1920 Time Magazine

In Manhattan, while Frank D. Waterman, nephew of L. E. Waterman, famed fountain pen maker, was being congratulated on having received the Republican nomination for Mayor, an old man sat in a vacant office on Madison Ave. staring at a fountain pen of antique design. He, Warren N. Lancaster, onetime business rival of the famed Waterman, told reporters how luck had undone him:

"That was a buster, that pen. I called it the Idea, after a horse I owned. Eugene Leigh, who brought that French horse over last year, trained him for me. . . When I had a place at No. 212 Broadway I sent President Garfield a pen like that. L. E. Waterman had a place a few doors down the street. I used to get my rubber from H. P. & E. Day up at Seymour, Conn. No one could make gutta percha like they could, on a big marble table, you know. Well, one time Mr. Day said he couldn't sell me any more rubber casings. Said he'd made a contract with Waterman. I put all my machinery on a boat and sailed it down to Baltimore. . . I advertised on P. T. Barnum's first circus program. . . When they put up the Flatiron building, they flashed 'The Lancaster Pen' against it with a stereopticon machine. Once I printed a Sunday paper to give away. . . My wife and I traveled all over; I introduced her to Mrs. Potter Palmer out in Chicago . . . It all goes back to the Baltimore fire." . . Old Mr. Lancaster pointed to a woodcut on a time-stained circular, which showed a Tennysonian gentleman with bushy brown whiskers, gold pince nez. "I looked like that once," said he. "It was always a fight. . ."

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