The good old days of writing with typewriters

Learning that the Skagit County Historical Museum has a new exhibit featuring old typewriters, “Hunt and Peck,” I assigned news staffers Bill Reynolds and Marissa Conklin to meet me Friday afternoon at the museum, dragging Bill and me back into our formative years and exposing Marissa to a world so foreign she might as well gotten there by horse and buggy.

Marissa was to photograph Bill and me staring at, comparing, oohing and ahhhing, and reflecting on back in our days when we used manual typewriters. Those were the days.

Practical as I am, I took a typing class at DeVilbiss High School in Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up. The class was mostly girls, but I was not smart enough to take it for that reason. No, they were training, vocationally, preparing to be typists or aspiring to be secretaries. Me, I was going to college and wanted to be ready for term papers.

I thought I took the semester long class as a senior, but I remember the girl sitting behind me was a senior. Her boyfriend was in Vietnam and she was going to marry him when he came back. I was years behind her. Maybe I was a sophomore.

My senior year I bought a 1920s L C Smith typewriter sold by Smith and Corona, a big hulking, black monstrosity that had the carriage return on the right side so you pulled the platen (rubber roller) across. That was an inferior design: pushing it from the left is less strenuous.

Marissa did not know what a carriage return was, what it did or how to work it. The exhibit features a typewriter with paper in it for kids and elders to try. She did.

Who remembers “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” or why practicing that was important? Who can define QWERTY? How about explaining how it has nothing to do with OMG and challenging young people to come up with its meaning?

My Smith and Corona is in my office. I have lugged it everywhere I have lived for almost 50 years but have not typed on it for 40-plus.

Before I went to college I bought an Underwood portable at the same typewriter store across the street from the downtown Toledo library. That’s seemed both the perfect and natural location for it. In 1973, typewriter stores were in no way equivalent to Apple stores. First they sold used machines dating back to, well, the 1920s. Second, they were very mundane, kind of a cross between a hardware store and an auto repair shop.

I recall my Underwood as a 1950s model, therefore less expensive than buying new. It was not sleek but classic. The metal finish was a pebbled texture. a portable, that meant compact and coming with a boxy carrying case, hard with a cloth finish that was ragged along some of its corners.

I wrongly remembered it as of German manufacture. No. It was made in New York.

I correctly remember the top row of number keys starting with two. See for yourself at the exhibit. As a portable, cutting size and weight was key. Since a lower case “l” looks like a one, each with a horizontal base and a hooked top end, it substituted for the one key. Many portable models were designed that way for decades.

I remember being proud of that typewriter, though I don’t think I loved it. It went back to Toledo with me when I graduated. Sadly, Someone broke into my apartment and stole it. It could be pawned. Pawnshops were probably the second largest outlet for typewriters into the 1980s, when price of the machines fell off the cliff with the advent of personal computers. A lot of typewriters were probably thrown off cliffs, as having no value.

I have not typed on my Smith and Corona for decades. The ribbon is older than that and dry as dust. Typing will probably put holes in the ribbon.

Oh, a typewriter ribbon is a yards long piece of cloth impregnated with black ink and wound between two spools. Every key stroke advances the ribbon so the next key hits fresh ribbon, good for dark letters on the page and long ribbon life. When the ribbon wound fully on one spoil, it was taken out, the spools reversed and the ribbon fitted into slots at the center of the platen for days or weeks of letters before the process was repeated.

No one ever used Google to look up a word while typing.

The 40 or so typewriters in the exhibit were built between about 1900 and 1955. They come from 13x companies, mostly American, with a couple of English brands and two German, one with a fascinating Nazi character on the “5” key.

Many were promoted as x quiet and silent and x something deluxe, but the advertising feature that was most true was being pitched to college students on a payment plan.

I can’t say if my Underwood cost $20 or $50. I am almost certain my parents made me pay for it out of my savings account, two old fashioned concepts from an age long gone.