My first pocket knife.
by James K. Sayre
Pocket knives have knife blades that fold and sit safely within a handle when not in use. Old family letters have revealed that I got my first pocket knife at age seven and a half, at Christmas in 1949. It probably had a couple of blades and a black bone handle. I could never quite understand what the point was of having two knife blades... Since they both did about the same thing: cutting things. In more recent times, it would seem to be have been related to the same sort of consumer creeping towards evermore bigger and better. Like razor blades that went from single blades to double blades to triple blades... As illustrated in the brilliant Robert C. Osborn cartoons in the late 1950s of the American cars with bigger and bigger tail fins...
There also were the "boy scout" knives with extra added blades for scaling fish, punching holes in leather and other scouting activities. Special knives designed for campers have spoon and fork attachments; however, it would seem to potentially be quite awkward to have to switch back and forth between the spoon and fork attachments while trying to each a campfire meal. But, as they say, it's the thought that counts...
As an adult, I finally realized that a cork-screw attachment was for taking the cork stopper out of a wine bottle.Then came the finest of all knives: the Swiss Army Knife, made in Switzerland, where they hadn't lost a war in over five hundred years or so... The Swiss Army Knife had a wide variety of attachments, that would do most anything except finish your Ph. D. thesis....
Now, in my old age, I favor the smaller, simpler pocket knives. The main problem for me with the Swiss Army Knives is that their blades are too sharp... Some of the fancy pocket knives have very strong springs on their blades, which make them very tough to even open up...The smallest and most elegant Swiss Army Knife that I have now was made by Victorinox and is only 3 1/4" long and has a reddish metal handle and contains only two blades, 2 1/4" and 1 3/16"...
A larger Swiss Army Knife, which has recently shed one of its two red plastic handle covers, has a locking mechanism for its largest knife blade. So, when I flew back from Australia on Air New Zealand in the late 1980s, the knife had to travel by itself in a special part of the luggage section; I got my knife back at the baggage counter in Los Angeles. This was all decades before the current "fly almost naked" paranoia of U. S. airlines...
End.
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Web page last updated on 23 March 2009.