Old Yeller

"ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON LAST SUMMER in the town of Hastings, Minn., David Norman Wigen parked his white pickup truck near the intersection of Fourth and Vermillion Streets, walked into the Wells Fargo branch there, and attempted to stage a heist. The 49-year-old construction worker handed a bank teller a curt, crumpled note: "Money now, do not make me hurt someone!" The teller handed him $260. Wigen fled with the money and within the next five hours bought some methamphetamine, confessed his crime to his sister, and was arrested by an off-duty police officer. Other than its clumsiness, Wigen's failed robbery is remarkable for one detail: the medium he selected to convey his instructions to the teller. His note had been scrawled in pencil on a sheet from a yellow legal pad.

Once used only by law students and lawyers, the yellow legal pad is now employed to a degree unrivaled in stationery. "End career as a fighter," President Richard Nixon wrote on a legal pad in August 1974. Five days later, on the top of another one, he scratched, "Resignation Speech." Jeff Tweedy, front man for the rock band Wilco, writes his songs on a legal pad. Jim Harrison, the laureate of the untamed heart, wrote Legends of the Fall on legal pads; Elmore Leonard writes his crime novels on them. Nonfiction criminals, it appears, are fond of them, too. How did they get so popular? And how so yellow?.."

Old Yeller
The illustrious history of the yellow legal pad.
By Suzanne Snider

Legal Affairs

Comments

[Anita Rose]

I buy the legal pads with the rainbow pages to write my shopping lists on.

Here it is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lookinthetunk/147955102/

[Michael]

Almost everything I write begins on a yellow pad or in a notebook.

A suggestion: With legal pads or any other stationery item, if there's something you really love, buy it in quantity before it declines in quality or disappears. I'm thinking in particular of the college-ruled Dual-Pad, for me the perfect legal pad, now gone. (I have a small stash still.)