Write On

      More Letters From Paradise
              Write On
I learned recently that cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in the elementary  grades of school. How very sad. Good penmanship was required. Examples showing students the proper way to form letters was always placed above the blackboard. Students would first use pencils, and later steel pointed pens dipped in ink wells.The story was always told that some boys would dip the braids of girls in ink wells, seated in  front of them in the long rows. I doubt this. Imagine a girl returning home with an ink braid. Justice would have been quickly served upon the boy who had done it.

Thinking about writing with pens brings to mind a fact that most right-handed people would not know. You all may have seen a left-handed person writing with his hand bent like a claw. He is not a cripple. He is simply avoiding getting ink on the bottom of his hand. If you write with your right hand, the ink flows behind your pen when you write. A person writing with his left hand simply plows into what he is writing. Hence the bent wrist and the awkward position. My father began writing with his left hand until he was beaten with rulers until he was made to change to using his right hand, just like everybody else. He said that it would not happen to me, and it didn't. And come to think of it,I never had a single teacher in any of the many grade schools I attended, who was left-handed.

Not much progress had been made with writing materials beyond the steel tipped pens. But it was an improvement over the knife-sharpened goose quill pens that were in use before. And it made many geese much happier.  

Then came the fountain pen, a pen with a bladder inside holding ink. The pen would be dipped into a bottle of ink, and a lever on the side of the pen would crow the ink from the bottle up into the pen. Ink came in many different colors. My grandpa Joe wrote his letters with green ink. I never knew anybody else who did so. All was well until people began riding on airplanes with fountain pens. The air pressure inside the plane's cabin caused the bladder of fountain pens to deposit ink in your purse or in your shirt pocket. These pens were followed with pens that used a plastic ink-filled cartridges.    The final, and so far the best       development is a pen which uses a roller ball to deposit ink on paper. The use of fountain pens faded away as people embraced ball-point pens. Though expensive, fountain pens  are still to be found. Here in Hawaii some craftsmen make ball-point pens out of our Koa wood, and they are beautiful.

I feel I have to mention here that during the race to  space with the Russians, the U.S. spent a great deal of money to come up with a pen that would write in space. The Russians used a pencil.

      Aloha
      Grant