According to stories that have popped up on Facebook, typewriters are back "in." One story was accompanied by a photo of a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe in gold, the same typewriter that I received as a much-coveted Christmas gift in 1971.
Oh, it was my old crush all over again.
I fell in love with words at a very young age. Even as the tiniest child I would ask my mother when she returned from a trip downtown "Did you bring me a book?" rather than "Did you bring me a toy?" From when I was midway through elementary school I ran through spiral-bound notebooks at an alarming rate, filling them with fantasy/spy/animal stories populated with all my favorite characters from television series, a place where Timmy and Lassie knew Maxwell Smart and John Monroe, plus later characters I created who were based on favorite actors like Michael Keating and Tom Baker. But my greatest wish was a typewriter.
Dad, however, was very insistent: I couldn't have a typewriter until I learned to type (it wasn't "keyboarding" in those days); he didn't want to see me hunched over like a vulture in hunt-and-peck mode. Happily, among the delights of ninth grade was typing class; everyone at Hugh B. Bain learned to type, even the boys who just took shop. Seated in front of gigantic Underwood manual typewriters, heavy, stolid, metal, and grey, Miss Rossi set us through exercises of "F-F-F-F space" and "J-J-J-J space" and so on, adding upper rows and lower rows and numbers and symbols until muscle memory took over our typing skills. We eventually surpassed "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to incomprehensible sentences with plenty of Z's and X's and digits with dollar signs and percentages.
I discovered a handicap for myself early on: Miss Rossi would pass by my desk and admonish "Keep your fingers on the home keys!" Alas, these manual machines were made for full-grown women and men with large hands. My hands were always small and my fingers short and even my own classmates' hands were larger than mine; I simply could not hold down the shift key and still reach to keep my fingers on the home keys. When I demonstrated this to Miss Rossi she sighed, having no easy answers for puny hands, and told me to do the best I could. Plus typing on a manual typewriter was a lot like driving a car without power steering; you needed a lot of strength to keep it going. Talk about a ten-finger exercise (or rather a nine-finger one, as the left thumb was rather useless)!
Dad and I had several rather epic disagreements over the years, and the typewriter for Christmas became one of them. The budget in our household being very tight, Dad wanted to buy me a Royal portable, which was a perfectly serviceable model (legions of reporters on the battlefield, like Ernie Pyle, would type out World War II reports on battered Royal portables while mortars exploded overhead and bullets hissed by) and would only cost $80. I, however, had been casting covetous eyes at the typewriters at Ann & Hope [think Kmart, the Rhode Island version] for many years now and had set my heart on a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe as pictured above, mainly because it had the newest keyboard, one with a number 1 and an exclamation point key.
Younger keyboard users will not remember, and their older counterparts may have forgotten, that the QWERTY layout changed in just a short time, from when I learned to type in 1971 and when I returned to school for a year in 1981. Note the typewriter above has the quotation mark over the 2 and the apostrophe over the 8. On the key to the right of the colon and semicolon, where now the quotation mark and apostrophe reside, is the at sign (@) and the cent sign (¢). The asterisk (*), which is now over the 8, was instead over the dash, and the underscore (_), now over the dash, was over the 6. The caret (^), now over the 6, did not even appear. However, there was a bigger difference; up until the 70s, most typewriters did not have a key for 1 and !. Instead you typed a small letter "l" for 1 and if you must type an exclamation point—a habit our English teachers steadily tried to break us of—you typed a period, then backspaced and typed the apostrophe. Me, I wanted that 1 and ! key. Dad demurred that he did not have the extra money. I said I'd save it myself, and that's what I did, and handed it over to him soon after my birthday, and on Christmas morning that shiny gold Galaxie Deluxe (in a hard-sided case that made this "portable" typewriter weigh a ton) was under the tree. (I wanted the blue one, but one can't have everything.)
"Writ" served me faithfully until I fell under the spell of an electric Smith-Corona in Murray's [think Best Buy, Rhode Island style] around 1980. I have forgotten the model number, but this typewriter came in both pica and elite type, and having fallen in love with the latter in high school, I was determined to lay my hot little fingers on the elite version. Its other fascination was that it was the first typewriter after the venerable IBM Selectric to have a changeable "ball" so you could type in different typefaces. It practically made me giddy; I could actually type with italics instead of having to underline words to emphasize them or talk about book titles.
(Wait...rewind...pica and elite? Typewriters, of course, did not have proportional type like computers. Your standard typewriter for years wrote in one typeface, the durable Courier, at 10 pitch, in other words 10 characters per inch, and no more and no less than ten. Elite typewriters still used Courier, but a slightly smaller version at 12 characters per inch. Intoxicating to someone who wanted to put more words on the same amount of paper. I was working by then and I did buy that typewriter, and I enjoyed it so that I named it "Treasure," who typed out innumerable letters to friends and several hopeful manuscripts.)
Times change. I later bought an electronic typewriter at Lechmere (for the short time that Massachusetts institution was here in Georgia before it closed), but ended up not using it much because suddenly it was the age of the computer. Using a Commodore 64, a daisy-wheel printer (a creature which composed letters from tiny dots of ink in cacophonous and headache-inducing noise), and a primitive word processing software called Paperclip, I took my first steps into word processing. Next at work came Wang dedicated word processors, with an amazing thing inside them, a "Winchester" disk. This meant you could save, and correct, anything you typed, without having to resort to a floppy disk drive. Finally came a succession of homemade PCs. Back in those days, you could buy "clicky" and "nonclicky" keyboards, and the nice feedback of the "clicky" version helped you hark back to the halcyon days of the sharp snick-snick-snick of metal typebars against the platen [roller], but eventually those mostly disappeared, leaving you with mushy versions including the dreaded "chiclet" keyboard.
But it was with fond memories of Writ and Treasure and several years of IBM Selectrics at work before automation consumed the office that I recently visited MicroCenter with a handful of gift cards kindly given to me upon my retirement and bought a gaming keyboard, the last bastion of the "clicky" generation. Sitting there with the familiar bounce under my fingers and click in my ears, the years fall away. It's suddenly a pleasure again to type.
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