Confessions of a type-a-holic
I try my best to keep my typewriters to an even dozen
Whenever I get smug about avoiding adult beverages for more than three decades, I remind myself that I am riddled with addictions.
We all have them.
I carry at least five pounds on my hips from my love of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in summer. Eaten, whenever possible, with a waffle cone.
I’ve never been able to give up potatoes for long.
Ditto potato chips.
But my true addiction has only worsened in the last 10 years, and for proof I just look around my office.
I am a type-a-holic. My addiction is … typewriters.
Yep. Those old-fashioned machines that once made up the background music in every newsroom and office. At least my addiction is relatively inexpensive.
My habit started slowly, as most do.
Long before Tom Hanks made owning typewriters fashionable, I bought a folding,
1915 typewriter at a flea market for $100. It was 1990 and I was so intrigued by this beautiful little Corona that I couldn’t resist. This brand of typewriter was the favorite of war correspondents in WWI and WWII, among them the reknown journalist Ernie Pyle. It weighs only about two pounds and folds up neatly into a 9-by-10 inch package three inches deep, easy to keep in its small case or tuck away into a backpack. When unfolded it can be used anywhere, including a foxhole.
Soon after my purchase, a friend offered to introduce me to William Zinsser, the author of “On Writing Well,” the bible of how to write clear and precise prose. I’ve met plenty of famous people without so much as a goosebump, but the prospect of meeting the God of Good Writing made me so flustered that I brought my little Corona to show it to him as a conversation starter. It worked. He loved the little machine. I relaxed. We became friends.
The second typewriter I bought has always been too heavy to haul to show-and-tell. It’s an Underwood No. 5, which was used in a Chicago secretarial school in 1925. I snagged it for $55. It weighs 30 pounds but it is gorgeous, black with gold lettering.
That was it for many years, but as addictions do, mine only went dormant. It was ready to come roaring back at a moment’s notice.
That’s what happened when I discovered auctions online, connected to estate sales within 50 miles of my house. One of my first buys was a cranberry red, 1939 Sterling Smith Corona. I got it for $25. It was in near-perfect condition.
When I bought a 1944 Remington Rand at a store in Western Massachusetts for $140, I knew I was hooked. The Remington is a basic black with a few cute red keys, but types in very large, 16-point type and must have been used for typing speeches, sermons or radio broadcasts for anyone who needed to read off a page with ease.
Like any addict, I do my best to exert control. I keep my working machines to an even dozen. In case of the Zombie Apocalypse, when computers will be rendered obsolete, I will be prepared to start a newsroom once again. But in the present, when it comes to repairs, I’m on my own.
This was not always the case. When one of my typewriters fell off a shelf one day and the carriage return seemed broken, I knew I needed help. I found it about an hour from my house, at the New Haven shop of a man named Manson Whitlock.
Mr. Whitlock was then a youngster of 90 who started his career in 1930 working in the typewriter department of his father’s bookstore. I lugged the typewriter up a steep stairway and entered his workshop, which was as neat as an Army barracks before inspection. Mr. Whitlock wore eyeshades on his head, had on a clean white shirt, vest and a tie. I told him my woes and he immediately reached over and lifted one end of the carriage, pointing to something bent that I hadn’t noticed. He said he would fix it, but warned that he was slow. When he called two months later, he said, “Your invoice will be higher than expected. I hope you don’t object.” As I added hundreds of dollars in my head, he said, “The bill is $26.”
Amazing.
Mr. Whitlock died 10 years ago and since his passing I have joined every typewriter maintenance group on Facebook, if only to learn the best way to remove the layers of nicotine that many of the machines come with, a throwback to an era when a cigarette dangled from the lip of every typist.
My typewriters have come in handy in more ways than one.
When I type on one of these machines, my writing is often more thoughtful. The act of using a typewriter slows down the process. Robert Caro, the great author of “The Power Broker,” and the multi-volume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, still writes his superb books on an electric typewriter (using carbon paper to make a duplicate!), and I say, good for him.
I’ve completed a memoir of growing up in Buffalo, New York, based on diaries I kept as a teenager. (My agent on this very day sent it to 12 publishers. Stay tuned.). Whenever I got stuck during the two-year-long process of writing and rewriting, I would turn away from the computer, pick a typewriter and start typing.
When finished I would unroll the paper, stick it in a drawer and walk away for a few days. It would always break through my writer’s block and enable me to write again on a computer, using just a fraction of the words I had typed out on one of my trusty antiques.
We lose something when these beautiful machines are discarded and unused.
And many kids are fascinated by them.
My granddaughter Ellie picks a different typewriter to bang on every time she visits. Happily, she prefers a pretty red Olympia Splendid 33, manufactured in the 1950s and far from fragile. When she starts typing, I can’t stop smiling.
She doesn’t know yet that typewriters are throwbacks to a different era. She doesn’t see them as hopelessly uncool. Ellie only knows that they make very satisfying noise and can make dozens of letters on paper that she can then take out and show her mother.
It has occurred to me more than once that I may be creating another addict. With the shamelessness of age, I don’t give a damn. Pass the cookie dough ice cream!
Twenty-odd years ago, my husband showed our young niece how a typewriter works and she was amazed that the words on paper instantly came right out of the machine - no printing machine required. "Wow!" she said. "Is this the latest thing?"
I've always wanted to own a typewriter — I don't know if its my age (generation?) and the need to throwback to the "early days" but there is something so fascinating about the physical click-clack tap-tap-tap sound as the keys hit the page. I've not yet purchased one, I would love to write small notes using one. I hope your memoir gets published, I would love to read it. I see the appeal of the red Olympia Splendid 33 - it looks like a very sturdy piece of work.