Raymond J. Culler, my father, gave me my first pocketknife when I was 11 years old. He said that his father told him at around that age that “a man should always have a pocketknife in his pocket.” I liked the knife; I liked that he called me ‘a man’. And because I had never met him, I liked hearing about my grandfather’s advice to his son.
It was a piece of advice that my father followed until the day he died. When I cleaned out clothes at the nursing home, his khaki pants were folded neatly over a chair, in the pocket was a small bone-handled pocketknife, well worn and razor sharp.
Pocket knives were something he bought, something he “picked up somewhere.” They were something you could always give him as a gift –he’d open the blades check the sharpness on his fingernail, admire the handle, joke about playing mumble-de-peg on the living room coffee table till Nan would tell him to “put the knife away and open the rest of the presents.”
Nan, my mother, told a story about the Depression, which she said – “will tell you a lot about your father.”
“We weren’t poor like a lot of folks. We had the shop; people always needed printing. Customers often couldn’t pay for things in cash – they just didn’t have it – but we took ‘scrip.’ We took milk scrip for printing the dairy flyers and traded for bread and meat; we took scrip from the grocery for the window sale cards and traded it for scrip for the movie theatre tickets.
But there were some things that you needed cash for – supplies for the shop and the like – and there were only two or three customers who paid in cash. Well, nobody paid on time, you had to go ask them for the money and usually the best time to do that was when they were ordering again. Raymond was out taking an order and collecting $5 from a job and we needed that money. He came home with $4.00. When I asked him where the rest of the money was and he told me he’d bought a pocketknife.
‘$1.00! RAYMOND! $1.00 for A POCKETKNIFE!’ I yelled at him. A dollar was half a week’s groceries.
Well, he got upset and said, ‘If a man can’t buy himself a pocketknife, then life just isn’t worth living.’”
Nan meant this story to show Raymond’s poor understanding of priorities, which, God knows, he demonstrated on more than one occasion, but I took it as reinforcement for his admonishment to me –“a man always ought to have a pocketknife in his pocket.”
When he died he left a small collection of pocket knives. I distributed them to his grandchildren, with this story and this note:
“This is one of the knives he left – handed down, bought, or picked up from the estate of someone he cared for- now it is handed down to you so you can “always have a pocketknife in your pocket, “ (except on airplanes or other places where metal detectors interfere with the nostalgia.)”
I saved a couple of knives for myself and now I have a small collections of pocket knives. Oh, there are no 100 year old Case knives or similar ones that get bid up into the thousands of dollars on eBay. And I don’t have many, just enough to have a different one each day of the week plus a couple extras, but my family know that if you’re stuck for a present for Alan, Pop, Grampa, go to a garage sale and pick up an old jackknife and at birthdays when someone uses a too much tape for a little one, you’ll hear, “Go ask Grampa for his knife.”
I’m wondering what there is about this tool that made at least three generations of men in my family advise their sons (and daughters in my case) to carry one.
Well, it is a tool with many uses, cutting package tape, opening envelops, or being a makeshift screwdriver. You can sharpen a pencil, dig mud outta your shoes, and slice an apple. Hopefully, washing the blade before and after.
It’s called a jack knife. A jack was a workman who could do passable work at al variety of tasks. Remember the expression, “jack of all trades.” The men in my family advise to be competent at several of the types physical work involved with living, so you don’t always have to “call a guy.” My father was a lot better at that than I am, but my son is better than I am too.
The second half of that expression “master of none,” Isn’t something we recommend. Finding at least one physical job you work to master is a good idea.
For everything else, you can’t go wrong having a pocketknife on you.
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