An Old-fashioned Gidget?

No shortage of potential topic sources around here.

May 29 is National Paper Clip Day, established in 2015 by whom I could not find, though coming out of the woodwork are more than fifty names of individuals who received patents for various versions.

Oddly, the paperclip we’re most familiar with was never patented. It was manufactured in England in the 1870’s by the Gem Manufacturing Company, though the trademark ‘Gem clip’ was registered in 1904 by Cushman and Denison, a New York manufacturing company.

But where is one when you need it in a hurry? ONE is a key word. Countless times over 33 years as a classroom teacher, I’d open my desk drawer to grab one out of its special little cubby, only to pull out a seemingly mile-long paper clip chain.

The culprit(s) were obviously more dexterous than I since I never caught them in the act. I can vouch that it’s impossible to unhook just one in a snap. The task required laying the stack of papers on my desk to free both hands. I’d have to work quickly or risk losing sight of it among the other stacks cluttering the desk’s top.

Time is a critical factor in classroom management. Getting one loose from the chain is harder when trying to remain calm. It was my probably erroneous belief that staying calm would discourage the perpetrators from plotting future mutinous acts. Several always scrambled to rescue me from my predicament by offering to untangle the chains. Hmm. Probably the guilty ones.

In retrospect, in classrooms of the mid-to-late 1900’s, linking paper clips highlighted the need for gadgets to fiddle with - the precursor to the increasingly popular, almost fun, gidgets available these days. A gidget can be a marvelous SILENT substitute for the clicking pen, too.

I wonder if the building principal would have questioned my classroom budget had I included 30 boxes of paper clips - one for each desk. Busying those idle hands might have made it easier to keep the attached brains tuned in. Ahh. The good ol’ days.