My Favorite Typewriter
I sat in my junior high school class, at Cunningham Junior High School, about a forty-five-minute streetcar or subway ride from my home in Brighton Beach. Of the innovative programs for the those offered this special three years in two opportunity, was a combined course in typing and home making. I looked at the large Remington typewriter in front of me and listened to the teaching tell the somewhat bewildered boys in the class, that typing is for boys and girls as was homemaking. Little did I know that Remington was one of the first to bring this almost miraculous writing machine into production for offices and then later to almost anybody as the price fell.
Typing and homemaking became among two of the most important courses I took in my very long education: Brooklyn Technical High School, Brooklyn College, the Dundee campus of Scotland venerable University of St. Andrews and then many years of post-graduate training. My time as a single father for almost three years to two children clinched the importance of knowing how to cook, use a washing machine, shop intelligently, plan a menu and keep a house from falling apart. But it was typing that became the skill that allowed me to become a prolific writer, first of very frequent letters home from Scotland and Europe to my parents, sister, and best friend Chuck. That writing metamorphosed into the writing of articles and ultimately the authorship of numerous books.
I can’t recall when I bought my robin blue Olivetti Lettera32® but that small machine became my companion during my years of study at Brooklyn College and while abroad, in medical school and traveling to many countries, including a four-year stint in Israel and return to Canada, having left the United States during the Vietnam war. Even after the introduction of the computer, not having a laptop I continued to type letters and articles and drafts of books on the small manual Letter32®. It was stolen from my parents’ home after their death when there was an open house to sell the contents and the typewriter was left on the floor in what I assumed was a safe place but when I looked after many visitors left, it was gone, leaving me only with very fond memories and a suitcase full of letters I wrote from Dundee, Europe and Israel to my parents who kept them safely stowed away. As is often the case, when I look at those letters, I can make out the little imperfections of my typewriter that forensic specialists often use to identify a machine from which important notes such as those for a ransom come from.
From a website search of the history of typewriters, “The first practical typewriter was completed in September 1867, although the patent was not issued until June 1868. The man who was responsible for this invention was Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The first commercial model was manufactured in 1873 and was mounted on a sewing machine stand.
According to the encyclopedia Britannica, “The first typewriter had no shift-key mechanism—it wrote capital letters only. The problem of printing both capitals and small letters without increasing the number of keys was solved by placing two types, a capital and lowercase of the same letter, on each bar, in combination with a cylinder-shifting mechanism. The first shift-key typewriter—the Remington Model 2—appeared on the market in 1878. Soon after appeared the so-called double-keyboard machines, which contained twice the number of keys—one for every character, whether capital or small letter. For many years the double keyboard and the shift-key machines competed for popular favour, but the development of the so-called touch method of typing, for which the compact keyboard of the shift-key machines was far better suited, decided the contest.”
Like the Gutenberg Press, this invention forever changed the world of communication, literature and in many ways religion as bibles became available to the masses in their own numerous dialects. The computer was the next monumental change in that world of communication and writing, that along with the digital world, and the same keyboard configurations allow anyone to access thousands of books on-line via what is called the Gutenberg Project.
I was sitting in the guests’ relaxation room of a small hotel in Detroit where my daughter in the later stages of completing her PhD in anthropology. Of interest we had just given to her my wife’s old Royal portable typewriter rather than selling it to a very interested purveyor of used typewriters, as she said sometimes, she just wants to type something without having to go through the complex of doing it on her computer and printing it. There was classical music playing through an App on the large radio and on the shelf of the coffee table in front of the sofa on which I was sitting, was a book with a red cover, “Notes from a Public Typewriter, by Michael Gustafson and Olver Uberti. I picked it up and started thumbing through it and it just resonated with me. The author had opened a novel bookstore and one of its attractions was a typewriter available for customers to compose notes, or letters or stories. In the early part of the book, there was even a reference to the writer’s owner of a blue Olivetti Lettera32®. The author says, “The typewriter I set out on opening day was a light blue Olivetti Lettera 32. I inserted a clean piece of paper and let it be. There were no prompts, No directions. Just the world’s smallest publishing house, waiting for an author.”
That propelled me to skim the book in the short time I was awaiting my daughter’s arrival. There was a collection of short aphorisms which succinctly, like Hiku often down, life’s or in this case a typewriters’ wisdom or perhaps more of its user.
“Life, like this typewriter, has no backspace. Type strongly and don’t look back.”
“Before spellcheck there was spelling.”
“I just want to push your buttons.”
“Avoid identify theft, use a typewriter. The are harder to hack.”
“My son thinks that I am a genius because I know how to type…
Finally, he is impressed with me.”
We have become keyboard whizzes, even on devices as small as cell phones: two fingers deftly writing away, sending messages via email, Facebook or ordering food for the evening via UberEats®. It took me awhile to transform my own habits from a typewriter, the last one being an electric, which was speedier than my Olivetti but didn’t have quite the same feel of being at one with the machine of creativity.
At long last I succumbed to the pressures of the computer. My first one was a huge Xerox 820 with 8-inch floppy discs. The instructions to the computer were with keyboard strokes. There was no such thing as a mouse. I remember accidentally deleting dozens of pages of the book when I hit the delete control rather than the save control on a book I was writing. I had to retrieve from memory what I had written. That is when my very computer savvy boss instructed me to use two floppies, one for writing and the other for copying and saving every ten minutes or so. With the advent of the first very expensive hard drives everything changed. Prices came down as more competition especially from Asia started cornering IBM and Xerox’s domination of the market. My last lap-top which fits easily into my knapsack with a huge internal drive and an external back-up drive in addition to automatic saving somewhere on a heavily satellite seems like something that would have been science fiction when I bought my first computer in 1975.
My Olivetti brings smiles to my face. I still have a picture of me in my room in Dundee, surrounded my medical books, typing away, probably a letter to my friend Chuck who stayed with his typewriter even after computers had taken over. He said, “He just liked the feel of the keys and watching the paper move up and over the roller.”