Wednesday, January 12, 2011

We Own A Smith-Corona

I just read about a group of kids with typewriters getting together in the coffeehouse. They're all going to type a letter, and put a stamp on the envelope, and send it to someone. They are thrilled to death. Typewriters speak to a certain segment of the younger generation, and I'm sure it's a positive sign. The kids report feeling a greater sense of accomplishment while creating a physical document by hammering on keys and slinging the return-carriage thingy.

It's a little odd to feel nostalgic for something you never experienced, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. I've often wished that I could look at an orange in my Christmas stocking and feel as excited as my great-foremothers did. I can't do it. Oranges are too available and the wonder of them has waned.

But the typewriter is a decidedly cool invention. There is a tactile reward: the keys have raised, round rims, in which your resting fingertips feel as special as pie filling. There's the acoustical award from the ding when you're close to the end of a line. There's a pungent taste to the onion-skin paper. Not really, I made that part up.

I learned to type very well in eighth grade, and it's the one thing I've learned that stayed learned. At my peak I was good for 125 words per minute with three mistakes per page, and that kept me employed between worthier employments. My mother, on the other hand, typed 135 words per minute with three mistakes per year. You could hear them if you were nearby. There'd be her usual cicada-buzz of typing, and then abruptly it would stop, and you'd hear this little "tsk." Mom was one of those women who was very valuable to her employers, although not in a way they showed monetarily, times being what they were and her with ovaries and all, but she not only did not make typos but she spelled everything correctly and straightened out the grammar and syntax as she blasted out a letter. She also had an hourglass figure, not that she could help it, which must have gone in the plus column for her employers. A woman with a brain and mad typing skills who made her bosses look good would have to be a very valuable commodity, but of course she had to quit in order to cook up my sister and cook for my father and, later, contend with me, who was not in the original plan.

Typing really well involves getting a good even rhythm. You don't want to syncopate if you can  help it because then you could accidentally hammer on two keys at once and then they have to duke it out in front of you, and you have to get right in there and peel them apart. And it takes a stout bit of power to get the keys all the way up to the page and printing properly. If you're thrifty like my folks were, you re-use your ribbons, and have to type harder and harder to get the letters to show up. The other thing you had to look out for was your typewriter was liable to walk across the table with every swing of the carriage return and if you don't happen to notice it's getting further away from the page you're copying, it could fall right off the table. These, I suspect, are the kinds of things that appeal to the young people doing type-ins at the coffeehouses now. Real problems, real molecules of ink hitting real molecules of paper, everything in front of you and accountable to you, and not this spookiness where your content turns to vapor and flies across the planet in some way you cannot fathom.

In a lot of areas, I've avoided the trouble of going retro by not going forwardo in the first place, but I don't miss the typewriter. I used to be really good at writing term papers, so good that I always aced them even when I had no idea what I was talking about, because I had good grammar and spelling, and even then that was a novelty for my teachers. They were always willing to reward well-constructed blather and as a result I got terrific grades without having to learn much. I'd write my papers on a legal pad in a dreadful chicken-scratch that even I couldn't read a week later, and the page would be filled with circled paragraphs and arrows and numbers showing me where they should really go, and new stuff in the margins to chink in somewhere else, and then it was just a matter of staying on my toes when I transcribed it to the typewriter. All of this works a lot better on a computer.

There were a number of conventions associated with typewriters that had to be unlearned when word processors glided onto the scene. No longer did one have to make an exclamation point by hitting the period, back-spacing, and topping it with an apostrophe. Exclamation-point abuse was born with personal computers. Other than that, everything got better.

Still, I cheer the coffeehouse crowd with their Underwoods under their arms and their Olivettis at the ready. I might even have some old onion-skin to unload. I think I'll walk in, scowl on principle, hawk a loogie and say "what in Tarnation is going on in here?"

39 comments:

  1. Then there was the shockingly revolutionary invention of erasable paper. Remember that? It arrived just in time for my college term papers, and was gone again about the time I graduated, thanks to those ubiquitous IBM Selectric typewriters with the white-out tapes neatly spooling across inside them.

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  2. I learned to type on an old Underwood. You can tell, by ear, which of us in our office learned to type on a manual typewriter, because you hear our fingers going whamity-whamity-wham, as the younguns go tippity-tippity-tip. When I bought my first home computer in 1998, my nails put divots in the keypads in pretty short order. My girls were amazed. I was also a pretty serious abuser of Bath and Body Works lotions at that time, and the lotion pulled the type off the keypads almost as fast as my nails monogrammed them. Not a problem for me, as I had been typing since shortly after the rocks cooled, but seriously frustrating for my girls. Wouldn't have been a problem with Dad's old Underwood.

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  3. Oh, the memories of high school typing class, erasale paper which didn't really work and old typewriters in the workplace. I one day got a small bottle of black touch-up paint and applied a White-Out label to it. When a guy at work who was typing swore and began hollering for some White-Out, I offered my new creation to him. When he saw that the liquid was black, he asked what was going on and I assured him that it'd turn white when it dried. That was many years ago but the mere mention of that incident still causes him to curse me with vile oaths.

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  4. I remember Ms Easterly's typing class well in that room FULL of green IBM Selectric typewriters. Our original typewriter at home was manual though, and I remember those correction tabs you had to insert as you backspaced and then hit the offending key again to cover your error. Wasn't that when you had to walk 8 miles to school in the snow?

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  5. I made it through college and almost all of grad school with my trusty electric typewriter. I'd love to say that I miss the thing, but I don't.

    Still, my kids think that messing around on a real typewriter is the height of fun. They like to see the words unfold on the paper as they type them.

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  6. I had even forgotten the phrase "Smith Corona." I learned on a manual and remember how strong my fingers were from pressing so hard on the keys. The Selectric was a wonder machine, and my first computer at work, a Micom with 8-inch floppy disks with massive 64K capacity... well, times have changed, not all of it for the better, but dang you sure made me nostalgic for the old days.

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  7. Odd timing, since I've just posted images of some stuff I typed out 30 years or so ago. There's something about the typewriter that I do miss, although what exactly it is I'd be hard pressed to say. I learned to type in an extremely short space of time and have often considered writing about it, but the problem is that my particular learning method was quite illegal.

    I think it's the sound that I miss. The clacking and dinging and that "ziiiiip" sound as you returned the carriage. Also the ink that always seemed to find its way onto your hands. Computers leave no trace on the person using them. Typewriters often left indelible marks.

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  8. Perhaps the typewriter will be joining the turntable in a return to mainstream America? Perhaps not.
    I remember being so thrilled upon the introduction of the Word doc. And the laptop's keys are so much more forgiving.

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  9. Coffee shop type-ins are now fashionable among the yoof? Jeez, whatever next? They'll be running their sopping clothes through the mangle in the back garden. And jumping up and down with excitement over the mangle experience.

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  10. We had an ancient typewriter at home - I don't remember the brand, but the instructions were all in German.

    At school we learned on manuals, but there we took turns on one electric typewriter. I remember my first time with it - I looked down & there was a row of "j"s just from me resting my fingers on it. I did not like to use it - I liked the built-in change your mind time with the manual.

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  11. We were too early for electrics in the typing class. I remember at one point thinking that if I could ever scrape together the $100 for an IBM Selectric, I'd never want anything else in my whole life. Corasable paper was cool, too, except it got smudgy. The white-out strips were a huge improvement on the white-out liquid (you are a BAD BOY, Bill And Dogs), and the liquid was an innovation too: before you had to erase the offending letter best you could and slam the new letter over it. Mom did that, so as not to waste paper, even though she knew she wouldn't make another mistake for four months. I'm looking forward to the mangle-in. You really could get your tits caught in one.

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  12. Just think how they'd feel if they hand wrote a letter!

    I always loved the typewriter, too. I learned on an electric one in middle school, but at home we also had an ancient Royal. It was heavy and beautiful.

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  13. I flunked typing in school--but part of our grade was dressing "appropriately" for an office. I was also taking power mechanics at the same time, where part of the grade was dressing "appropriately" for that class. I aced power mech, flunked typing, and curse the school to this day.

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  14. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Amazing that I don't remember anyone getting carpal tunnel syndrome from a manual typewriter. All keyboards possess their own "touch." True of electric pianos too. My Aunt Barbara could also type 125 with no errors on her Selectric. She disliked her word processor because she could type faster than the machine could register it, and later disliked the feel of the computer keyboard. Elaine

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  15. Great post, brings back many memories.
    The Selectric was the cat’s meow, until they came out with the fully automated one with the correction tape in the machine.
    I also used to type beyond the capabilities of the Selectric and had to wait a few beats for all those letters to appear – brrrrrrrp!
    And oh, yes, onion skin and carbon paper. Gee, I hardly ever put it in backwards! I was so thrilled when copiers were invented!
    Which takes me on a tangent – prior to copiers as we know them, there was a thing called a Bruning Machine. You put your original on either the top or bottom of another piece of special paper, ran it into the machine and it would go through a wet process and the original and the copy would come out the back. Need more than one copy – repeat as needed! We wore those little rubber finger things to grab the originals and copies in speedy fashion.
    Before the home computer, I worked with a word processor called The Redactron. It was this giant contraption with keyboard and screen attached to a desk-like bottom. Had to go to classes for weeks to learn it and each time you did something new the screen would go blank – as would my head! That may be why I suffered from migraines! But once I learned, it was great. You could type an entire document and zip back and forth to make corrections before you had to paginate; imagine a 100 page piece of paper, sort of like a scroll. Of course, you were in trouble if you tried to print it that way.
    As always, love your blog!

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  17. I took typing in high school, I thought it would be a great way to meet girls. It was; but the girls were more interested in the guys who could throw footballs than guys who could type.

    We learned to type rhythmically in class to the tunes of "Alley Cat" and "Syncopated Clock". I dropped the class before they added "Flight of the Bumble Bee".

    College was agony, having to type the same term paper pages over for eternity due to errors. I asked my son, who was the beneficiary of the new computer word processing in college, how much easier writing term papers were for him. "Simple", he said. "I just download someone else's paper from the Internet and paste it into Word. It only takes me a couple of minutes".

    He's going for his PhD.

    [see, I had to delete and repost because I made type-o's - where the hell is the "undelete" on this thing?]

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  18. I was always terrible at typing, and avoided it when possible. What a blessing when word processors were invented!

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  19. Well into the computer years, I was writing my scripts in long hand on a yellow legal pad and then transcribing them to print via an IBM Selectric. God, I was excited the day I got that machine. Eventually, though I gave over to the computer age, but I'm awfully glad I had that experience and it's a great lesson for those kids, too.

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  20. Must be the first blog post where I haven't felt like the lone oldie!
    But I thought 80wpm was reasonable! [slinks away quietly...]

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  21. Oh, oh--typewriter memories. I still have the little Smith-Corona I received for my 16th birthday (from my parents who left me here when they returned to Africa, just days before that birthday).
    And I recall typing on that very typewriter a term paper due in grad school, holding the typewriter on my lap (hey, a laptop) while my girlfriend drove us to class. I had to summarize the last several pages into one--and thereby earned a scornful comment from Prof. Sievers and an F along with a stern rejoinder to REDO it and turn it in. It got an eventual B, but he said it was A quality. So I got punished. Harrrummpph.
    Finally, I typed my master's thesis (100 pages on Thomas Becket and T.S. Eliot) in 3 days on corrasable bond making only 3 mistakes on 100 pages!

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  22. I detested typewriters except when I was a little tiny girl. I would "type" very earnestly on my mother's typewriter. When I had a good long string of characters, I would make her read them out loud, while I rolled around on the floor laughing.

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  23. Murr, I envy your mother's accuracy. I probably wouldn't be able to type a degree after my name without the invention of erasable bond. Being able to type backwards almost as fast as forwards on the Selectric with the built-in correction tape saved me, too. Then there was one of those crossovers-almost-a-computer. My employer sent me to adult toy school in the IBM building, which looked just like an IBM card, little window holes and all. And yep, beyond typewriters, I learned to use the card punch and turn program cards in at the university computer center, then wait 24 hours for them to come back with errors.

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  24. Smith-Corona portable was my graduation present from high school. Thank goodness for erasable bond paper! I remember doing term papers and redoing, and retyping. Wouldn't you have loved Microsoft Word??
    My youngest(age 18), computer whiz, loves to get it out and type "old school".

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  25. I had to learn on a manual typewriter as well. I finished class with 40WPM and was happy. And if I had to give up spell check, I'd probably kill myself or the guy trying to take it from me.

    And sticking whole paragraphs or jerking them from one place and putting them in another. How great is that?

    Good riddance to typewriters.

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  26. And then there were slide rules....

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  27. I nominated you for the "hummor" category of the 11th annual bloggie award (http://2011.bloggi.es/), after reading a few of your posts and laughing like I haven't but really needed to for a while. I am resolved to know that I'll never write as well as this but at least I recognize brilliance when I see it.

    PS: Please do not go read my blog just out of curiosity or worse, courtesy, I cringe at the mere thought of it.

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  28. Though I type really fast and editing is really easy with computers, I still love the feel of writing with a really smooth pen on a piece of paper, especially if its of good quality with a tinge of grey or cream......

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  29. Shopgirl, thank you. Just the thought that I make someone laugh like they really needed to makes me all giddy. It's good of you to drop by and tell me.

    Penny, I'm the worst longhand writer in the world. I should write prescriptions for myself.

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  30. I remember the cheerful hum of the IBM Selectric that sat on a little side tray beside my desk at my first full time job; my boss had bought a garishly flowered TV tray with tubular brass legs for fifty cents at a yard sale and presented it to me as my 'typing stand'. It would sway gently every time I hit the return, and I would brace myself so I could catch that thirty pound steel-clad machine in my lap if necessary. This was before we concerned ourselves with anything so mamby-pamby as 'ergonomics'.

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  31. Oh, the lust for a Selectric! And I never did own one, after the Underwood I used in high school I was given a portable electric to take to college, some German thing that never liked me, and fought with me for years. By the time I could afford a Selectric they were out of date, but I've never forgotten the longing for one. I don't think I've ever coveted anything else like that. It was in a class by itself, as far as objects of desire go.

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  32. I guarantee that fad won't last long. Typing on a computer was a goodsend [sic] to me. I make too many errors to do typewriter typing. In university, I hand wrote almost all of my essays but did get a few typed up. I also did pretty well on my essays, but I cringe to think of it now because I never edited -- never!

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  33. I hated typewriters when I had to use them in high school and couldn't have been more thrilled when the word processor and PC were finally invented. Now, of course, I can't write anything without a PC, which scares me a little, although I don't know why since we don't seem to be in danger of running out of PCs anytime soon.

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  34. I hated typewriters when I had to use them in high school and couldn't have been more thrilled when the word processor and PC were finally invented. Now, of course, I can't write anything without a PC, which scares me a little, although I don't know why since we don't seem to be in danger of running out of PCs anytime soon.

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  35. I remember the cheerful hum of the IBM Selectric that sat on a little side tray beside my desk at my first full time job; my boss had bought a garishly flowered TV tray with tubular brass legs for fifty cents at a yard sale and presented it to me as my 'typing stand'. It would sway gently every time I hit the return, and I would brace myself so I could catch that thirty pound steel-clad machine in my lap if necessary. This was before we concerned ourselves with anything so mamby-pamby as 'ergonomics'.

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  36. Though I type really fast and editing is really easy with computers, I still love the feel of writing with a really smooth pen on a piece of paper, especially if its of good quality with a tinge of grey or cream......

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  37. Coffee shop type-ins are now fashionable among the yoof? Jeez, whatever next? They'll be running their sopping clothes through the mangle in the back garden. And jumping up and down with excitement over the mangle experience.

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  38. Odd timing, since I've just posted images of some stuff I typed out 30 years or so ago. There's something about the typewriter that I do miss, although what exactly it is I'd be hard pressed to say. I learned to type in an extremely short space of time and have often considered writing about it, but the problem is that my particular learning method was quite illegal.

    I think it's the sound that I miss. The clacking and dinging and that "ziiiiip" sound as you returned the carriage. Also the ink that always seemed to find its way onto your hands. Computers leave no trace on the person using them. Typewriters often left indelible marks.

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  39. I made it through college and almost all of grad school with my trusty electric typewriter. I'd love to say that I miss the thing, but I don't.

    Still, my kids think that messing around on a real typewriter is the height of fun. They like to see the words unfold on the paper as they type them.

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