Popeye Fountain Pen

This week’s restoration is a fun one. It reminds me of when I was a young boy and I watched Channel 3 out of Syracuse, NY on a black and white TV set after school. The show I watched was Popeye, a popular comic strip, developed into a television cartoon, and even a movie starring Robin Williams.  Here is a photo of Popeye, with his spinach enhanced forearms, and his best girl – Olive Oyl.

Below is the Popeye themed pen, after I took it apart.  You can see that it is a standard lever filler, with normal brassing and ink stains.

I rightfully assumed that the gold furniture was plated, so I took care not to apply any abrasives to the lever, clip, nib, or decorative cap ring.  I cleaned out the inside of the cap which was caked with old blue ink.  I then dropped the cap and nib into an ultrasonic cleaner to gently clean off any dirt and ink from the gold plating.  It did the trick and as you can see, most of the pen cleaned up well.  The barrel and cap are plastic and I was able to thoroughly polish them and apply some carnuba wax to the finished product.  I scraped the section end, removing all of the old sac and cleaned the channels of the feed with and x-acto knife.  I then reinserted the newly cleaned nib and feed back into the section and affixed a size 16 sac with sac cement.  I let it stand sit overnight and then reinserted the nib/feed/section assembly back into the barrel.

You can see the finished pen below, measuring 4 13/16 inches closed and 5 13/16 inches posted.

This pen reminds me of the Pepsi Pen that I restored and wrote about in my post of September 7, 2009.  Both were advertisement pens, promoting albeit different products.

This is definitely one of my favorite clips…

In my post if the Pepsi Fountain Pen, I speculated that it was an Eagle Pen Company product.  The EPENCO nib on this pen confirms that they in fact had their hand in the production of this pen.  Eagle (New York City based) was known for producing colorful pens in the 1930s – some of you may have seen the Stars and Moons pens that they produced during the same time period.  They are not high quality vintage pens at all and were definitely aimed at the lower end of the market – in this case the novelty market.

The cap ring has the following three inserts ~ the first being Popeye himself with his signature pipe, the second being a chipped version of him with his sailor cap off, and the third is the King Features Syndicate logo with the 1935 identifier. As a pen collector, it is always nice to have this date for reference.  Popeye first appeared as a stand alone King Features Comic Strip in 1929, so this pen was produced during a high point of the comic’s popularity in the 1930s.

In the course of investigating Popeye Pens, I found that there was another version of a Popeye Pen, probably produced by the Arnold Pen Company (Petersburg, VA), around the same time period.  Just what I need, another pen to search for…..and I probably should start looking for some spinach colored ink while I am at it.

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