Sitting patiently in a cream-colored plastic bin were five bundles of pencils held together with tape. I tried not to be too greedy and only took three. Each bundle had one stand-out pencil that grabbed my eye: a checkered Purina Chows, a cow-spotted Tri-State Breeders, and a pink and green print that says, "MILK: It does a body good."
Fennimore Roller Mills
Fennimore, Wis. Phone 822-6214
Baraboo 608-356-8357 & Westby, WI 608-634-3111
It does a body good
Looking through these pencils, I try to imagine the Collector in my head. A farmer, for sure. A God-fearing Christian, a substance abuser, whose partner hosted Stanley Home Goods and Tupperware parties. I figured the best way to begin painting a clearer picture of the Collector was to map out where all the pencils were from. Since I got these pencils in the The Driftless Area, it only made sense that most of these pencils were from there, as well. I plugged every pencil with a location onto this map:
Knowing the general location of our Collector makes me envision a classic, corn-fed, upper-midwestern 70-something-year-old, probably wearing a plaid button-up and jeans held up with suspenders - someone you would find at the Piggly Wiggly. I wasn't satisfied with knowing the location alone, so I went on to separate the used pencils from the unused pencils, and this is what I was left with:
I then separated them into three categories: Minimal Use, Normal Use, Heavy Use. These groupings look like this:
One thing that's interesting, and maybe you've noticed this from the image, is that the pencils in the "heavy use" category are all round - not hexagonal. According to Honeyoung, the "World's Top Pencil Manufacturer and Supplier", round pencils are the most basic form of pencil. Comfortable, reliable, and can accommodate all pencil gripping positions. Hexagonal pencils, however, are best suited to the structure of the human hand. What made our Collector reach for the round pencils more than the others? Did they hold their pencil in a way that the edges of a hexagon would have dug into the sides of their fingers? Did they have gigantic, beat-up farmer hands? Maybe a round pencil is what is most familiar.
After this finding, I collected the pencils, mixed them up a bit, then separated the round pencils from the hexagonal pencils - about 60/40, so that doesn't tell me much.
A fun note I'll add is that in the grouping of unused pencils, two had slightly worn erasers. And what do you know, the erasers belonged to round pencils.
Back to the point before I got into the shapes of things: Let's dive into the "heavy use" category of pencils to see if we can find any key information about our Collector.
The most important thing to note here is that the four shortest pencils (or the pencils that seem to have the most wear) seem to be the oldest of the bunch, or maybe they seem old because they were the dirtiest. Here's what I could find about each pencil:
Savings & Loan Assn.
708 No. Madison St P.O. Box 488
Lancaster, Wis 53813
"Where you save does make a difference."
Prairie Federal Savings and Loans was absorbed by Anchor Savings in 1983 and is no longer. The first mention I could find was in Volume 70 of the Bloomington Record, published in 1950.
Bruce R. Young
140 Virginia St., NE. Phone: 6-7831
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Bruce R. Young was born in 1905, and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1972. He had been in business in Albuquerque for 30 years, according to the Albuquerque Journal, so the pencil dates somewhere between 1942-1972. The address on the pencil was the address of his home, which makes me suspect that he was a door-to-door auto-parts salesman. There's something to be said here about the eraser being worn to the metal...
Distributors of Celotex Building Products
907 Main St. Rockford, IL
2-3711
The company was founded in 1911 by Edward D Mott. An interesting anecdote is that Edward attended the University of Arizona - just next door to New Mexico. I wonder if he had ever crossed paths with our Bruce R. Young.
The pencil that begs more questions is the Newport High School pencil. There were no Newport High Schools in Wisconsin or Illinois. The only mentions I could find in Wisconsin and Illinois newspapers were Newport High Schools in Virginia, Vermont, California, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania. There is a Newport, WI, but whether or not they had a high school is unknown to me. Which is a shame, because Newport would have fit perfectly on our little map (yellow):
I have to wonder if any of these four pencils held any significance to our Collector (well, the Newport High School pencil probably did!). Were those the only pencils they used because they were the only pencils they needed? Did they feel precious about the pencils they collected on road trips, vacations, or their visit to the rehabilitation center? There are some pencils that snapped and were never re-sharpened, waiting in a bin for the rest of Collector's life for another shot, just to be donated and adopted by some guy who loves to write about old shit.