1963

Before the laptop, there was the pencil. "It gave portability to writing," says Chris Wiedenmayer, whose company A.W. Fabercastell USA has been making them for 150 years. Pencils go back to the 16th century, but it was Kasper Faber who mass-produced the first pencils in Germany in 1761. In 1840 Rasper's grandson Lothar came up with a hexagonal shape to make pencils easier to hold and stop them from rolling off desks. Lothar's brother Eberhard opened an American subsidiary of A.W. Faber in New York in 1849. The company was renamed A.W. Faber-Castell in 1898 and thrived until World War I, when President Wilson declared U.S. subsidiaries of German companies forfeit as alien. (To the consternation of other family members, Eberhard had had the foresight to set up a separate American company that continued to make pencils right through the war.)

In 1957, still a few years before laptops and Yahoo, Gustave Wiedenmayer, a Newark banker, bought the dormant A.W. Faber-Castell and sold part interest back to A.W. Faber-Castell in Germany. In 1971 the reins were turned over to Chris, a young Columbia M.B.A. who, according to a recent Knight-Ridder news service profile, embarked on an acquisition campaign that included reuniting the old Eberhard Farber American company with its German A.W. Faber-Castell counterpart. Company sales grew from $5 million to $240 million in 1994, when the America branch was sold to an Illinois company. But the story hardly ends here. In 1996, the Germany based A.W. Faber-Castell bought back certain rights and relaunched A.W. Faber-Castell USA in Bedminster, New Jersey, with Chris as president and CEO. The company concentrates on production and sales of high-end writing instruments and has worldwide sales of $5 00 million. With the advent of computers, does Chris see the demise of the pencil any time soon? "No, it will go on. It's existed through a lot of stuff so far."

Adding to his legal and academic accolades, Dartmouth trustee Billy King was honored along with six former players from the other Ivy schools for accomplishments in life after football at the first Ivy League Football Association dinner in New York attended by more than 700 former players and friends, including Bill Blumenschein, Tom Parkinson '64 and Scott Creelman '64. Bill Spencer is now vice president of sales and marketing for La Haye Laboratories, a producer of health-care related products in Redmond, Washington.

Joan Swirsky, wife of Steve Swirsky, was genrly scolded by Times language columnist William Safire because her e-mail submission failed to disclose that she resides in Great Neck, New York. Safire waxed eloquent on Joans observation on the overuse of the expression "end of the day" by TV commentators especially during the election coverage. Safire pointed out that George Washington used the phrase in a 1797 letter and that it appears, like other phrases, this one may never go out of vogue. Joan Swirsky, by the way, writes for The Times in the Long Island section, which, at the end of the day, is probably not read inside the Beltway.

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