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When President Barack Obama signed the $789 billion Stimulus Bill on Tuesday Feb. 17th in Colorado on live TV the audience and press were scratching their heads with laughter. The president used a brand new pen to sign each of the 10 signatures the document needed to become law. As odd as this seemed to the viewing audience, it is, in fact, a tradition.
Each time the President Of The United States (also referred to by his security people as POTUS) signs a new bill into law it is done with a brand new Cross Townsend Pen. And it is also tradition that the president make a gift of the pen(s) to the people who were most helpful in the preparation and passing of the bill. In this case it was 10 different people and 10 different signatures needed on the huge document containing hundreds of pages.
The pens used to sign the Economic Stimulus Package were Cross Townsend Selectip Pens made of highly polished midnight blue lacquer with 23 karat gold plated details engraved with the President's signature on the cap and the Presidential Seal on the clip and sell for $120 a piece. So they were rather nice gifts to get.
In the past, penmanship was considered a way to judge a person's intelligence. George Washington (USA's 1st President) had excellent handwriting and practiced often. Washington used a single goose quill pen mounted in a silver ink well that sat upon the president's desk, and one of George Washington's known belongings was his silver pen knife. This was a small knife that Washington always carried with him to trim his quill pens.
Abraham Lincoln was known to use eagle quill pens. These were hard to get, so his friends often would send some to him plucked from the wild eagles they hunted in the 1860's. But modern presidents cannot be getting eagle feathers (or any other "pens") sent to them in the post by their friends. Presidential Cross Townsend pens are security checked before being placed on the president's desk in the Oval Office of the White House.
The president's desk is called The Resolute Desk because it was made from the timbers of the H. M. S. Resolute, an abandoned British ship. Queen Victoria ordered that the desk be specially made for President Rutherford B. Hayes. That was in 1880. Today, 129 years later, President Barack Obama sits at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office of The White House with his Cross Townsend pens (and his Blackberry) as he struggles with what some have called "The world's toughest job!"
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