DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

On the day of the Iowa caucuses, an announcement was made in Iowa that naturally got little attention, which may have been why it was scheduled for that date.

The Bic Pen company announced that by the end of March it would shut down one of its holdings, the Sheaffer Pen company in Fort Madison, Iowa. Sheaffer manufacturing will be moved to Asia and all other operations to Slovenia, where Sheaffer ink is already made. (Among those other operations is quality control, meaning that quality control of manufacturing will have to be maintained from a distance of a few thousand miles from the plant).

To a baby boomer, there are terms that are likely to summon up memories. See what these do for you: Stripe toothpaste, the Sabin oral vaccine, Toni home permanent kits. "Which twin has the Toni?" was the advertising slogan for this last product and one of the sets of Toni twins - Jeanne and Eleanor Fulstone - came from Smith Valley, Nevada. Boomer culture is responsible for more than just the invention of the sentence, "If your food explodes, clean it up."

Anyway, Sheaffer Pen is one of those terms. Ball point pens had been around for a while without ever taking off, and it was in our childhood that they came on strong and the transition was made away from fountain pens. I suspect that at this point it might be well to explain what a fountain pen is in case there are any readers who were born, say, after 1965. I've noticed that it's necessary to explain carbon paper to those who grew up in the photocopy era.

Ball point pens use a fairly thick paste-like ink while felt tip pens use wadding that is soaked in ink. Fountain pens used ink with the consistency of water, stored in a tank or bladder inside the pen. A lever on the side of the pen made it possible to create a vacuum in the bladder so that when the pen point was dipped into a bottle of ink it would draw ink up into the storage compartment. I never got the knack of doing that, so it was fortunate that Sheaffer sometime during my childhood introduced ink cartridges. We learned how to refill those cartridges using a hypodermic needle.

Writing with a fountain pen was, compared with ball points and other later choices, like figure skating compared to clog dancing. For one thing, a writer did not need to press the pen into the paper. In fact, it was not necessary for the pen to even TOUCH the paper. The pen could glide across the paper laying down a path of ink without actually coming in contact with the surface of the paper.

Unfortunately, many people never learned this and for real aficionados of fountain pens, loaning their instrument to someone else was always a nerve wracking experience. As often as not it came back with the point pressed back at an odd angle or with the fins separated.

There were expensive fountain pens made by companies like Waterman, but for most people they were not an option. The principal choice was Sheaffer. This was a problem because Sheaffers leaked, which probably sped the transition to ball points. Perhaps those more expensive pens didn't leak, but Sheaffers did, and a writer had to live with it and with a stain on the left side of the middle finger next to the fingernail. It was worth it.

I loved fountain pens and stuck with them long after other alternatives came on the market. The leaking problem finally got to me and I dropped fountain pens for perhaps a decade. Then in about 1994 or '95 a friend gave me a Pilot Varsity. It was incredible. It was disposable, meant to be used until empty and then thrown away. But most important, it doesn't leak. I switched back to fountain pens.

About a year ago I was in a University of Nevada bookstore and spotted a Sheaffer. Figuring that if the technology had advanced enough for Pilot to make a leakproof fountain pen, then Sheaffer would have done the same, I bought one. It leaked. I mean, it really leaked, worse than ever.

There are online sites for fountain pen lovers, and one person posted a message saying that she always carries a ball point for "when someone asks to borrow a pen and I don't want to give up one of my fountain pens." In the interest of my pen point, I started doing that.

A few days ago I was at a counter paying for some photo processing. As I wrote a check, the clerk watched my Varsity move and said, "That's really a beautiful pen." I gave it to him. They cost only three dollars and maybe I made a convert to gracious living.