The Man on the Lighter: Uncovering Lester “Flick” Flickinger

Lester Flickinger, Zippo Innovation
A Remarkable 1968 Portrait Lighter

Prepared by Dan DeMato

A Lighter That Opens a Door into Zippo History

Some Zippo lighters are important because they are scarce catalog models. Others matter because they carry a military inscription, an advertising history, or a connection to a famous event. This 1968 portrait lighter belongs to a smaller and more intriguing category: a special internal piece that points directly toward the people who shaped Zippo itself.

The lighter depicts Lester Flickinger, identified in a period Zippo company directory as Vice-President of Production. To coworkers he was known simply as “Flick.” The portrait is rendered on a high-polish chrome case through a finely controlled airbrushed enamel process. It was not a normal retail design and was never distributed in quantity. The surviving evidence instead places it among the extremely small group of executive presentation pieces created inside Zippo during the late Blaisdell era.

This article is not an appraisal and is not intended to publish the lighter’s private ownership history. Its purpose is to introduce Lester Flickinger, explain why his work mattered to Zippo, and place this extraordinary lighter within the company’s technical and artistic culture of the 1960s.

Who Was Lester “Flick” Flickinger?

The available biographical record is still incomplete, but the strongest evidence indicates that Lester T. Flickinger was born in 1904 and died in Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1988. Bradford was not simply where Zippo operated; it was the community in which the company’s executives, engineers, artists, and production employees built long careers and enduring relationships.

By 1968, Flickinger had risen to Vice-President of Production. Linda L. Meabon, who began her more-than-50-year Zippo career in 1967 and later served as the company’s museum curator and historian, remembers that he was still active when she arrived and that everyone called him “Flick.” Meabon, author of Zippo Manufacturing Company, recalls that he was responsible for patents and improvements to the Zippo lighter and worked directly with company founder George G. Blaisdell.

That recollection is especially valuable because it agrees with the documentary record. Flickinger’s name appears on several patents assigned to Zippo Manufacturing Company. The patents show a man concerned with practical problems: reliability, manufacturing precision, cleanliness in use, and the expansion of the basic Zippo mechanism into other forms.

Meabon also remembered Flickinger as an early communications enthusiast—one of the first people in Bradford to have a CB radio in his automobile—and recalled that his interest in CB communication helped prompt Zippo’s development of a CB-operator-themed lighter around 1976. Separate callbook evidence identifies him as an amateur-radio operator. CB and amateur radio are different services, but together the recollections suggest a technically curious man whose interests extended beyond the factory floor.

An Inventor Inside the Factory

Flickinger’s patent record is the clearest surviving evidence of his hands-on importance. He was not merely supervising output. He helped solve problems in the lighter itself.

Patent No. 2,517,191 appeared on the bottoms of millions of Zippo lighters during much of the 1950s, generally from approximately 1950 or 1951 through 1957. The patent formally recognized Lester Flickinger alongside Zippo founder George G. Blaisdell as a joint inventor of the improvement. Both men assigned their rights to Zippo Manufacturing Company, but Flickinger’s inclusion as a named inventor establishes his direct contribution to an important development in the Zippo lighter’s operating mechanism.

The importance of these patents is cumulative. They document Flickinger’s work across more than one kind of problem and across several years. In the story of Zippo, he belongs not only among the executives but among the practical inventors and production thinkers who refined the lighter’s performance and helped translate ideas into repeatable manufacturing.

The 1968 Portrait Lighter

The lighter itself is a full-size 1968 high-polish Zippo. Its front carries a carefully modeled portrait of Flickinger: gray hair, dark glasses, a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. The image closely follows the formal corporate portrait used in the period directory, making that photograph—or another image from the same portrait session—the likely visual source.

The work is remarkable at lighter scale. The face is built from controlled fields of color rather than a simple line transfer. The glasses, hair, shadows, skin tones, collar, and lapels all remain legible on a surface only a few inches high. The result is both photographic and unmistakably handmade.

Reliable Zippo-connected sources describe the design as a special executive piece rather than a commercial issue. In company practice, a “one-off” design did not always mean that only one physical lighter existed. A very small working group—often three or less—could be created for setup, approval, quality control, or presentation. The precise number made with Flickinger’s portrait has not yet been documented. The safest conclusion is that this was a unique, non-catalog design produced in an extremely small quantity.

That distinction matters. The lighter is rare not merely because few survive, but because its subject, purpose, and method belong to Zippo’s internal company history. It was never a design available to the general public.

Was Paul A. Hajdu the Artist?

No signature or surviving work order has yet been found that conclusively names the person who painted the Flickinger portrait. The leading attribution, however, is Paul A. Hajdu, an artist and inventor associated with Zippo during this period.

Collector research credits Hajdu with contribution to the creation of the artwork for the celebrated 1969 Moon Landing—or “Moon Lander”—design. That does not mean he personally painted every Moon Lander lighter; production examples could be executed by different artists and processes. It does establish him as a central creative figure in Zippo’s late-1960s art work. Hajdu is also associated in specialist collections with portrait and animal designs from the same general era.

The attribution of the Flickinger lighter to Hajdu should therefore be presented as informed and plausible, but not final: the technique, date, subject matter, and internal executive context all fit his known sphere of work, while direct documentary confirmation remains to be found.

A Presentation Case Normally Reserved for Gold

The packaging is nearly as striking as the lighter. It is housed in an ornate burgundy clamshell case with a satin-lined lid, fitted burgundy interior, gold-colored border detail, and a white outer sleeve. This style of presentation case is normally associated with early solid 14-karat-gold Zippo lighters and is rarely encountered empty.

The case is in exceptional condition and retains its fitted interior, instruction slip, outer sleeve, and protective wrapping. Among advanced collectors, an empty example of this box is valuable in its own right because owners of unboxed gold lighters seek correct period packaging. No monetary figure is needed here; the point is that this was unusually prestigious packaging for a chrome portrait lighter.

The case does not, by itself, prove who selected the packaging or on what occasion the lighter was presented. It does, however, reinforce the special status of the piece. This was not treated like an ordinary advertising lighter.

The rare burgundy presentation case with its white outer sleeve, satin interior, fitted tray, and period instruction slip.

The People Around “Flick”

Period photographs place Flickinger within a close-knit group of Zippo managers and long-serving employees. Bette Ross, for example, appears in a company photograph as Shipping Manager and later became Plant Manager after a career of nearly 58 years. Her presence in photographs with Flickinger is useful historical context: it shows the operational world in which this lighter was created, without requiring the private ownership history of the piece to become part of the public article.

The same principle applies to planning books, directories, employee photographs, and internal memorabilia. They allow the story to be told through the company’s people. These materials are supporting windows into Bradford and Zippo in the late 1960s, while keeping private family and collection details out of the public narrative.

Why This Lighter Matters

The Flickinger portrait lighter brings together three distinct parts of Zippo history.

• It preserves the likeness of a senior production executive who worked directly with George Blaisdell on patents and lighter improvements.
• It demonstrates the extraordinary level of custom artwork that Zippo’s artists could produce on a high-polish case.
• It survives with a presentation package far more elaborate than the packaging ordinarily used for a chrome lighter.

Its importance is therefore not based on celebrity in the usual sense. Flickinger’s significance lies inside the product. He helped improve the mechanism, manufacturing, and extensions of the Zippo lighter, and this tiny portrait presents him as the company itself once saw him: a leading figure in production during a defining period.

The lighter is rare and valuable, but the larger value is historical. It is a tangible connection between invention, production, art, and the people who made Zippo in Bradford.

An Ongoing Historical Study

Research on Lester Flickinger and the 1968 portrait lighter is continuing. Future additions may clarify his complete employment timeline, retirement date, the specific circumstances of the presentation, the exact number of examples made, and whether Paul A. Hajdu can be documented as the individual artist.

Additional period photographs, the executive planning book, oral histories from longtime Zippo employees and historians, and other attributed Hajdu pieces may eventually allow the story to be expanded. For now, the evidence already supports a clear conclusion: Lester “Flick” Flickinger was an important Zippo inventor and production leader, and the portrait lighter bearing his image is an exceptional surviving artifact of that history.

Research Notes and Selected Sources

This piece deliberately separates documented facts from oral history and informed attribution. Public publication preserves that distinction.

• U.S. Patent 2,517,191, “Pyrophoric Lighter,” Lester Flickinger and George G. Blaisdell; filed Oct. 12, 1948; issued Aug. 1, 1950. Patent 2,517,191
• U.S. Patent 2,704,447, “Flame Guard for Flint Wheel,” Lester Flickinger and William Lewis Pierotti; issued Mar. 22, 1955. Patent 2,704,447
• U.S. Patent 2,774,234, “Table Lighter,” George G. Blaisdell and Lester Flickinger; filed Jan. 12, 1954; issued Dec. 18, 1956. Patent 2,774,234
• Specialist research on Zippo Town & Country baked-enamel designs and the Paul Hajdu attribution for the 1969 Moon Landing design. Baked Enamel Process research
• Period Zippo executive directory and photographs in the current owner’s collection. 
• Oral-history recollections from Linda L. Meabon, a longtime Zippo employee who began her career in 1967, later served as the company’s museum curator and historian, and authored Zippo Manufacturing Company. Private correspondence; used with permission.

Additional Images from the 1969 Zippo Executive Diary

The following photographs provide additional visual context for the period in which Lester Flickinger served as a senior Zippo production executive. They also connect the portrait lighter to a surviving piece of Zippo corporate history from the following year.