Give Me a Keyboard That Clicks...

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.

So Many Notebooks, So Little Time

I have never gotten over my childhood delight in stationery counters.

My first encounters were at the stationery counters at Newberry's five-and-ten. This was my special store when I was small, because they sold all the inexpensive (29¢) Whitman books down in the toy department. With great anticipation I would take the escalator downstairs to see if there was a new book based on Lassie or a new Donna Parker book, prepared to clutch it in my arms and plead "Please, Mom?" As I got older and learned to write, I would prowl the back end of the store as well, near the bakery, where they kept the paper and pens. Hardbound composition books, spiral bound notebooks in various sizes, lined pads of paper, account books, all stacked up in tempting piles, and overhead, hung on dull metal hooks on evenly-holed masonite board, were rows of pens: Bic, PaperMate, and more, and then lines of crayon boxes, eight, sixteen, twenty four of Crayolas and another off brand. One didn't buy the off brand; the waxy colors were insipid and greasy, and nothing smelled like a Crayola. I mostly didn't have any money, but I did stand staring at those notebooks and dreaming of all the stories I could write in them.

Once Newberry's has gone to the big department store in the sky, my new haunts were Grants and Woolworth's. After Newberry's their selections seemed tawdry, the pens and pads not so numerous, joined by flimsy plastic protractors and thin metal compasses that were required for school back then, and a few lines of rulers. However, one tradition remained: each Christmas I would set down 67 carefully hoarded cents and buy myself a new box of 68 Crayola crayons (because Mom could never quite understand why 48 colors were Just Not Enough). Across the street in Woolworth's another dollar or two bought me a blank calendar, which I would draw for the upcoming year illustrating my own stories. It was something fun to do in the sweet vacation days between Christmas and New Year.

Next I made the acquaintance of college-ruled notebooks, which meant whatever stories I was writing could be longer. I didn't abandon the wider-ruled notebooks, about 8x7, but after that they were relegated to short stories; the newer, smaller notebooks with their narrow lines, about 7x5, were for longer stories—real books, in my mind. These were, at first, very difficult to find, until I found a treasure trove at Thall's Drug Store on Reservoir Avenue. The original layout of the small store had the stationery on a curved aisle, where I could usually gloat over all the notebooks in peace. (Thall's remained a favorite until they closed, but I never did quite forgive them for going to the supermarket layout of straight aisles; the original was so much cozier.) They had a particular kind that worked the best. (When they stopped carrying them, I had to hunt further afield; thank goodness for Douglas Drugs!)

After picking out a notebook, then came the best part: evenings sitting cross-legged on my bed cozying up in the winter or with the windows thrown open in the summer waiting for a gasp of a breeze, or watching television on the sofa with my lap desk, writing a new story and illustrating it every few pages. I never wrote "girly" stories about clothes and boys, even when I reached the supposedly difficult teens. My stories were all proper adventures, populated by adults and kids, with spies, hairsbreadth adventures, impossible odds, and obligatory talking animals with great "Lassie to the rescue"-type endings. Not Beatrix Potter animals who wore clothes and recited rhymes, but dogs and horses who took part in the adventures but still acted like dogs and horses. All of them were friends, and, even more than that, were "family by choice." It didn't matter if you had a bad past and now wanted to do good, or had a physical problem, or were just having a bad time. Every one was ohana, as they later said in Lilo and Stitch, and that “...means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”

And because it was a book, a real book, I made sure the story ended with two sheets of paper left in the notebook. When I was done writing I would unbend one end of the spiral wire that kept the pages together and unwind it. This way I could take the two spare pages to make a front and back cover, the titles carefully lettered with my happily hoarded Flair pens and the back cover with a short synopsis of the story, just like a proper book. I'd carefully letter the title on the spine in black and color it, then put the spiral back in and Scotch tape the covers on.

One of my rare stationery treats was the downtown store for "E.L. Freeman, Stationer." It was lettered in gold on the door of their store that was either on Weybosset or Westminster Street, away from the hustle of the department stores and the shoe stores and the five-and-tens. With the proliferation of Office Depot and Staples, I'm not sure stores like this even exist any longer. It was where the businesses downtown—the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, City Hall, the department stores' business offices, etc.—ordered their personalized stationery and bought executive writing instruments. You wouldn't find Bic pens in Freeman's, no sir! They carried Cross Pens, fresh from the factory outside the city, or British and French fountain pens, and you could have them engraved, or purchase them with an elegant pen holder and have that engraved.

When you walked into the store the first scent that hit you was that delectable odor of fine paper, a beautiful perfume only equaled by that of a bookstore. Paper samples were arranged along one wall. You ordered letterhead stationery here, for your store typist to enter correspondence on, with matching envelopes, suitably return addressed. In the rear were leather-covered ledgers for both single and double-column accounting, appointment books, staff-lined music books, fine notebooks ready to be emblazoned with your company name. This is where I went on my yearly odyssey, when I outgrew the locked diaries they sold in Woolworth's, to buy a new datebook/diary for the coming year. They were bright-red covered, a whole map of empty days ahead to fill with events of your life, whether it be crowing over a week in Lake George or crying over the death of a pet. The important things of your life set down for remembrance.

The Flairs come from Sam's Club now, and the diaries and the "proper books" sleep in Xerox-paper boxes, but every once in a while a row of pens or a pile of notebooks will take me back to Newberry's shelves or the sweet, sweet scent of Freeman's.

That Darn Spot (a.k.a. The Neverending Story)

Mom was a neat freak. There was no doubt about it. Once she went to work little things had to fall by the wayside, like dusting the house each morning, but before that time everything had a feather duster run over it daily. I dreaded weekends because one of my chores was having to take everything off the bureaus and the parlor tables and use a cloth (and sometimes the Pledge); between the bureau scarves, the small gold-framed photos, the knicknacks, clocks, flowers, and of course the saint statues it was a long and tedious job.

(Dad always liked to tell the story about their bedroom. Just as at our house, so it was at my maternal grandparents' house where Mom and Dad lived for four years, saving up to "go housekeeping." As in many Catholic homes, the top of the chest of drawers was lined with religious statues: the Infant of Prague, the Sacret Heart of Jesus, the Blessed Mother. Plus there was a statue of St. Anthony on the bureau and of course a Crucifix over the bed. He used to say he felt downright guilty "doing what comes naturally" in front of Jesus!)

The house also had to be dustmopped daily (thank goodness for hardwood floors!), the parlor vacuumed, the dishes washed and wiped. If doing the dishes or making the beds on a morning we were going downtown might make us miss the bus, we missed the bus! Mother never left a dish unwashed or a bed unmade. I learned to make a bed in two minutes and forty seconds, and that was with the top sheet and blanket tucked in, the bedspread correctly positioned and flat, and the pillows puffed up into long bolsters at the top of the bed with the spread covering it like frosting on a Swiss roll. Plus there was the laundry to be done, and the ironing after that. Mother ironed everything. About the time I got old enough to iron, she had given up ironing panties, men's shorts, and the sheets, but the pillowcases had to be ironed! And not only did I have to iron my pants, but they had to have a crease in them, like Dad's trousers (even the ones he wore to work in the factory every day). No one was ever going to gossip about my Mom's house- and family-keeping!

Back in those days I would spend any time not watching television in the living room in my bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I had "Lassie," my little 12-inch television set in the window, for some time, then shifted into the corner about the time I went to work and bought my nice wooden art desk, which, of course, became a horizontal magnet, and I seldom used it. Instead I would sit "tailor-fashion" with the beanbag lap desk someone had bought me on my lap, with my pens in their containers and my crayon box on either side of me, and a composition book in front of me, writing stories.

I couldn't write stories in just any old way, on a tablet like John-Boy or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Instead, I bought spiral bound small college-ruled notebooks, first at my favorite drugstore of all time, Thall's Pharmacy on Reservoir Avenue, and then later at Douglas Drugs on Atwood Avenue. (Both of these places fall under Places I Still Miss: Thall's which had TV Guide earlier than anyone else, a big plus when the Fall Preview came out, and Douglas Drugs, where I bought my first copy of "Starlog.") These were written using the beautiful Sheaffer ballpoint cartridge pen Mom bought me when I went to Hugh B. Bain (pens were supplied in elementary school only), with embellishments provided by several sources, including every single color of Flair pen ever made and my "fountain" pen with the black ink (it wasn't a real fountain pen, which you fill from an inkwell, but a cartridge pen). Every so many pages I would illustrate a scene from the story, and then when I finished, two pages of the composition book were left blank. When I did finish, I bent one end of the wire spiral so that I could "unscrew" it, remove the two sheets, and then replace them on top of each of the cardboard covers. I could then make a cover for my book and a teaser for the story on the back, just like a proper novel, and tape the cover papers to the cardboard.

It was the fountain pen which caused all the trouble, because if a fountain pen has one weakness, it's that anything absorbent, like paper—and like cloth—will wick the ink from the nib of the pen if it is laid on that type of surface. So I was very careful, especially after an accident with an old blouse (and thank God it was old), never to leave the fountain pen lying with its point against paper or cloth. Besides, a big blot of ink on paper or cloth meant less ink in the cartridge, and those were expensive. It was in my best interest to be careful.

Nevertheless, one day Mom found a big black spot on one of my sheets. Yes, you can guess what she accused me of doing. In vain I protested that I never left the pen lying on the sheet, that if nothing else it wasted the ink. No, she insisted, it must have rolled away and you didn't see it...there's nothing else that could have made a big black spot like that...on and on. And on and on. And it didn't go away after a week, or a couple of weeks. Every time we changed the beds and the blotted sheet came up, she shook her head at my wastefulness, and I protested that it wasn't my pen..."well, then it was another one of your pens!" was the retort. If something else went wrong and I would protest that it wasn't my fault, she would bring up the ink spot on the sheet. I would never, ever, hear the end of that sheet.

Over the course of another couple of years, tiny black spots appeared on some clothing. Once it was Dad's pants, so Mom figured it was something he had gotten into at work. Polishing jewelry was never a clean job and Dad had to scrub his fingertips with a nail brush when he finished for the day. Once it was on the pocket of my chestnut-colored pants and again came the accusation about the fountain pen. The fact that I usually sat on the bed to write after I'd changed clothes for the night and was in my pajamas didn't appear to dawn on Mom. It was all the fault of that fountain pen! I sewed a cute little bee patch on the pocket and hoped that was the end of it.

So victory was very sweet the day a big black spot showed up on Mom's sheets, and not only one of hers, but on the bottom sheet, which spent 16 hours a day covered up with a flat sheet, a couple of blankets, and a spread, none of which had an ink spot on it. And she knew very well I almost never went into their bedroom, and no one could sit on that bed without making a racket; it had bed springs instead of a box spring and they squeaked like the devil.

Mom was positively gobsmacked. Me, I gloated. "I guess you think I deliberately set my fountain pen down on your bed, right?"

So she called my cousin Timmy, who was a washer repairman. He reported that the clutch was bad on the washer and that would make it, occasionally, leak oil into the tub—which meant that big "ink stain" on my sheets was an oil stain instead.

Needless to say I was pretty happy, having finally vanquished the specter of the leaking fountain pen.

Don't you know that as Mom got older she started telling that old story again? Apparently, some family legends never die...