A long time ago, in a lifetime far away, Cheryl bought me a Michelangelo pen produced by the Acme pen company as a birthday present. I really liked the pen as a writing instrument and she later bought me a NASA designed pen, also produced by Acme. A few years later, she got me an Elvis pen with a neat design.
Those three pens, located on the left side of the picture, started a nice little collection-as they had quite a bit meaning for me. Prior to the Beatles, Elvis was the big thing. His last appearance on the Ed Sullivan show happened a few months after I was born in 1957. I remember watching Elvis movies on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. The NASA pen represents my extreme fondness for all things NASA, space and astronomy and the Michelangelo pen represents my love of learning so Cheryl started out very strongly with these three choices.
Little did she (or I) know what an obsession that would eventually create!!! Across from the Nuveen office in downtown Chicago is an office supply store, Atlas Stationers, still there after all these years and they started carrying Acme Beatles pens. I don't remember which pen, but despite the high price of $60 for a pen of all things, I bought one. Now, over 20 years later, I have collected all of the Beatles pens, although I don't think I had a conscious plan of doing that until maybe 8 or 10 years ago and quite frankly I didn't really think it would happen as a number of them are quite rare as I had never seen several of them for sale. I wish I had thought of getting the full collection earlier while they were still being produced as it would have been a lot cheaper to buy back then!!!
The Beatles have an important historical connection for me as my first solid memory of both a time and a place was when the family gathered in my grandpa Sam's living room on 55th and Ashland Ave, on February 9th, 1964 to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, with my mom and dad there, my baby sis, Julie, my grandfather and my Aunt Bunny and Uncle Jerry. I was 7 years old. I remember John F. Kennedy's death and funeral a year earlier but can't put any place to where I was when I first heard the news. I also remember seeing many rocket launches on grainy black and white TVs when I was very young, with the missiles often blowing up, but can't remember any specific place or time for those either.
So, I have always had a Beatles connection although it wax'ed and waned over the years. The Acme pen collection contains 26 pens, 8 of them representing the years that the Beatles were a band from 1962-1969 (the 9th, 1970 pen I have to describe in a moment as it does not exist to my knowledge), 13 pens representing the 13 UK albums, a British Invasion pen and the 4 individual pens, one for each Beatle, sold as a group, shown in the upper left hand corner of the shot. The 1970 pen, designed by Acme, was never produced to my knowledge as Yoko didn't like the design. The artist developed it with a theme of the final year for the band but the pictures on the stem was sort of like what you would see at funerals for the deceased, with a picture of a person in an oval window. Too close to reality for her. So, that pen doesn't exist, as far as I know.
Anyway, that is my story and obsession although it also extends to books about the Beatles, of which I have an embarrassing number as well. Now, I can stop collecting things as having exhausted the opportunity---although my son-in-law unhelpfully mentioned a $3,500 Mon Blanc Beatles pen this past weekend but there is no way I am going to pay that much for a pen, I don't care how rare it is and since I have it here in writing, it must be true.
Thanks for reading and remember, the love you make is equal to the love you take so rock on!!!
