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| Wearever
Pennant c1950-1962
Next to the Supreme, the Pennant is probably the most common Wearever you will find in the field. The Pennant is the consummate "dollar pen", sold from about 1950 through the early 1960s. The Pennant is cheap and nearly indestructible and Wearever sold them by the bucket full. Pennants would be seen typically on card racks and countertop carousels at drug stores and dime stores along with other Wearever products. In advertising, the Pennant got the lion's share in the 1950s. The Pen That Panicked The Public!
Wearever relished the low price market, with its Pennant ads shouting "World's Largest Fountain Pen Manufacturer" and "Why Pay More?". This is the "Pen That Panicked the Public!" My favorite! Imagine the public pandemonium and mad rushes to stores to scarf up Pennants that must have happened in the early 1950s. The panic must have subsided eventually, as Wearever advertising settled down on value points as the decade rolled on. Though some later advertisements did show crowds of people buying the pens.
Early on, the Pennant was largely presented as the value leader at a dollar a pen. Advertisements asked the reader to compare the Pennant to pens costing US $5.00, which would have been the bottom end of the Sheaffer Snorkel line. A heady comparison. The Pennant was also pushed as a school pen, as with many other Wearever pen lines. Advertisements warned, "Don't buy any school pen!"
Pennants came in all the typical early 1950s colors: black, red, burgundy, blue, dark blue, green, and brown. Later in the decade classic 1950s pastel colors and solid marbled plastics start to appear. The metal cap is actually a sleeve over a body colored plastic cap, with the lip and top showing to match the body color. Pennants came in chrome, gold toned, or plastic caps, though the chrome or aluminum caps seem to be the most common. Clips had several patterns, and came in gold or chrome.
Wearever was also an early entry in the 1950s ballpoint race with the PresClik ball pen. The PresClik was introduced probably as early as 1953 for US 98 cents, and was often matched with the Pennant in advertising. The PresClik visually was very similar to the Pennant, so a matched set was possible for about US $2.00, less than the price of a single pen from the leading brands.
The Pennant finished its run in the early 1960s as a $1.95 pen, and these later models have a lighter and cheaper (if you can imagine this) feel to them than the earlier, heavier pens of the early 1950s. Wearever eventually dropped out of the pen business, focusing more on home products. Funky Pennant Features
One doesn't look for features on cheap pens, but Wearever put them on the Pennant. One interesting feature of the Pennant is the "C-Flow" feed. This is a clear plastic feed that allowed the user to "see the flow" of ink, so it would be obvious when to refill the pen. When the feed started looking light on ink, it was time to refill the pen. This is an interesting twist on the visulated sections that started appearing on pens in the 1930s, to guide the user on the amount of ink left. Visulated sections and barrels were on the way out by the end of the 1940s, so the Pennant was an interesting throwback, with a twist. Wearever introduced the C-Flow clear plastic feeds on the earlier Pacemaker and Zenith pens in the 1940s.
Another feature that has an anachronistic twist to it is the "overfeed" on the nib. The Pennant nib has a bar mounted on top from the section nearly to the tip, like an overfeed on an early eyedropper pen. This bar was supposed to keep the nib from drying out when the pen was left uncapped, but in personal use, it seems to make no difference. It does make the nib a bit stiff, perhaps reinforcing it, but since stiff was "in" in the 1950s, this would not have been an issue to pen buyers. The overfeed can be stainless or gold plated. Some will have "WEAREVER" stamped down the length. A Personal Point For Your Pennant An interesting selling feature of the Pennant was the "Personal Point". This allowed the purchaser to buy any point they wanted for the pen at the place of purchase, or possibly later, after the sale. Don't get the idea that this system worked like the Wahl Eversharp Personal Point system or the later Esterbrook system, where the nib unit simply unscrewed from the pen.
What's unique about Wearever's approach is, unlike almost every other manufacturer who tried this, including Esterbrook, a contemporary competitor in the 1950s, the Wearever system included not just the nib, but the entire section with the ink sac attached. These "Personal Points" came in long boxes, nearly as long as the pen itself. The change was made by unscrewing the cap, pulling out the friction fit section, sac and all, and pushing in the new "Personal Point" unit.
As opposed to Esterbrook's huge inventory of nib choices, the Wearever system consisted of just five: extra fine, steno, flexible fine, medium, and broad. Everything any pen user could want! It is of note that the selection included a flexible nib up to the early 1960s. And Flexible!
Although flexible nibs were on the wane by the 1950s, many pen manufacturers still offered some flexible choices to their customers. Sheaffer offered six flexible Triumph nibs out of a total of sixteen choices on the 1952-1959 Snorkel pen and ten flexible or semi-flexible choices on the Tip-Dip Touchdown pens. In 1960, Wearever offered five different point choices, Extra Fine, Flexible Fine (or Flexifine), Medium, Broad, and Steno on the US $1.00 Pennant line, though the flexible was more of a semi-flex or soft touch nib in practice. All This And Cartridges, Too! The Pennant cartridge pen was introduced in the mid 1950s as a model alongside the lever-fill pen. Interestingly, the Wearever cartridge is somewhat more elaborate than competing models. Sheaffer's cartridge probably is the epitome of simplicity, a simple cylinder that can be inserted either way and is punctured by the action of reassembling the pen. Wearever, likely to avoid patent infringement problems, designed a cartridge with a bulb and metal sleeve on one end and a dimple on the other. The cartridge is marked with instructions to insert the sleeve end into the barrel and reassemble the pen to puncture the dimpled end, a concept similar enough to Sheaffer's without using the exact same design.
The cartridge pens came in all the brighter late 1950s colors and also featured the C-Flow feed. The nibs on all the cartridge pens I've seen omit the "overfeed" seen on other Pennants, possibly both as it really doesn't do anything, but more likely because this was an opportunity to cut out expenses on a cheaper design. Performance Pennants are very common pens that turn up everywhere, in antique stores, eBay, estate sales and pen shows. The Pennant is a very durable pen that is often found in working order and if not, are very easy to resac and put into use. The worst thing about the Pennant is the metal cap is very easily scratched - a common defect. These pens weren't treated as heirlooms, and this often shows on pens found in the wild.
The pen featured in this article is a typical Pennant, fitted with a medium nib. The Pennant is fairly large, about 5 1/2 inches long capped and 6 5/16 inches posted. It's on the light side, but considerably heavier than its sister pen the Supreme, and feels substantial enough. It's actually a fairly well balanced pen, posted or not. Pennants are much better made for a pen three times the price of the Supreme, and for a pen that sold for only a dollar. There is more detailing, such as a faux cap band, coin edge on the cap lip, the plastic is much better quality, the plating is much better, and it is manufacturing finished more. The plastic on this pen is actually a tad iridescent. Pretty cool. The pen is imprinted on the barrel with the Wearever and Pennant names, as in the earlier Pacemaker and Zenith pens. Fit and finish are on par with those pens.
The Pennant has a number of design similarities with the earlier Wearever Pacemaker and Zenith lines. The cap and clip show the family resemblance, with the Pennant being a little less Parker like. The clip has a little give, so the pen will be fairly easy to pocket with most materials and it will stay put. Because of the cap top mounting of the clip, the pen will sit low in the pocket, as with the Pacemaker. A few quick pumps of the lever and the Pennant is ready to write. I tried several Pennants, with extra-fine, Flexifine, and medium nibs. On most of the pens the nib is as stiff as one would expect from a 1950s pen, but actually quite smooth. All were good, but not great writers, laying down a respectably wet line with no variation. A good, utilitarian writer, as expected from a cheap, mass produced pen.
The Flexifine nib was interesting, and a bit of a disappointment. I managed to get my hands on two of these. One was on a pen loaned by Christopher Tate, and was the first one I had used. Surprisingly, the tines don't really split very much, as a flexible nib should. Perhaps this is a function of the overfeed, but I would have to do surgery to find out why. The nib seemed to have "give" more than flex. The second sample Flexifine came with a pen that was part of a "bag o' pens" I bought, and wrote exactly the same, confirming my earlier findings. I actually had a medium nibbed pen that wrote more like a true flexible than either of the Flexifine nibs. A Pennant is not going to be an expressive writer, but a good everyday pen for the budget minded. Exactly as advertised. The nib, because of the "overfeed", is difficult to clean, so expect the nib to always be a little inky on top. I would be interested in also trying out the flexible fine nib to see how it test drives. Pennants are ubiquitous. They turn up everywhere vintage pens are found. My guess is that there was an alien conspiracy that forced all Americans to buy at least one Pennant, and even if it wasn't used, they wound up in desk drawers or like change, in the bottom of sofas. Should you collect Pennants? They aren't bad pens, but don't get into a panic! A few in cool 1950s colors can make a neat cheapie corner to your collection. Maybe I watched a few too many 1950s SciFi movies before finishing this article... Don't panic! Get a Pennant! Acknowledgement Thanks to Christopher Tate for loaning the Pennant with the Flexifine nib. Comments on this article may be sent
to the author, Jim Mamoulides |
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PenHero.com - All Rights Reserved Use of photographs, scans and illustrations is not granted without prior written permission. This includes internet auctions. Contact Jim Mamoulides Last Update 7/24/04 |
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