Neatness Counted
In the 1980s, when my son's teachers said that children needed home computers to do well in school, I laughed. I remembered my parents getting a typewriter in the 1950s, after a teacher told them that students like my next-older sister needed one to succeed in high school. Before that, they had been told that students like her older sister (who already was at the top of her high school class) needed a good fountain pen to do well.
We could buy these pens in school, with six ink cartridges, for about $1.39.
fountainpennetwork.com
In the 1950s, did your Mom or Dad spend 6 bucks apiece on ballpoint pens for you?
parkerpens.net
A Smith-Corona like my sister's; the color was called "Desert Sand."
magazinesandbooks.com
In Junior High, our text books had to be covered; for some reason, the bright shiny covers with the college names and colors were popular. Decent ballpoint pens were hard to find. The early cheap click ballpoints skipped, smeared, and stopped writing with plenty of ink remaining - unless they fell apart first. The ones with clips marked USA were rumored to originate in Usa, supposedly an obscure place in Japan. Not true. They were junk, but they were American-made junk. Fortunately, Paper-Mates and Parker Jotters came along.
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