 hardware items in countless tiny drawers” and countless simple white business pencils in stock for decades of tradesmen that built the modern Windy City.

The Wisconsin Forge That Took America Underground

Next time you’re standing at the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Disney World, or even just on the streets of Chicago, New York, or almost any city in the U.S.A., chances are you can look down and spot the legacy of a post-Civil War iron master who turned a little plow forge outside Oshkosh, Wisconsin into a fundamental part of every American streetscape, with a little help from 146 years of custom factory pencils like this one we found from the 1950s.

Manholes are not glamorous, but without the ironwork of the Neenah Foundry, most of the country wouldn’t have been able to send its electrical, sewer and other infrastructure underground as the nation boomed into the 20th century, a move that was surprisingly crucial to the growth every city from coast to coast.

Neenah Foundry’s, er, founder William Aylward actually got his Aylward Plow Works started on that little spit of Wisconsin land a year before the “city” was even incorporated. And he wasn’t even the only wily entrepreneur who liked the looks of the place: Kimberly-Clark of Kleenex fame also got started there in the same year, 1872.

After pop Aylward had spent awhile taking an oxcart down to Green Bay to snatch up the Swedish pig iron needed to make those farm plows, and later barn door rollers and sugar cauldrons, his three sons decided to turn the business away from the agricultural and toward the growing urban centers of the early 20th century. The idea of making manholes and tree and sewer grates filled their eyes full of dollar signs.

By 1920, nearly all of nearby Chicago’s manholes were made by Aylward’s boys, who had decided by then to rename the business Neenah Foundry after their town. When the Great Depression hit, and FDR’s New Deal, er, plowed tons of moolah into infrastructure projects to help ease unemployment, Neenah Foundry was one of the few companies that did so well they kept growing and growing.

We don’t know when they started ordering pencils like this one to use on the factory floor, in the office, or out on the streets to figure specs, orders, and other memorandum of the analog industrial age, but we’re sure they used gross after gross of them to keep track of business as Neenah Foundry started making manhole covers, sewers, curbs, and tree grates for American cities near and far.

The Aylward family sold Neenah Foundry in 1997, but the company is still alive today after overcoming two bankruptcy filings in the last 20 years. Because their products can last over a century, long after the streets around them crumble, we’re sure we’ll keep spotting Neenah’s iron works on Manhattan streets near Graphite Confidential HQ for years to come, but it’s nice to know they’re still up in Wisconsin forging ahead, hopefully doing so with the help of more custom pencils. — Jessica Letkemann

Detroit Library Lovers from Thomas Edison to Garfield the Cat

The Tigers were on their way to the World Series and homegirl Madonna was climbing the charts when 9-year-old Jack White’s neighborhood branch welcomed politicians, a gaggle of kids, and spokescat Garfield to launch the “Use Your Detroit Public Library” campaign with a city-wide blitz of red pencils including the well-used one that we came across in a life-long booklover’s Detroit attic last summer.

The ordinary red pencil may only be 34 years old, but it’s a direct link to the history of an institution that was responsible for feeding the mind of boy genius Thomas Edison back before he invented the 20th century, and later for some of the greatest work by one the nation’s most acclaimed architects, Cass Gilbert, and funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

124 years before lasagna loving and Monday hating orange tabby Garfield was yukking it up at the Cass Corridor main branch in the big ‘80s, 13-year-old Grand Trunk Railroad telegrapher Thomas Edison was spending Detroit downtime (and two days’ pay for membership) reading his way through every single book in the library, which was then still just a university-related amenity. He may have died long before these red pencils came on the scene, but Mr. Edison of course would go on to flip all that knowledge into epic inventions we all rely on like, oh, you know — the movies, the lightbulb, home electricity, and recorded music.

Cass Gilbert, the architect responsible for the U.S. Supreme Court Building and New York’s Woolworth Building among many others, jumped into the library’s story in 1913 when Carnegie decided to toss a few hundred grand in library money at Detroit, then bursting with bucks because of Ford and the auto industry. It’s little wonder that the Gilbert-designed main branch that eventually rose on Woodward Avenue in 1921 was an ornate Beaux Arts marble monolith destined to be part of history itself. And indeed, in the tumultuous history of the city, not only would a huge historic collection live there, the National Guard would be deployed to its lawn in 1943 during the city’s other major Civil Rights-era riot.

No one knows for sure if a preteen Jack White ever used a “Use Your Detroit Public Library” pencils doled out by Garfield a few blocks from his family’s home, but we like the idea of him scribbling down proto-White Stripes lyrics with one of these red pencils that literally turned what young Mr. Edison did in his 1860’s freetime into a slogan reminding late 20th century Motor Cityzens of the historic living institution in their midst. —Chris Alan Jones

The Telegraph That Penciled In Irving Berlin’s Love Story

One of America’s most famous songwriters. His disinherited flapper heiress fianceé. Her silver miner grandpa who hit the the mother lode. Their stories are all united with a simple pencil.

It’s the height of the Great Depression, jobs are scarce and money is tight. You’re heading down to “The Postal” with a quarter clenched in your fist, ready to send a life-changing note to your wife-to-be, parents, or boss. But first, you need to grab this unassuming purple pencil with “Postal Telegraph” written in a lightning bolt font up the side, and jot down your dire communique in 10 words or less, not including punctuation. STOP.

Postal Telegraph, which the New York Times once called “the only successful rival which the Western Union has ever found,” went out of business in 1943, but this 1930’s PT pencil has survived to remind us of a time when everyone from paupers to presidents marched down to “The Postal” to send their era’s version of a text message.

Walt Disney did. So did pencil enthusiast John Steinbeck (in a long missive to President Franklin Roosevelt) and a pre-presidential JFK did too. Bob Hope, Babe Ruth, you name ‘em, they sent or received Postal Telegrams. And in an earlier era, so did a Wright Brother, and radio pioneer Marconi had a back and forth with Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, THAT Alexander Graham Bell.

And it would not have been possible without an army of these purple pencils, waiting at the ready at the coast-to-coast offices of the Postal Telegraph, a company that had sprung to life when Irish-born John Mackay hit a bonanza of silver in Nevada’s Comstock Lode in the 1860s and decided to start a cable and telegraph company.

By 1893, PT had hoarded so much coin that Mackay built a newfangled 14 story “skyscraper,” in downtown Manhattan that still stands to this day. Landmarked in 1991 [pdf], New York’s Postal Telegraph building sits across the street from City Hall and what was once “newspaper row.” So you can just imagine how many politicos and jittery reporters stomped into the ground floor office of the building to pencil in telegram blanks that sent huge scoops and other world-moving news across the city, state and country.

As early as 1892, female Postal Telegraph operators were recognized as being on the forefront of a movement for greater careers for women. Eventually, college-aged girls could be PT messengers too, but barred from using bikes like the boys, they ended up walking upwards of 12 miles a day, often bearing the heart-rending strain of delivering terrible news, usually the death or illness of a loved one pencilled in by a bereaved relative far away.

By the time John Mackay passed away in 1902, his son Clarence was running the company. Just a year later, Clarence’s lovely daughter Ellin would be born. But she was destined to become a thoroughly modern woman. Around the time this Postal Telegraph pencil began to be mass-produced, 21-year-old Ellin, a respected writer and future novelist, and 36-year-old superstar jazz age songwriter Irving Berlin fell in love. Her daddy Clarence vehemently opposed the relationship because their family was staunchly Roman Catholic, while Berlin was Russian and Jewish. A couple days after New Year’s 1926, Ellin Mackay and Irving Berlin snuck off to the New York City Clerk’s office, literally 700 feet from her dad’s Postal Telegraph Building, and secretly got married, which amounts to a pretty colossal middle finger to dear old dad.

All the papers (also about 700 feet away) carried screaming headlines the next day, and dear old dad disinherited Ellin and wouldn’t even let her visit home for five years. Irving would write her many a love song, including the classic “Always” that he gave her for a wedding present (and we hope he used a Postal Telegraph pencil to compose it). Ellin and Irving were ultimately married for 62 years, until her death when she was 85. Irving died a year later at age 101!

And who knows just how many singing telegrams, a format Postal Telegraph invented in 1933, featuring one of Berlin’s love songs for Ellin were ordered with one of these purple PT pencils before the last one was delivered in person in 1942? Only the pencil knows.

The Postal Telegraph company would finally be eaten whole by its more famous rival, Western Union, in 1943, the 540th company forcibly acquired by telegraphy giant. In a perfect karmic twist, Western Union spent the rest of WWII using up Postal Telegraph blanks, uniforms, and yes, pencils like this one.

Neither company sends telegrams anymore, but once upon a time a purple Postal Telegraph pencil like this bore witness to the most important moments of American lives, great and ordinary.  -Jessica Letkemann

Graphite Confidential Newsreel Edition: Ad Pencils That Advertise Pencils

Dateline - New York. March 30, 2018. It’s National Pencil Day, and Graphite Confidential is celebrating with a long lost, newly discovered newsreel that uncovers the shocking truth about the advertising pencils that companies around the U.S.A. made to — you guessed it — advertise pencils.

But seriously, we put on our finest fake 1950s announcer voices and ginned up this historical black-and-white "filmstrip" on ye olde iPhones for your viewing pleasure. Happy National Pencil Day, and may the Hymen Lipman* be with you.

*Hymen Lipman, which you probably already know because you’re reading a niche pencil site right now, was the first person to patent a pencil with an attached eraser in the United States. National Pencil Day celebrates the day his patent was filed in 1858, exactly 160 years ago.

Chillin' & Grillin' on Route 66

In 1902, before the town of Tucumcari was named and before New Mexico was even a state, Tucumcari Ice & Coal provided the necessary fuel to keep food fresh, beverages cold, the townsfolk warm, cook a hearty meal, and power the steam locomotives rumbling through town to boot. To guarantee continuous production of their “crystal clear taste-free ice,” the company dug their own well in 1924 that was capable of pumping 30 gallons per minute, no small feat in the desert back when both the ice and the coal was lugged around in horse-drawn buggies.

We don’t have a specific date for this pencil, but we’re pretty sure that was made after 1902 when the company was founded and before 1963 when brass ferrules fell out of favor. We believe it’s most likely from the 1930’s or 40’s, primetime for the coal needs of a young railroad town. In a burg whose population always remained under 9,000, the ice and coal company was more than just a business - it was a social hub of the community, so there was plenty that Tucumcarians and TI&C workers alike would need to jot down.

Several photos and comments full of fond memories about the “ice plant” and what it meant to them and the town have made it to the digital age in a Facebook group, appropriately named, Tucumcari Then and Now. Whether it was getting ice for the hotel, getting married (no, really) at the TI&C store, picking up vacation ice (whatever that is), or buying ice for their fruit stand on Route 66, many residents of a certain age have good memories from the old ice store on West Railroad Avenue. You can still practically imaging the rumble of those 50-pound blocks of ice coming down the huge galvanized metal chutes out back.

While the community had the warm and fuzzies about the place where they all got their ice and coal, the happenings behind the scenes were much weirder. A TI&C ice delivery man who we can easily imagine with one of these white pencils tucked behind his ear as he made his rounds, Kenneth S. Booth had an unfortunate accident in 1915 that could have ended much worse. While filling the big icebox of one of the town businesses, the ladder Ken was standing on slipped and threw him onto a table with a meat block that had several knives sticking up. To save his face from mutilation, he put his hands out to brace his fall and ended up severely cutting his right hand.

Not to be outdone, a few years later TI&C’s president disappeared completely after eloping with a mystery woman, leaving no clue except a curt telegram. Perhaps he even filled out the telegram form at the local depot with one of his own company pencils. According to a story in the July 2, 1922 Albuquerque Morning Journal,  Tucumcari Ice & Coal president J.W. Corn’s telegram said, “am leaving for parts unknown” with no other information provided about who he married, where they were headed, or if he was ever coming back. Talk about making an exit! The same year, TI&C began the process of filing for bankruptcy and then suddenly they were not. Could it have been some creative math and accounting, possibly with a pencil just like this, that saved the company?

It’s easy to imagine this pencil kicking around the office making notes of whose turn it was to shovel the horse poop from in front of the building, cool orders, hot deliveries, when the train with the next “good clean coal” delivery was due into town, the best recipes for taste free ice, and the odds on whether or not J.W. Corn was ever coming back. We know the company eventually did go the way of the coal stove, but as late as 2013, the sign lived on, memories of a time when you could get your chill on and your grill on route 66.  —Chris Alan Jones

143 Years of Death in the Family

When 101-year-old Herb Haertel died in 2015, so did the last living master of his family’s 143 years of expert gravestone making. Maybe thinking about death every day gives you a long, long life, because even as late as his 100th birthday, old Herb was on local TV in Minnesota doing pushups like a character straight out of Lake Wobegon Days.

Sometime before he hung up his chisel and he and his brother sold their Fairmont Monument Works in 1974, they got these handy business pencils made in a soothing silver color similar to the granite and marble they used the mark the final resting places of townfolks since they took over their dad’s business in 1946. Curiously like all those graves, one of these Haertel Brothers Fairmont Monument Works pencils has survived the vagaries of time to remind future generations (us) that they existed.

And boy what a headstone dynasty it was!

It was fun enough to discover that Herb and his brothers got their start working in dad Emanuel’s gravestone works, which the elder Haertel had founded in 1899. But it turns out that Em’s sons were carrying on an even older Haertel tradition: Emanuel himself was one of five brothers carrying on THEIR dad’s gravestone business, spread out across the midwest in Illinois, Wisconsin, and of course, Minnesota.

Grandpa Henry had founded Haertel Monuments in Illinois waaaaaay back in 1872, when he was about 30, and he got his sons Martin, Walter, Henry Jr., William, and our patriarch Emanuel started in the biz before he retired in 1902.

A year before our Herb was born in 1914, dad Emanuel was (ahem) already being memorialized in journals like American Stone Trade for fighting off imposters trying to use the Fairmont Works name to trick local undertakers (no kidding!). He sued the fakers’ pants off and then joined forces with his brothers to carve a cutting-edge (yuk yuk) grave monument to the man who started it all, their dad Henry, who took his trip six feet under a custom Haertel headstone in 1918.

The 1918 headstone of headstone mogul Henry Haertel, crafted by five of his headstone master sons including the founder of Fairmount Monument Works, Emanuel.

Whew!

It’s no wonder granite dust was practically in Herb and his brothers’ blood. After apprenticing in the family biz after high school, Herb faced death even more up close serving in World War II. Perhaps because of all the horror he saw in the Pacific theater of the war, the man who returned in 1946 to help take over Fairmont Monument Works was universally known as “an extremely friendly person that took great interest in knowing the history of families.”

Though Herb and his brothers sold Fairmont Monument Works back in 1974, the company -- now known as Fairmont Monument Co. -- appears to still be in business, proudly touting the fact that they were established in 1899, and adding the punny tagline, “Planet Granite.”

The Illinois branch of the family, meanwhile, also continued in the gravemarking biz. Granddad Henry’s Haertel Monuments in Illinois stayed in the family all the way until 1987 when grandson Harold (our Herb’s cousin) passed away, but that business also lives on.

Just like the silver Haertel Brothers pencil that’s still here among us on this mortal plane.

-Jessica Letkemann

From the Ruins of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair

Steps from the University of Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, work was completed on the city by the lake’s own grand institution of American ingenuity just in time for the 1933 Century of Progress world’s fair. It would become a famous tourist attraction for ever more, and it was so huge and important that after WWII it earned its own alphanumeric telephone exchange—MUseum 4— which was promptly imprinted on pencils for use by docents, execs, school children and anyone else who happened to need something to write with during their visit to the mind-bogglingly large and varied museum.

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Like the 1933 fair’s other Art Deco edifices, the Museum of Science and Industry’s interior was reasonably Art Moderne, but its exterior was curiously ancient looking, almost as if it had been there for decades. That’s because it had.

When one of those everyday pencils printed sometime between 1948 and 1977 came into our possession recently, we knew we were holding a forgotten reminder of major Chicago history.

As a fourth-grader who lived two blocks away and played at the hulking Beaux Arts MSI every day after school in the 80s, I discovered many little incongruities on the grounds that made it seem like a portal to the 19th century. Why did the empty back of the building seem to be some kind of long lost grand entrance? Why was there a giant lagoon back there in an otherwise teeming part of the south side of Chicago?

I would eventually learn that the building was actually the last remnant of Chicago’s 1893 World Columbian Exposition, also known as the White City because of its faux marble structures. Fire destroyed many of the other genteel temporary structures, but the gorgeous Palace of Fine Arts somehow remained standing at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive.

Directly after the 1893 fair, department store magnate Marshall Field paid for it to become the Columbian Museum of Chicago. In 1920 the renamed Field Museum left the old building for newer digs on the Chicago lakefront closer to downtown (where it still stands). The 1893 structure was left to rot as various pols and planners debated on what to do with it.

By 1926, Julius Rosenwald — the man best known as the “& Company” of Sears, Roebuck and Company — began laying down millions of dollars to endow it, incongruously, as an industrial museum. The rest is history.

Visitors can still walk the same huge halls they did when this pencil was made probably in the ‘50s around the same time the WWII German submarine and the chick hatchery debuted, all while making new memories: Barack Obama’s presidential library will be built on the 1893 park grounds behind the museum soon.

MSI is always old and new at the same time. Squint your eyes a little bit and you can be transported to 1893, 1933, or any mid-century yesteryear. Chicago adopted two-letter alphanumeric phone numbers including the one on our old MSI pencil in 1948 and finally abandoned them in 1977. But just like the time-warping magic of childhood, you can still dial MUseum 4-1414 and a Museum of Science and Industry operator will answer, just like they have for 70 years. -Jessica Letkemann

Not Your Typical State Fair Fare

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Since humanity first learned to dip food in hot grease, state fairs have been a test kitchen for groundbreaking advances in what can be deep-fried, and the Kansas State Fair is no exception. But for the past 70 years, that fair's most popular dishes have included the chicken & noodles and fresh pies served up by the parishioners of the South Hutchinson United Methodist Church.  

When we came across this orange pencil for the church's cafeteria at the fair, we wondered, “Why does a church need a custom pencil at a state fair?” But a single search made it was obvious: this wasn’t just a church group selling snacks to hot and hungry fairgoers, it is an institution that has remained a perennial favorite for decades. It’s likely that at some point these pencils were used by Church volunteers to write down or record any number of things like:

1. Volunteer lists and schedules

2. Customer orders

3. How many raisin cream pies would be needed tomorrow

4. That funny thing Fran said earlier 

So how did the church get into the fair game? A storm destroyed their church in 1948, so members began serving up the unusual fare for a state fair to quickly raise the money necessary to rebuild. The new structure was built in 1951. Their state fair chicken and noodles and variety of homemade pies, however, were such a hit that long after the fundraising goal was met they continued feeding hungry fairgoers. They are now one of the Kansas State Fair’s oldest continuous vendors.

Ella C. Downs had already raised six children and retired from a career as a school teacher in 1948 when she rolled up her sleeves to help the South Hutchinson UMC raise funds with state fair food. When she returned from a trip to California in 1950, Ella brought a recipe for raisin cream pie that is a staple on the menu to this day. In the late 60s, 20 years after she started, and she was still running the show at 84 years old!

Current Pie Coordinator, Judy Snyder, began volunteering in 1952 when she was in second grade (and Miss Ella was in charge) and the food was still served on “real plates with silverware”. Today, she oversees the production of all varieties of pie for the fair - including Ella C. Downs’ raisin cream pie. While the pies are baked fresh daily, the from-scratch noodle preparation begins in July, two months before the fair opens, to ensure that the 1,200 pounds of noodles needed will be ready .

The 2017 fair marked seven decades since the first helping of chicken and noodles and first slice of pie was served by the volunteer staff from South Hutchinson United Methodist Church. Only two other food vendors have been feeding fairgoers longer: the parishioners of Our Lady of Guadalupe who have been dishing up tamales, tacos, and enchiladas for 71 years, and the aptly named Dairy Bar for almost 90 years where you could get an ice cream cone for a nickel in the 1930’s when it first opened.

Our pencil clearly came from an earlier, less digital era in the South Hutchinson UMC's Kansas State Fair reign, so we can easily imagine Miss Ella using one like it to jot down notes, instructions, and recipes for the squad of young egg crackers and noodle dryers in the little brick cafeteria in the 1960’s because she knew she was still teaching the next generation even though she was no longer in a classroom.

-Chris Alan Jones

Blind New Yorkers Take Pencils Off The Streets

Picture it: a famous New York governor at the top of the Empire State Building ostentatiously buying a pencil from a little blind girl in 1933, mugging for reporters and newsreel cameras. Now imagine one of those pencils in your own hand, spat out of a Lower Manhattan vending machine over 80 years later.

Its eraser died a dried-out death before your parents were born, and the type along its hexagonal barrel looks like boring fine print from an ancient IRS tax form, but this maroon pencil was actually an instrument wielded not only by that governor, but by mayors, socialites and everyday New Yorkers in one of the first successful efforts to treat people with disabilities like the full-fledged members of human society they are.

The idea of the blind beggar selling pencils on city streets was already a stereotype by the time legendary journalist/reformer Jacob Riis wrote How The Other Half Lives in 1890 in New York: “There is no provision for him anywhere…The annual pittance of 30 or 40 dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide.”

It would be Jewish New Yorkers, another oppressed group that Riis wrote about, who would proudly appropriate that blind man stereotype 24 years later and turn it into a decades-long, city-wide movement greater than simple or individual charity.

When the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind was founded in 1914, its officers set up a Pencil Office and launched its first pencil drive to fund the guild’s welfare department, the Yonkers home for the blind eventually built in 1920, and other services including education and jobs for the blind.

By 1930, the Pencil Office was located on west 72nd street and employed five blind girls stamping “To Aid N.Y. Guild For The Jewish Blind” on thousands of pencils annually, including the specimen that we discovered. 

Ex-New York governor Al Smith, Democratic nominee for president of the United States just a few years earlier, was the celebrity face kicking off the 1933 drive by buying one of these maroon “To Aid N.Y. Guild For the Jewish Blind” pencils from seven-year-old Hannah Seidenfeld at the top of the Empire State Building that September. 

The next year, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia launched the 20th annual pencil drive at City Hall on September 18, 1934 by purchasing the first package of the campaign from a blind nine-year-old ward of the Guild named Bertha.

As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency put it in their preview of the ceremonial event at City Hall that day, “The Guild’s pencils, bearing the inscription: ‘To Aid N. Y. Guild for the Jewish Blind,’ are today known in thousands of homes and offices, and have come to be a symbol of help for the destitute blind.”

The New York Guild for the Jewish Blind would later change its name to the Jewish Guild For the Blind, to underline the fact that its services were open to all, not just Jewish New Yorkers. Today, over a century after that first pencil drive in gilded-age Manhattan, the Guild has merged with Lighthouse International to become one of the biggest organizations in the world for the blind.

And it was all because a few New Yorkers in 1914 thought that selling blind folks selling pencils might actually be the start of something great. -Jessica Letkemann

The Railroad that Fed 'Little House on the Prairie'

Laura Ingalls Wilder made farm life in the wheat belt during pioneer days sound like a perfect childhood in her Little House on the Prairie books, but her family would have starved if she and her Pa and Ma hadn’t done time serving rough customers at the Chicago and North Western railroad camp when the future authoress was 12.

We aren’t sure of the exact date this (very) old C&NW No. 3 pencil was used by dusty men along the line, which started in 1859 and ran until 1995, but its typography was in use by 1883. Therefore it’s likely this pencil existed in 1879 when Charles Ingalls signed on as the railroad's company general store clerk and surveyors’ house caretaker in what would become De Smet, South Dakota, along the tracks being laid out to the hub town of Pierre. It’s not hard to imagine him using a plain C&NW pencil like this with no eraser to tally purchases and keep track of chores.

The railroad had been peppering potential pioneers with “You Need A Farm!” propaganda erroneously suggesting the hot, dry Dakota Territory climes were great for crops, and in September, 1879 Mr. Ingalls took their word for it and headed to the eastern part of the area to homestead. It wasn’t long before he and his wife and daughter Laura were working for the railroad, all the livelong day, to supplement his income enough to support the family.

Twelve-year-old Laura found herself surrounded by peculiar folks straight out of an old dime novel as she and her mother cooked and served food to the men of the camp. There was the hulking half-French, half-Native worker who spent most of his time gambling, fighting or riding his white pony along the line. There was also a gang of horse thieves that menaced the town during the Ingalls’ time. They were never caught.

Beginning with Little House In the Big Woods in 1932, 65-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series brought pioneer childhood in the America of the 1870s and 1880s to vivid life for 20th century kids in the throes of the Great Depression still way too familiar with rural struggle but also used to motorcars and radio. Like this no-frills green pencil from her father’s days working for the railroad, her works are fascinating artifacts that survived because they are beautiful and simple and useful.   -Jessica Letkemann

Sources

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Chicago & North Western Ry. Co. Timetable - 1883

Chicago & North Western Historical Society