Welcome to- The Fountain Pen Community!

MountBlanc
Disaster averted, though honesty.

I had been a member of the Mont Blanc club, for the last ten years with out knowing it. I am an American living in Germany.

Some fifteen years ago, the uncle of my wife died. He sold insurance for DEVK, a large German company, and was a district leader, a small big shot. Five years later his wife died. We cleaned out the house, selling what we could, giving other stuff away.

This inherited ball point pen sat in my drawer for some ten years after the Aunt died. It was a good ball point pen (nothing more IMO), that one day I was going to get a Parker type cartridge for.

Years went by, having so many cheap ball points, that I never had to buy that cartridge.

It was just a good ball point pen, nothing special. Actually, I had more interest in finding a Parker roller ball cartridge (that way back then were hard to find in the normal German corner shop that sold school pens), than worrying about that black and  a bit more than an inch of very fine striped metal worked  front cap. I had tried a Parker style cartridge in it and it had not quite workI think. It after all sat in the drawer for a decade, never remembering to take it with me to a pure brick and mortar shop fountain pen shop.

 I was young and ignorant. In fact I was rather ignorant up to a couple of months ago, when I started collecting the pens,  that were to go to the flea market.

 In my apartment building there is a crippled young man in a wheel chair, who is finally trying to do something with his life, by going to school. Hes on welfare, and didnt have any money. Every once in a while we help him out with a couple of eggs or a bit of rice and a can of tomatoes, at the end of the month.

I had two, twenty year old Parker black roller ball pens. Saturday night, I gave him one. Seeing I now had fountain pens, I had no use for two of them.

Instead of standing up, and walking into the living room, where I have an old pretty wooden topped, treadle sewing machine case that I gutted and turned into a living room bar, and pulling out a drawer and getting out a couple of ordinary nice metal pens; I reached into my drawer and gave him a pen.; telling him it was a good one. All it needed was a cartridge.

 Monday night, he shows up at the door, and says, I gave him the wrong pen. I gave him a Mont Blanc.

Shake of the headof course not. I didnt even have a Mont Blanc. He told me that the folks at the Brick and Mortar told him it was a Mont Blanc.

Eyes like an unhooded falcon, I saw that funny star on the top of the black and metal pen, that I gave him.

 OK, so Im an Indian giver.

I gave him a very nice cartridge pen, that my wife got two weeks before, for buying an expensive piece of jewellery, two normal solid nice looking metal pens and two that are a tad flippy, and the five Euro the Mont Blanc cartridge cost.

The Mont Blanc cartridge has a different top, smooth and larger than the normal Parker style cartridge. So it was no wonder, the pen had not eaten the Parker cartridge I had tried in it.

 Lightly polished, and waxed, it no longer looks like a ball point pen one would casually give away.

I am so glad that honesty is not dead. Some times when you cast your bread on the water, you get a Mont Blanc returned.

 I would like help in identifying it.

I will try to get a picture here. If not, then in the avatar.

 It is black and  steel cap. It is 5 inches long, the front cap is 1 3/8ths, and it has a flip open and closed mechanism in the steel clip. A MountBlanc star on the top and in very fine letters Mont Blanc on the barrel, just above the fine striped metal nose cap.