School Days...

In late August when I was in School, was the time for much excitement.  School was a few weeks away from starting, and it was time to start stockpiling school supplies.  We were a Navy Family, and did not have much money, but we always found enough for the school supplies we needed.  

Mom and Phyllis and I would head to the dime store, where there was table after table of brand new school supplies.  I was in heaven!  I Loved that section of the store.  All the new pencils, and paper, and notebooks!  I drooled over the pencil boxes, and the bottles of ink.  All different colors of ink! They had blue, and black and peacock green!! In BOTTLES!!  I was so excited.  

No glue sticks back then, we had pots of rubber cement!  And then later when I was older, they had Elmer’s glue!!  We also had bottles of mucilage, with a red rubber top on it, with a slit on the top, so when you pressed down, the glue would come out, and you did not lose the lid!  WOW.  And PASTE!!!  White paste, that tasted good!! (ok, you guys may have sniffed glue, I ate paste!)

Three holed paper with wide lines on it was fairly new then, and it was really cool!  You could put it in your 3 ring notebook, and would not tear it taking it off the tablet, like we used to.  The notebooks were called binders, and some came with zippers around them to hold in your pens and pencils and loose papers.

We did not have backpacks back then.  At least not the kind kids take to school.  NO, we had to carry all of our supplies around with us.  We had lockers that we would run to between classes, and grab the books that we needed for the next class.  (After we were in 7th grade that is, until then we all sat in the same desk, in the same class room, all year.  All our supplies were kept in our desks!)

Our pencil boxes were really only glorified cigar boxes, but we had to have a new one every year.  no plastic fancy ones like now days, these were balsa wood with a top that was attached on one side.  Usually they had some kind of school theme on them. All the same.  We had little tiny hand held pencil sharpeners for emergency use during a test, but usually we used the one on the wall in the back of the class.

We had ball point pens, but they were expensive.  Parker T-Ball Jotter was the first one I can remember that I had, it was a blue green bottom with a silver top, and you pushed a button on the top to get the point down.  COOL MAN!!  When we got in to Junior High, we were required to have a fountain pen.  And a bottle of Scripts ink.  (yes, kids, and that is what the hole in the edge of the desk was for )  

My first fountain pen was an Eberhardt pen.  It had a silver nib, and a little lever on the side, that you would pull down when you needed to fill the bladder of the pen with more ink.  The ink bottle had a little well on the side, and you would tip the bottle over to fill the well, then take the top off, and stick the nib of your pin into the well with the lever down, and then slowly let the lever come back up to draw the ink into the pen.  The real trick was to fill your pen and finish your paper without getting ink all over your middle finger.  I used peacock blue ink.  I liked it, and it matched my pen!  I had that pen for years, I don’t know what happened to it, Phyllis probably broke it, she was a bratty little sister! ;)

I am still enchanted with office supplies!  I love back to school sales, with all of their neat new pens and pencils and notebooks, and gadgets!  Office Max is my favorite store!  A whole aisle full of just pens and pencils!!  WOW!!  Times have gotten so much better now, back packs, and glue sticks, and post it notes (Oh don’t get me started on THOSE!!!) (  and colored paper, and binder clips and colored paper clips and rulers, and protractors, and templates of all kinds.  OH I am quivering right now.  

My favorite pencil at the moment is the papermate mechanical pencil with a big huge eraser in it, that you can roll up when it gets worn down!!  And you just click the button on the side to get the lead down.  It is really cool!!  I have about ten of them in various places around the house.  

My favorite pen is the Pentel RSVP ball point pen, in all different colors.  It is not a gel pen, but it writes like one.  (Gels are really my favorites!!)  and my favorite sticky notes are the post it flags that pop up so you can mark a page!  I like the Cambridge Legal pad in white please, with a spiral top edge.  You can rip the paper off clean.  SEE, already I am frothing at the mouth to get into a store and window shop!  Must be getting close to School time.  I must need SOMETHING…