Johan Thole, Dario Giorgi, Ross McKinney, Richard Binder and Bruce Scheiner
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Johan
Thole
My name is
Johan Thole. I´m from the Netherlands and I work as an IT consultant
for IBM Global Services. I am 32 years old, married and we have
two daughters. Both are still at the age where they can be considered
very dangerous for my pens :-)
My first
fountain pen was a Parker Vector my grandfather gave me in 1980.
It has served me everyday during school. When I got my first
job, as a network administrator at the University of Maastricht,
I decided to buy a "real pen". My choice was a Sheaffer Targa,
an excellent pen that I still use fairly often. My attraction
towards older pens began when I got the old school pen of my
mother, an Osmia 463. However, I don´t use this pen very often,
because the very flexible nib is a bit hard to handle for me,
as a left handed writer. The old pen of my grandfather (a Merlin
33) and the school pen of my father (a Geha Schulfüller) followed
and then I got hooked ...
I see myself
more as a fountain pen user than as a collector. I do have a
very small collection of about 30 fountain pens, most of them
from the 50´s and 60´s. All my pens are in some kind of rotation,
but my daily user is a Parker 51 with a medium nib. My collection
is slowly growing, with an Aurora 88 from the 50´s as the latest
addition, and expecting right now a Sheaffer Triumph with a
medium stub nib from Nathan Tardiff in my mailbox..
My other
interests are reading and music. I play clarinet and saxophone.
Both strictly at an amateur level. Until this year I was in
an orchestra, but because we moved to another place, I got another
job and we expected another child I only have a very limited
amount of time for music at the moment. However, I planned to
really start playing again next year. For the woodwind lovers,
my clarinet is a very beautiful Buffet RC and my saxophone is
a vintage Martin Indiana. They don´t make them like that anymore!
As I enjoy
reading and learning about pens I really love the Zoss list,
this site and the overwhelming amount of pen resources at the
Internet!
Dario
Giorgi
My first
vintage pen? A green-striated Radius superior! My personal vintage pen for everyday ? Tibaldi "transparent"
vacumatic from late 30s! In my opinion…..the best pen ever made? The Aurora 88!
It appears
to be clear that my main interest is for vintage pens…in particular,
I am interested in the pens produced by minor italian pen companies,
such as Radius, Omega, Saratoga, Pen.co etc. In 1937, my grandfather
bought a short Omega safety pen……nowadays, this is the pen I
generally use for correspondence with my pen friends.
Although
my father was always interested in fountain pens, I only became
a collector of vintage pens recently. My age? I am 32 years
old (November 26)….My work? "Unfortunately", I am a medical
doctor, specifically an ophthalmologist. Fortunately, I live
in Rome….a wonderful city……full of wonderful vintage fountain
pens! Fortunately…..still not married!
If you like
to know it… My father told me: "At this world, there are four
misfortunes for a man! First, to have a an English cook. Second,
to have a Japanese house. Third, to have an American wife…and
finally to have a Chinese salary. Conversely, there are five
best fortunes for a man on this world. First, to have a chinese
cook. Second, to have an english house. Third, to have a Japanese
wife. Fourth, to have an American salary. The fifth? To have
an OMAS!"
My web-site
is at: http://space.tin.it/clubnet/jkjgio/
Thepicture
shows from the top: Radius "superior" early 40s, Tibaldi "transparent"
late 30s, Aurora 88, solid 925 silver cap which is engraved
"Alfa Romeo" car company, made during 50s, finally my nice Omega
safety pen (1937).
Ross
McKinney
I was raised
in Kansas, where the topography is as flat as a piece of notebook
paper, and I grew up with pencils and Chief Tablets. My handwriting
was terrible, terrible, terrible - so bad my 4th grade teacher
threatened to flunk me ("How can I pass him when I can't even
read what he's writing?"). Eventually, I was allowed to give
up on cursive and move to printing. I used BICs and Cross pens
until medical school (in frozen Rochester, NY).
I bought
a Sheaffer Targa that weighted 27 pounds and wrote with the
sublety of a thermonuclear device. A friend saw it, said, "That's
a sorry excuse for a pen!" and gave me a Parker 51 as a gift.
I loved it. Until I dropped it. And replaced it with one of
those cheapish '70s Mont Blancs with a hood nib. Lasted me until
1998, when it cracked. I asked my wife for a fountain pen for
my birthday. She gave me a Parker Sonnet. I loved it. I loved
it so much, I said, "I should get another one!" So I did. A
Waterman L'Etalon. Man, was that a dog. Smooth as can be, heavy
as the aforementioned thermonuclear device, and totally numb.
So I traded it. Dave Penn gave me a Parker 51, a Parker Vacumatic,
a Vac tool, and a Vac diaphragm.
One installation
later, I was hooked. I started fixing pens and found that I
loved it. So I still do it. Lots of them. Some I buy on E-Bay,
some from friends, some from antique stores - wherever I can
find them. Then I fix'em up. My wife began to get anxious. "Ross,
dear, how are we going to have space to live if you keep accumulating
pens?" The simple solution was to move to a bigger house, so
we did. The long term solution was to start selling them - so
I do, at www.rosspens.com I love to write with flex nibs, think
Parker Vacumatics were the best pen line ever made, and collect
Moores because I love the plastic, think the best ones write
very well, and there isn't that much competition for them (well,
Rob Morrison and Charlie Harles...). I also like Chiltons (great
pens!) (but the prices...whoosh!) and '30s Watermans. My daughter
likes fountain pens & attends Carleton College in MN. My
son really like pens (even collects a bit), and is planning
to go to school up North. My wife is a church administrator.
My two dogs are lazy, and my cat....she provides fuzz that attaches
to all the sacs I install (sticks to the shellac). The photo
is a publicity shot from work - bearly passable...
Richard
Binder
Ross,
that's quite a tale. I grew up in the Rockies of Montana, son
of a college professor and a medical technician. To them, insofar
as I can remember, a pen was a thing to write with. Period.
But my mother's father, the well-known pictorial photographer
Paul L. Anderson (died 1956), knew what writing was all about.
He wrote his novels on his typewriter; but when he used a pen
(at least from the late '20s on), it was a red ripple Waterman's
No. 7 Ideal with a Blue nib. I now own that pen--it's the first
of the vintage pens on my web site. I nibbled around the edges
of fountain pens more than once over the years until I was finally
irretrievably sucked in, in 1998, by my son-in-law. Now, my web site says it all: seventeen pens and counting.
My handwriting,
like yours, was always pretty bad--and I'm not even a doctor;
I'm a computer geek. :-) By the mid-1980s it had deteriorated
from semi-legible script into an execrable scrawl. So I took
it upon myself to reinvent my style, the idea being that if
I had to concentrate on making different letter shapes, I'd
have to be careful enough to produce legible results. It worked,
mostly, as you can see from the title banner on my Web site.
(Can you guess that I'm trying to raise the hit count on my
site? Anybody out there read French? The site is 100% bilingual,
and I count hits on the French side, too...) Your experience
with a Parker 51 mirrors my own. I wondered what 51 collectors
saw in those streamlined things until my son-in-law (yes, him
again!) handed me his aerometric 51 and said, "Write with it."
Now I have a 51, a 1948 Vac-filler. But my favorite pen is my
Bexley 5th Anniversary. It was merely good until John Mottishaw
magicked the nib; now it's a dream.
Bruce
Scheiner
Thought it
about time to let everyone in on my life. I was born in 1950
in good old Brooklyn, NY. When I was about 11 I became fascinated
with those old plastic BIC retractable pens and accumulated
a whole box of them. Little did I know that this was foreshadowing,
and that the latency of this addiction would come to fruition
years later.
Originally
I graduated from Cooper Union with a Chem. Engineering degree,
but the thing I learned most about Ch.E. at Cooper is how much
I hated it, so I taught math and science in NYC schools until
the infamous 1975 layoffs, when I lost my job because I didn't
have tenure or a permanent license yet and therefore no seniority.
So what was the logical thing to do? Go to law school and become
a patent lawyer. I went at night, and actually got a teaching
position again so I worked while I studied. I graduated in 1980.
I was obsolete as a patent attorney, as I was out of engineering
for too long, so I got a job with a landlord-tenant law firm
and I'm still doing this almost 20 years later. It's a grueling
in-court practice, and I've been telling people for years that
you have to be a little crazy to do this kind of work or you
go completely insane (which my wife knows about; she's a psychologist).
But it beats sitting behind a desk doing paperwork.
Anyway, I've
been married to the same woman for over 25 years (I told you
I was crazy). Seriously, though, I think we're the only 2 people
who would put up with each other, and do it happily. She works
as a school psychologist in a school district in Suffolk County
on Long Island (we moved to Long Island in '82). 2 great kids,
a son 21 (senior at Rensselaer Poly. Inst.) and a daughter 17
(wants to study dance and "something else" in college starting
next year), who both make sure I don't have enough money left
over to buy pens. Oh, yeah, pens. Speaking of pens, I started
using a fountain pen (stainless steel Noblesse) in '77, to improve
my handwriting in law school (I'm lefthanded) and bought a few,
but didn't really get heavy into this until about 4 years ago.
Most of my collection (about 100 now) is modern but there's
a growing number of vintage as well.
Oh, yes,
I forgot to tell you, I work many days in a courthouse only
a stone's throw away from FPH, the Mecca of the pen collector.
I have gotten to know Steve, Terry, Harvey, Ed and the others
quite well, and recently had the pleasure of having my picture
taken by Harvey with their best customer, Bill Cosby. They blew
it up to an 8x10 and Cos signed it for me with a nice note.
My wife wants me to frame it. But I look horrible in it. If
I knew how to attach a picture to this bio....I still wouldn't
show it to you. That's how bad I look.
I hope this
site stays around awhile, and that in a few years we can all
update our bios with our experiences of the coming years.
I bought
a Sheaffer Targa that weighted 27 pounds and wrote with the
sublety of a thermonuclear device. A friend saw it, said, "That's
a sorry excuse for a pen!" and gave me a Parker 51 as a gift.
I loved it. Until I dropped it. And replaced it with one of
those cheapish '70s Mont Blancs with a hood nib. Lasted me until
1998, when it cracked. I asked my wife for a fountain pen for
my birthday. She gave me a Parker Sonnet. I loved it. I loved
it so much, I said, "I should get another one!" So I did. A
Waterman L'Etalon. Man, was that a dog. Smooth as can be, heavy
as the aforementioned thermonuclear device, and totally numb.
So I traded it. Dave Penn gave me a Parker 51, a Parker Vacumatic,
a Vac tool, and a Vac diaphragm.
One installation
later, I was hooked. I started fixing pens and found that I
loved it. So I still do it. Lots of them. Some I buy on E-Bay,
some from friends, some from antique stores - wherever I can
find them. Then I fix'em up. My wife began to get anxious. "Ross,
dear, how are we going to have space to live if you keep accumulating
pens?" The simple solution was to move to a bigger house, so
we did. The long term solution was to start selling them - so
I do, at 
Ross,
that's quite a tale. I grew up in the Rockies of Montana, son
of a college professor and a medical technician. To them, insofar
as I can remember, a pen was a thing to write with. Period.
But my mother's father, the well-known pictorial photographer
Paul L. Anderson (died 1956), knew what writing was all about.
He wrote his novels on his typewriter; but when he used a pen
(at least from the late '20s on), it was a red ripple Waterman's
No. 7 Ideal with a Blue nib. I now own that pen--it's the first
of the vintage pens on my web site. I nibbled around the edges
of fountain pens more than once over the years until I was finally
irretrievably sucked in, in 1998, by my son-in-law. Now,