Fountain Pen

We used only a pencil in the first few years of school.  I think it was 3rd grade that we started using a pen. A fountain pen.
 It was a love hate relationship.  I had my fountain pen for a long time till I left  it on a bus on my way home from school. 

My pen looked like this only a maroon color.

Many things could go wrong with your pen. The split could widen and you had a blotch on your paper. A pen could leak from just about anywhere and destroy books and anything else in a book bag.

But what was worse...was when your ink bottle leaked.

I am pretty sure I have used this exact ink. I kept my bottle inside it's box as more protection if any spilled out.  Filling up your pen was a little dangerous. You could splatter and get the ink on the back of the uniform of the person in front of you. Or on yourself and then have to listen to your mother as she tries to scrub it out of whatever you got it on.

It was not unusual to hand in a paper with some blotches of ink on it.  And just about always some ink on your hands.

If you forgot to tell your mother you are low on ink, you had to beg someone in class to let you use theirs. 

In old cartoons and movies you see a boy, sitting behind a girl,  dipping the girls hair braid into an ink bottle. That never happened in my school. A nun would have slapped him silly if he did that.

Eventually, Ball point pens became more common and we were allowed to use them in school. We were so happy, but that did not last long.

Early ballpoint pens were horrible! 

They did not write with a smooth line of ink, sometimes. 

It might skip, it might not write at all. It might only use up half the ink in them and stop. You always had to have a few pens on you.

Here is the pen.

Some times the pen would only write on parts of the paper which made you wonder why the heck it would not write on certain areas.

They look like some of today's pens, but they are NOT.  They improved with time, thankgoodness.