I guess I love knives because when I was growing up ALL the men I knew or saw carried one.
It was just something men did.
My father, my uncles, my cousins, my brothers, my male school teachers (my female school teachers seemed to prefer scissors), our preacher, the produce man on the corner, all the hunters, all the plow boys, all the bikers, all the rednecks, male family friends...every guy I knew or saw carried a knife.
Usually they were traditional pocket knives (I was born in 1967).
I got my very first pocket knife at age seven, from my Uncle Lacey (a tiny 1.5" 2-blade pen knife with fake pearl scales).
And within hours of ownership, I managed to cut myself (my Uncle had that knife razor sharp!).
But my folks took it all in stride and taught me how to be more careful and how to cut safely.
It really never occurred to me that there are men out there who don't love knives.
Allen, it sounds like you had a childhood much like mine, even though it was many years later. As a kid, all the grown men I knew had a pocket knife on them if they had pants on. It was a right of passage for a boy to get that first pocket knife as a sign of confidence that dad thought you were grown up enough not to handle it. Getting cut was also the right of passage and you learned what NOT to do with that knife.
But...and heres a big but...most of the men thought of that pocket knife as a daily needed tool, to be used as needed, but not an object of any kind of love. In fact, I don't think I knew any knife nuts as a kid. The pocket knife was a cutting tool, to be used and sometimes abused as a pry tool, improvised screw driver, putty knife, paint scraper, and mud off the boots scraper. If it broke or wore out from being sharpened on the edge of a cement sidewalk, it got tossed and replaced. Those shell handle Imperials that cost all of 3.99 were popular, as were cheap imports.
Those men who bought more expensive knives from Camillus, Case, Schrade-Walden, Kinfolks, Western, Utica, took a little better care of them, but still saw them as a semi disposable tool. When Remington was still making knives, they did a survey and found the expected life span of a pocket knife was all of two years. The sight of a pocket knife with at least one of the blades broken off was common. As was a knife with blades ground down by sharpening on electric grinding wheels or even having a file used on it. These knives were not loved, admired, and even fondled as a loved possession. I remember seeing one guy snap off the blade of a pocket knife prying open a can of window putty, and just reshaping the blade with the end as a screw driver.
There may have been a man here or there that was a knife nut, but it was extremely rare. Much more so than now. But a knife was a much more needed item for life the 1950's than now. Then, there was no easy open packages, with the dotted line to tear open. There was packages wrapped in heavy brown paper sealed with that brown fiber tape that was put on wet and dried fast into a heck of a seal. A sharp knife was needed to open. Packages also came wrapped in that white cotton twine that needed to be cut. And then there were the pencils.
People take the modern disposable pen for granted. Cheap ball point pens have taken over the writing industry. But when I was kid, pens sucked. there were fountain pens that leaked, ran dry unexpectedly, and were a giant PITA. The new ball point pens of the day leaked on a regular basis ruining whatever shirt you had on, or wrote lousy skipping and blotting, or drying out. The ink formula wasn't right yet. People carried pencils. Working guys had some stub of a wood pencil in their pocket, kids in school used pencils, tradesmen used pencils, secretaries used pencils, and they all needed a sharpening once a day or the point broke. A small knife was needed to to this. Up until 1960, the plain old pencil was the writing tool people carried. It wasn't until Marcel Bich in France devised the perfect ink formula that really worked, that the ball point pen came into its own. The birth of the Bic pen, by Marcel Bich. People don't need to carry a knife to sharpen their pencil anymore.
Life and technology has changed the need for a knife. Now its more a want than need. Less tool and more a cult worship item.
.
