Beautiful example!
I joined a knife forum a few yrs back with the intention of getting some advice & repair on my original Whitler. I don't think it was this forum, as they have no record of me and so just I registered here.
Briefly on my provenance story; my mom begrudgingly bought me a Boy Scout Whitler about 1964 when I was in Cub Scouts. It was to whittle down a Soapbox Derby block of wood for a merit badge. After the race, I started to carry the knife in my pocket....I was 9. I was picking sap out of a tree with the main blade when it folded on my finger, nearly severing it....I still have the scar. I dropped the knife on the ground and assumed it was lost. Fast forward to the late 80's and as I was going through my dad's 'hardware' drawer, there it was all those yrs later unused. Rusty, I labored over all the blades and the handle case. It looked almost new. Not really thinking about 'value', I started carrying the knife in my pocket again.
Using it proved to be too much for the old knife and a spring broke. About this time I met a guy that claimed to be a 'knifemaker'. "No problem, I can fix it". So he returned the knife with the spring fixed BUT.....the rivets were the wrong material(copper looking) and there was only one spring rivet, not the other two for the handles as in the picture above. Also, he polished the one rivet down and buffed one of the handles clear down to the case. I guess in his mind, he was making the knife functional again for me, although I had told him it had great sentimental value.
What I didn't realize at the time is he had destroyed my original handles and robbed a pair from the newer Whitler that you could still buy(early 90's). I bought one too with the intention of robbing those handles to put back on mine(as he had done). Fortunately, I went no further with this project. Inside the case on the original, you can clearly see the evidence of more rivets originally. I can't get anyone interested in bringing the knife back to its original form and so I'm hunting for a knife from the same yrs as my original..... just keep the newer one I bought intact.
What I'm noticing is that the original stag handles shrink quite a bit over the decades. Yours is in exceptional condition!
Kevin