Back When by Margaret Toal
One of the best parts of a new school year was the new school supplies. No school year in my memory had better school supplies than the year I started third grade at Jones Elementary School. (‘To George D. Jones we’ll ere be true, because of our great love for you.’ Our school song.)
Third grade was the year students learned cursive writing. During the early 1960s, that meant getting to use a cartridge pen rather than a pencil. Plus, the teachers required a unique Nifty brand notebook with a magnetic closing on the top. The concept was not to have any binder rings. That way, left-handed kids, like my best friend Mary Adele Horn, did not have to learn cursive while negotiating binder rings on the left side.
Parents had to buy special paper with two holes in the top for the notebook. Again, the paper was usually Nifty. And yes, kids at Jones sometimes used a Big Chief tablet, but mostly everything was Nifty. Nifty’s mascot was a drum major, side view, with a leg up beginning a march. He was wearing a large, fur-type hat and carried a baton with the big ball on the end. I assumed the drum major was a he, but in gender fairness, maybe it was a girl. However, growing up in Orange, the only girl drum majors I ever saw were wearing shorts or skirts.
I not only had a nifty Nifty sky-blue notebook, I also had a 64-count box of Crayola crayons. Back in those days, we didn’t use the word ‘crayon.’ Every brand was called ‘crayola.’ The company history says the 64-count, with built-in sharpener, was first released in 1958. I was not in ‘big’ school then and had to use the thick eight-count packs. In second grade, my mother got me a 48-count pack, which was introduced in 1948. I had begged for a 64-pack, but I guess she didn’t want to spoil me. I admit that through the years I have coveted many things, but I don’t think my jealousy was ever as strong as it was that year toward one of my girl classmates with the 64-pack. I will not name her, though I could, even more than a half-century later.
The Sheaffer cartridge pen was the ultimate instrument to make an 8-year-old feel like a grown-up. I was going to learn to write like a grown-up in cursive. Sometime in the past 30 to 40 years, schools stopped teaching cursive handwriting. I think it’s a big mistake. I’ve seen education studies saying handwriting helps young minds think in special ways. Recently, I read a story about how people who have not learned to write and read cursive writing will have a hard time studying historical documents, which were written in cursive. Think about the Declaration of Independence and all the letters our parents and grandparents wrote.
A Sheaffer Pen Company history says the cartridge pen was first sold in 1955. It was a break-through in technology. Instead of having to fill up fountain pens from bottles of ink, a little round plastic cartridge of ink was slipped into the main plastic part of the pen. The nib would screw into the main part and a little metal tube punctured the cartridge. Writers using the pen could get the effects of a fountain pen without the mess. The fountain-cartridge pens wrote a classier script than ball-point pens.
The original Sheaffer cartridge pen cost $2.95. On the inflation scale, that would be $26.27 today. The company developed a student cartridge pen that was a bit smaller for younger hands. It was released in 1960 for $1, or $8 today. It came with five cartridges included.
In those days, we didn’t know who our teacher would be until our mother (usually) walked us up to the room door. In those days of Baby Boomer kids, the hallways were packed with kids and adults looking at the poster-board lists on each door. Names of the students in each classroom were written in alphabetical order. Among my friends in the third grade, everyone wanted to get Miss (Gail) Terry. Her first year of teaching out of college had been my second grade year and she seemed like the coolest teacher at Jones. After all, she drove a T-bird. And by the way, all those elementary teachers that I thought were ‘old’ were in their 30s.
So there I am in a new dress and new shoes with my sky-blue Nifty notebook, Sheaffer cartridge pen and 64-pack of Crayolas. I look at the chart and I am in Miss Terry’s class. Sometimes life reaches perfect moments. The first day of third grade was one of those.
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