At the storage unit: the Smith-Corona
When I moved to smaller digs over a decade ago, I stored a couple of boxes of my stuff and some pieces of furniture in my ex-husband’s storage unit.
Actually, at the time he had two storage units, both of them 20′ by 20′ and jammed to the gills with stuff. In other words, he’s a packrat, although a few years ago he managed the Herculean task of reducing the two units to one.
And lest you think it odd that I was storing some things in my ex-husband’s garage-away-from-home, let me add that by the time this happened we were good friends again.
Now my ex is determined to get an even smaller unit, maybe 10 by 15 or even 10 by 10 (goals!), and to get rid of many of the things that are mouldering in the present one, along with random mouse turds and spider detritus (as well as a few living spiders). I volunteered to help him through with stern yet inspirational talk, as well as to remind myself what things I have in there and perhaps get rid of some of them. I know that two of those things are my great-grandparents’ absolutely gorgeous crystal from the late-1800s, and some of my parents’ china too, as well as the aforementioned items of furniture.
But who wants crystal and china these days? I don’t think my son does, and I don’t think my nieces and nephews do either. I’ll get rid of the few items of really cheap second-hand furniture I bought when my husband and I separated and I started living on my own, and keep some of the older stuff.
But then I spied the Smith Corona electric typewriter. I had forgotten about that. It looks a great deal like this one, and if memory serves me, it worked until I retired it when I got a word processor in the 80s. But oh, the memories I have of that typewriter! It took me to the end of high school and right through college. The moment I saw it forlornly standing there in that storage unit, I pictured it on the small desk in my dorm room freshman year of college – and me sitting in a wooden chair, chain smoking and typing away through the wee hours of the morning, having postponed my work till the last minute. Where was my roommate? Maybe she was asleep in the other bed, or maybe she was awake and studying, too, since it was probably near finals time.
When I was pressed for time I didn’t write drafts; I simply typed the thing out on that typewriter until I reached the required number of pages. Somehow the product I churned out usually seemed coherent enough. It was risky business, though, because – for those of you who might be young enough to have never typed on an actual typewriter yourselves – there was no good way of correcting errors. We did have erasable typing paper, but it was somewhat flawed and you had to catch any major errors pretty quickly or the formatting was wrong. Same with white-out.
I still remember my wonder and excitement the first time I used a word processor – when I made a correction the rest of the text magically rearranged itself.
And as I stood in the storage unit staring at the Smith Corona in its heavy case, my memory went back even further to its predecessor – my mother’s old mechanical typewriter. She had been a secretary for a while and was a master typist, and could also take shorthand. What skills! Her fingers flew over that keyboard, which was even more impressive because the machine didn’t respond to a soft touch and made a satisfying sound as each key struck the paper. She could use carbons. She could do just about anything on that thing, although the keys sometimes stuck and had to be pried down again and even sometimes untangled from each other.
I learned to type in junior high because it was required. We learned on IBM electrics with the keys covered so that we couldn’t see the alphabet. Our teacher was a pretty itty bitty woman with a stick she beat on the floor at times, and a will of iron. Terrifying to defy her. We had timed drills in which five words per minute were deducted from our scores for every mistake we made. But I learned to type, although never as well as my mother did.
My mother’s old typewriter looked very much like this one. But you won’t find it in my ex’s storage unit. My mother must have given it away long ago. She didn’t keep a lot of things. But she did save an enormous number of photos and letters, some of them going back to the 1850s. A couple of months ago I bought a bunch of plastic storage cases to use when I sort them out. Soon; soon.
Wish me luck.
“…. although the keys sometimes stuck and had to be pried down again and even sometimes untangled from each other.”
Originally, typewriter keys were alphabetical. Typists, mostly women of course, were so fast that keys frequently jammed, and even were damaged. Led to rearranging of letters. Didn’t solve the problem completely, but slowed it down.
BTW, whiteout invented by a woman.
Oh, I had a Smith-Corona electric in college! An electric was an upgrade from the manuals that many students still used.
My grandfather wrote monthly family letters to each of his seven children, typed on a manual Underwood with six carbons. To be fair, each month he rotated the copies, from the original to the sixth carbon, for each family. So, on the seventh month, we got a letter we could scarcely read, in the certain knowledge that next month we’d be promoted to getting the original.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Does anyone else remember that sentence?
I have a tender heart for family antiques, so it grieves me when things like china and crystal become a burden rather than a pleasure. This is not to criticize your homemaking decisions, but is just an observation.
However, if you think no one in your family will want these things, giving them to a woman’s shelter would be a kindness. If I had to flee my home, then set up housekeeping again with nothing of my own, some lovely old china and crystal would be a boon to my sore heart.
HH, it’s a charming idea, but the sad truth is that no one uses the old good china and glassware, because they must be hand-washed. I have my grandmother’s wedding china from 1910. I don’t use it, and I expect my daughters won’t want it, either.
My parents gave me a reconditioned typewriter after I completed a summer school typing course in high school. I used it for decades, but the word processing ability of computerized typing made it obsolete. What should I do with it? Give it to Goodwill?
Writing on a computer, with the ability to instantly correct typos and other errors, has made writing much easier for me.
Before typing, teachers incessantly complained about my handwriting. Some time in my adult years, I saw an elementary school composition of mine. The number of erasures, trying to improve my handwriting, was rather high. Yet as an adult, my handwriting isn’t that bad, at least to my view.
My parents gave me a reconditioned typewriter after I completed a summer school typing course in high school. I used it for decades, but the word processing ability of computerized typing made it obsolete. What should I do with it? Give it to Goodwill?
Writing on a computer, with the ability to instantly correct typos and other errors, has made writing much easier for me.
Before typing, teachers incessantly complained about my handwriting. Some time in my adult years, I saw an elementary school composition of mine. The number of erasures, trying to improve my handwriting, was rather high. Yet as an adult, my handwriting isn’t that bad, at least to my view.
BTW, whiteout invented by a woman.
Not just any woman. The mother of Monkee Mike Nesmith invented whiteout.
Gringo, a side effect of word processing technology is that many children are no longer taught cursive writing at all. They can print, and type, but cannot sign their names in cursive and in many cases have trouble reading cursive.
Quite a bit of deja-vu…
In my grandparents’ bedroom sat the old Underwood (probably from the 30s)…and in the adjacent bedroom, my aunt’s, sat the S-C portable, usually enclosed in its light-blue case, though (or was it gray…?)….
Funny…
(Yep, that Underwood sure was a struggle…)
The Electronics Department at the small college I worked at assembled the first set of computers for the staff. When we distributed them every secretary, and I mean every secretary, asked how they plugged their typewriters into them. They were all skeptical when we told them that the word processor on the computer was infinitely better. Six months later, except for the oldest, they were skeptics no more.
I had to make do with a manual portable typewriter in college, but when I graduated, my family gave me an early 1970s-model Smith-Corona electric to see me through grad school. I still have it, though it’s been years since I last used it. It’s blue, just like the model in Neo’s link. As for Wite-Out, I couldn’t have gotten through my term papers without the stuff. I was delighted that word processors came along by the time I wrote my dissertation– no more having to calculate the amount of space at the bottom of a page to have enough room for footnotes, in addition to the ease of correcting typos by simple back-spacing.
Some differences between Neo’s experience and mine: 1) I never took typing lessons; my typing technique is still basic hunt-and-peck; 2) I was never a chain-smoker, nor indeed any type of smoker, though I well remember when grad school seminar rooms accumulated a lung-choking amount of pipe and cigarette smoke by the end of two hours of presentation-and-discussion time. You could always tell when a seminar had ended by the cloud of grey smoke wafting out into the corridor when the door to the room was opened. I was glad when smoking was banned in classroom areas in the 1980s; I didn’t have nearly as many winter colds after that.
I’ve read that when one company started using typewriters, shortly after they were introduced, one of their customers was highly insulted to receive a typewritten letter…did the company think he was an illiterate, who couldn’t read writing??
PA Cat:
I only smoked my freshman and sophomore years of college, and only chain-smoked when writing papers or in class, and never inhaled. I liked to blow smoke rings.
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
I do. But not that way… I learned it as:
“The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.”
My husband never learned to type. He was in the military, and had to depend on a secretary to type _anything_ that needed to be typed. Over the years, it caused such irritations that I made sure my sons all took typing. As it turned out, I was preparing them for the computer age, but obviously, had no idea at the time!
Also have the old china and crystal. Including a china set that was my grandmother’s. She died about 1922+/-. My sons’ wives seem totally uninterested. Of course, they probably have family china they don’t use as well…so I guess I can’t blame them. I don’t have any of my MIL’s china…good thing!
And an “oh yeah”…
I have an old typewriter as well – somewhere. Not electric…just the old mechanical type. Wonder if it’s possible to buy ribbon?
SueK…I homeschooled my two boys through high school in the mid-90s to the early 2000s and I made sure both of them knew how to “touch type” as we called it back in the day. They are both keyboarding whizzes in their 30s!
I learned to type in what was called “intermediate” school in OC California. It was 7th & 8th grade. I learned on a giant black Royal manual and got pretty fast and accurate!
Before I retired at the end of last year, younger women in the office would often marvel at how fast I type on a computer keyboard and that I don’t have to look at the keys. But even more interesting to them were my 10-key skills! Since I went into bookkeeping and then accounting pre-computer days, I was (and still am) a speed demon at both keyboards and 10-keys.
Those were the days!
In the 1980s, working at various jobs, I used a (as I remember) “IBM Correcting Selectric II” — very luxurious, with a “ball” — as I remember it cost about $1200 to buy. Google says this is about $4300 in today’s (or yesterdays?) money. We even rented one for a brief time, for something like $100 a month, during one project.
As word processors moved in, my husband’s work upgraded, and they were *giving away* the Selectric typewriters. We carted one off, unable to believe our luck. As we too had PCs by that point, it was already obsolete, but it was hard for me to comprehend that it wasn’t a treasure, a windfall. It was purged, of course, fairly soon.
I downsized massively when I moved in 2020, so I don’t have a storage unit. But if I had, I would frequent thrift stores, and use the unit to store all the beautiful fine china that is going for a song. Perhaps making the same Selectric mistake, but to throw out such beautiful and irreplaceable stuff is really sad.
I also have grandmother’s, aunt’s and mom’s good china and silverware. I actually use the “good stuff” on a daily basis since I don’t mind handwashing a few dishes. I do use my mom’s china the most since it can go in the dishwasher per the Lenox website. Using the good stuff just makes me feel better. I also use cloth napkins for the same reason as well as I don’t like using so much paper. However, I don’t use the china coffee cups that often since the liquid always chills down so fast!
BTW, when I was working on my mom’s house, my sister told me that her daughters didn’t want anything from the house. I told her to at least take some pictures and ask questions. Yup, they both asked for items that they remembered from the home.
My father insisted that we all type. He got us an IBM Selectric when I was in JRHS. I thought that thing was so cool. I would just sit in front of the TV typing away at whatever struck my fancy. Sometimes I would do what was later called ASCII art, but I was the computer. Still a lousy speller though.
A,S,D,F,J,K,L,Semicolon
Throw that carriage!
Fingers on the home row keys!
I remember Mrs O’Reilly and Junior High School typing to this day.
Thanks for the memories.
Lest we forget: Leroy Anderson’s light orchestral piece, “The Typewriter.” It won’t take too many more years before the program notes for concertgoers will have to explain the original purpose of this percussion instrument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW8dGwa2zRw&ab_channel=SabineSchneider
” “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
No w, h,t,or g? ”
?????????????
broWn
T H e
doG
Takes me back, too. My memory of HS typing class is like Neo’s, but with one addition. They allowed certain classes to listen to the WS, and typing was one. (1969, New York. And I was anti-Mets.)
I was the fastest male in the class, and earned money (actually, beer) in college by typing papers for others.
When you think of it, there aren’t that many types of technology which were so ubiquitous for almost a century, then disappeared.
There was an interval between typewriters and PCs during which dedicated word processors thrived; there were some pretty successful companies that focused on the market, of which Wang Labs was a particularly high flyer…but few if any survived into the next era.
This is an interesting thread! Typewriters and china. I have no stories about china, but appreciate you-all’s (?) recollections about it. I’ve always lived solitary, so have had no need of it; but some of you make me want to acquire some.
Typing… I took typing my freshman year in high school, one year’s worth, which turned out to be sufficient. It has certainly served me well. At some point, well after I had gotten my own Mac, I forget the circumstances, but I sat myself down and learned to type using the Dvorak layout. That has also served me well, I would say better than the Qwerty, though I have equal facility in both.
Our HS typing class had 4 or 5 IBM Selectrics at the time, the rest of the typewriters in the room being Olivettis (all electric in any event, this being in the late eighties). I once threw up all over the keyboard in the middle of a class practice session after I had come from the immediately preceding gym class with nausea. That made a bit of a scene. (I forget if they were able to save the machine.) Other than that, I enjoyed typing class a lot; it was a nice way to round out the school day.
I have my mom’s old Royal portable. The case mildewed being saving decades ago, but the e typewriter still works, of ribbon could be found.
I hated typing with every fiber of my being. I discovered the joys of fixing papers and dealing with footnotes by cutting up and taking things together and then photocopying it. I’m still really angry about things that have changed in the MLA handbook:
1) No one does footnotes now that it is easy to do them. End notes are the way to go
2) The header is no longer right justified. I have a longish last name and back spacing through it to get the right justified header…
The last class I took, which was a year ago, I refused to left justify the header and use end notes. I think it’s just being extraordinarily lazy now to do that.
I remember learning “Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume” which is the French pangram.
My mother typed so well and so fast that she typed my high school term papers while I dictated in normal speech. As a surgical resident and surgeon, I dictated all operative reports and histories and physical exams. I never learned to type but have written two books and numerous articles using the hunt and peck method.
On those photos, I’m sure you know there are services that will digitize them. It’s not cheap if you have hundreds or thousands, but it will preserve them from damage from water or fire, and allow you to print fresh copies and share them with relatives. We’ve got hundreds of my father’s old photos sitting in storage, and will at some point have to reckon with my mother’s, as she’s going on 96.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
That’s the phrase I typed over and over once upon a time. I’m assuming that has gone out of style.
I had the most beautiful little Olivetti typewriter, pale gray. It weighed almost nothing, seven pounds, I think? It went with me through four years of college and, after a little while, three more years of law school and a year or two after that, before things changed and I moved on to one of the early IBM PCs, with, if I remember correctly, a 10 MB hard drive. Oh, how I loved that little Olivetti. I still remember its light slim grace and how gently the keys tapped on the paper. It seemed to communicate that writing and typing was easy, swift, light-hearted — just tap it out! I wish I could remember what happened to it.
I took touch typing in high school, as everybody headed for college was supposed to do back then. I got it quickly and could rattle along at 60 or 70 WPM, then considered pretty impressive. Our teacher, Mr. Wahl, had recently gotten back from service in Vietnam. He was mostly calm but occasionally unpredictably unhappy and volatile. One day he passed around to our class of naive 15- and 16-year-olds a Polaroid showing himself triumphant with his foot planted on the back of a dead Vietcong soldier, whom he said he had killed. A selfie of the late 60s/early 70s. After that, he disappeared for a while and we had a substitute. I can’t remember for sure if he ever came back. But I have always since then been able to type pretty doggoned fast, thanks to him.
I still miss that beautiful little Olivetti.
I had that exact same typewriter via my mother for college and grad school, though I only used it a couple of times after getting my bachelor’s degree. I gave it away at some point in the early 1990s.
I was trying to add a little bit to my Olivetti post about china, but ran out of time. I have a few pieces of my grandmother’s Haviland Limoges, translucent and fragile, gently scalloped with a delicate pattern of flowers in an unusual combination of pale blue and coral/orange on a creamy ground. It gets used, at most, once or twice a year, on the rare holidays when everyone’s at home, but it has to be hand-washed and hand-dried, so most of the time it sits unused on the top shelf of my corner cupboard, looking ethereal and old-fashioned and entirely unlike anything else in my home. My kids don’t want it. I’m not sure I want it myself, but it makes me think of my tiny, lady-like, somewhat stern grandmother, who grew up on a farm with a school-teaching mother, a fiddle-playing father, a field of barley, a stream that ran chattering over rocks and a cow named Brownie. She tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to teach me subtleties of manners, and she managed to preserve a certain idea of gentle femininity that I’ve never quite forgotten, even though it has no relevance to the life I’ve actually lived. So I’ve kept the china through the years, carrying it carefully from home to home. I use it once in a while, and think of my mother and grandmother and the other women who went before me. I guess my kids will be stuck with deciding what to do with it when I’m gone.
Jimmy:
I already have photos of the most important photos on my computer. I may try to make some sort of book out of them. But I also want to keep the photos themselves, the very old ones.
Philip Sells:
I bet they had to scrap that typewriter!
I learned to type in HS, maybe Jr or Senior yr. I had a portable one in College, not sure of the brand. When computers came around I improved my speed and actually accuracy (lets not talk about spelling and spellcheck). I am a touch typist, seldom look at the keyboard. I have one of those ergonomic ones which I like.
We don’t have China or Chrystal from our parents but have acquired over the years two sets of China. One is Noritaka (spell?) that I bought through the PX system while I was on the ship in the Med. The other one is English Fine China we bought in London when we were on a trip for my Wifes retirement celebration. We have numerous pieces of Chrystal, mostly seconds bought in the UK over time. We try to eat dinner at our Nice Dinning Room Table every Sunday, using the Good China often and Chrystal Wine Glasses. I have a dozen Whiskey Glasses that I use for my Single Malt.
The bad thing is we have no one to leave it all to, having no children. We have discussed this with friends that do have Children and they say the kids don’t want it either. What a terrible shame.
Learned on a manual in typing class. Remember setting margins, etc, from the center of the page?
I possess a handsome, sky-blue Olympia manual first used in grad school so long ago, and a few years back had occasion to clean it up and show it off to the world: The mens’ chorus I sang with asked me to write its spring show, a tribute to the United Services Organization. The second act opens in the dark theater, the only sound the emphatic slap of my Olympia’s keys, then a male voice-over describing the ravages of the Blitz. Curtain and lights rise to reveal war corespondent John Steinbeck, pecking away in his cramped London digs.
A brief but satisfying renaissance for what to me is a beautiful object. Made In Germany, ironically enough. (Steinbeck’ fine ‘Once There Was A War’ attests to his genuine admiration for the thousands of USO entertainers — most long forgotten — who brought a touch of home and a ray of sunshine to soldiers on land and at sea.)
Mom was at the top of her secretarial school class in typing. She could type somewhere well north of 100 wpm with low error rate. On a manual typewriter.
Cute video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9k9PKN0YMY
All the students in my junior high class had to take typing. Extremely valuable. The other sexist feature of that class was that the girls had to take home economics, and the boys had to take shop. Now I never had much use for the wood working that we learned, but the first third of the class was drafting. That turned out to be very useful to me.
I recall getting my first PC in early 1985 for the word processing capability. The strange thing was that composing and handwriting at the same time were so ingrained in my mind that I had waste many hours at the keyboard struggling to compose and type. It came eventually.
I’ve got grandma’s Bavarian china. Used it twice a long time ago. Sigh.
Fun topics. Good luck Neo!
We had a mixture of mechanical and electric machines. You would start on one and had to swap halfway through the school year.
I always preferred “Sphinx of black quartz: judge my vow!”
I learned to touch type, as they called it, in the 9th grade when I was 14 years old. Didn’t have much use for that skill in HS, all our work was done in long hand. In college as a computer science major I had to type, on punch cards, programs and data and such. I decided then to resurrect and hone my touch typing skill.
In the early 80’s I worked as a programmer and was fortunate enough to work on systems on which code was created “on line” (no more punch cards). Then in late 1984 I went to work at Wang Laboratories, erstwhile inventor of the multi-user word processing systems. I worked with people at law firms, insurance companies, and financial services firms; word processing was a god send to them. Eventually a number of PC and desktop competitors, including Microsoft, appeared and leapfrogged over Wang in word processing.
I still type using the techniques I originally learned when I was 14 and can produce a lot of text in a short period of time. The best part of computer composition compared to a typewriter, for me, is the ability to simply write and create without concern for structure and context – you can always move the ideas, in text, around to make a coherent story.
Fascinating reading all the stories this post has generated.
Taught myself to type on old Remington, similar to your mother’s?, at age 10, but never learned to type numbers, or the 10 key pad. First term paper was on Chile, for some reason, where I first used that typing skill for school work.
But first jobs you wrote your reports, etc., long hand, with cross outs and insertions, handed it to the department secretary/typist, proofed and corrected that output, etc.
First word processors, coupled to dot matrix printers, allowed bypassing the typist stage, but after finding an error in a 12 to 30 page printout, you still became impatient for the corrected version to spit out. Sometimes you could keep the correction contained to a single page or two, rather than reprinting the “whole thing”.
Now my mind and eyes and fingers seem to be more disconnected than previously, such that I end up typing more errors, or miss or insert words out of place because my fingers do not keep up with what my mind wants to see on the screen. And spell checking can show some of the errors, but typing “that” for “than” does not cause a problem, at least on this comment field.
Getting rid of things. It’s a big issue in our abode. With luck we may last another four or five years. Can’t take it with us, so in the last two years we began unloading things that we’ve been saving all these years that we no longer use, and our family members don’t want. Dishes and glassware – no market, so given to Good Will. Confederate antiques passed to my wife by her great grandmother. At one time quite valuable. Today, not so much. Sold online to the highest bidder. Clothes we will never wear again – ski outfits and down jackets – off to Good Will. My beloved fly rod, reels, tackle boxes, and dozens of favorite flies – sold at a garage sale. Furniture, books, old electronics, etc., etc. – all given away. We still have some items, and our energy is waning. Our daughter may have to get rid of much of what’s left.
Typing, ach. I took it in high school and weas never good at it. Fortunately, I never needed it during my years in the cockpit. (Thank goodness for Navy Yeomen and airline secretaries.) When computers came out with word processing programs, I decided to try to write about some of my life experiences. Hunt and peck have worked okay, but I’m sloow, very slooow. It would take me a full day to do a typical Neo post. And she does several a day. Wow! And now we know how she does it. She learned to type and type accurately, a skill that has served her (and us) well.
Your four words about your “stern yet inspirational talk” tell me volumes about your relationship to your former husband.
I could be wrong!
My mother was a secretary and one summer when I was in HS I sat down with her portable typewriter and typing book and taught myself to type. That came in very handy in college because I had a job that used teletype machines. Anybody remember the old teletype machines? The communication center used to be full of them. They became obsolete in the 1980s.
I took two years of typing in high school! The first year was just touch typing. Like Bkhuna, I can still hear the voice of my typing teacher calling “A,S,D,F, J,K,L, semi…” The second year was for people who wanted to learn secretarial skills. We not only perfected our typing but we also learned how to format business letters, etc. This class was very special because we had the brand new IBM Selectric. It had built-in error correction, the equivalent of white-out in a stripe on the ribbon; invoke it, backspace, and type over the error. Miraculous! There were some businesses at the time that didn’t allow the use of this method, the same places that didn’t allow whiteout — the result wasn’t considered professional enough; the standard for serious secretaries was zero errors.
I remember when word processors came out. It was indeed a wonder to be able to correct mistakes immediately and invisibly. I remember there was a lot of discussion about whether the word processor would catch on. Some people said it would be a problem for secretaries, because executives would type their own stuff, now that it was so easy. Others said executives would never, ever touch a keyboard. That part seems funny now but for a while that was a defining thing: if you were really in management, you never touched a keyboard.
I still have my dad’s old upright typewriter, a 1936 LC Smith. He earned a living on that thing, as a writer, and so did I when I was first freelancing. Now I find it difficult to use — it takes a fair amount of strength, and you have to apply that strength very consistently to get a rhythm going. It’s enjoyable once you get used to it. At least it is for me. I’ve always enjoyed typing, there is something calming about finding and keeping that rhythm.
A few years ago I had my old typewriter refurbished by Tom Furrier, who has a repair (and sales) shop in Arlington, MA. Here’s a story about him: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/15/lifestyle/only-typewriter-shop-town-has-its-hands-full/
JJ…have you tried the speech-to-text apps? Some of them are good enough that all you have to do with the keyboard is to fix a few errors.
Ray…”Anybody remember the old teletype machines?”
Here’s an AT&T ad from 1932, introducing their new TWX service:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/61181.html
…basically, a combination of email (print the message out and the recipient can look at it late) and text messaging (typing back and forth). Private-wire teletype services long predated this product, what TWX added was that any subscriber could connect to any other subscriber.
I use a 1950 Smith-Corona Silent Portable to address envelopes. I still pay most of my bills by check (yup, fossil) and some vendors don’t include a return envelope.
It’s the exact same make and model as my mother’s old typewriter, right down to the taupe metal housing and the green plastic (Bakelite?) keys. That’s the typewriter she used to type up my father’s dissertation in the early 1950s and I used to teach myself typing by the hunt-and-peck method in the 1970s. I’m a fast 2-finger typist. Mom’s typewriter is at the family house in Massachusetts. It needs some work; Mohawk Office Equipment in Greenfield still does typewriter service and repairs. They also sell refurbished typewriters. (For anyone who’s in that neighborhood and interested.)
Ribbons: Amazon sells them.
I understand that Tom Hanks is a typewriter user, fan, and collector.
Neo: good luck on the family sorting. A lot of us are in that situation.
Despite over 60 years using a keyboard, I never learned to type, but I do have a very quick hunt-and-peck, about 20-25 wpm.
Whitehall:
That was a bit of a joke. He has stated that he wants me to coach him about this, in order to get rid of more stuff, and yet is resistant to change.
When I was on the space program when the mission was a go, we would receive a “go TWX”. For classified missions it was a classified “go TWX” received through an encrypted telephone line. TWX was pronounced Twicks.
I worked in a library for awhile entering Hebrew and Yiddish titles into the catalog. The keyboard we used was a regular American English keyboard, but the computer read it as a Hebrew or Yiddish keyboard when whichever was selected. We had cards available so you could find the correct key. Talk about hunt and peck! After awhile I finally memorized both configurations, and didn’t need to look at the cards. After that, I felt confidence in myself to touch type in English. My accuracy isn’t so hot, but my speed has increased dramatically.
David Foster, thanks for the tip. I may just try that.
We use fancy china and glassware every week for the Sabbath… but not the silver. Don’t want to clean/polish it. My mom used to bring out my grandma’s stemware, but now post-Corona all their circle is afraid to socialize, so no guests for Sabbath dinner.
The late Avram Davidson wrote a short story inspired by the euphoria he felt when he got his first electric typewriter. The title is “Selectra Six-Ten” and it can be found in “The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection” a post-humous collection of his work that is well worth reading. It is available on Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited.
Back in the late 1960’s I learned to touch-type at Navy radioman school. We learned morse code simultaneously, so the code went into the ears and out through the fingers without having to think much about it.
Judging by the comments, it seems likely that many of the commenters would enjoy both this article, and the comments made:
https://americandigest.org/i-had-a-fortress-once-in-paradise/
Allow time…both article and comments are long.
Ha, ha…we have my wife’s college manual typewriter in the basement (because I trip over it from time-to-time).
Haven’t seen it in 30+ years, but I have a really high end metal Pickett slide rule, complete with leather belt holster someplace too. Would love to find it to show grandson#1 (age 4 – currently in astronaut phase) what engineers used to design Apollo, but doubt I find it until we move.
As I recall… ‘driver’s ed’ and ‘typing’ were both 1/2 credit classes in HS. Took both and glad I did to this day. Had several ‘collections’, at some point interest faded and gave away. Reckon I’ll leave with what I came with : )
Oh my. We seem to be (almost) the same person! That Smith-Corona was the exact model (and color) I used in college at about the same time as you. And the Underwood was used by my dad. He was a pharmacist and could type “Take 3 times daily” with two fingers on that mechanical keyboard faster than anyone else could using all ten.
I can relate to almost all of the comments!
Going to college and then my first real job spanned the manual typewriter through the early commercial computers and thus to Word Star.
One of our sons has my father’s manual that he did all his office accounts on in my childhood, for a memento.
No one has yet mentioned that Dan Rather’s “Bush Memo” hoax was busted because the alleged National Guard writer’s text was revealed to have been produced by a word processor, not on the electric typewriter which was the only thing available back when it was supposedly created.
Wikipedia has a fair account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
I figured they were fakes as soon as this appeared in the news:
“Lt. Col. Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.”
It’s rather touchingly nostalgic to see that even the MSM took up the case after the right-wing “pajama clad bloggers” produced enough convincing evidence.
I have no question that the story transposed to recent years would have gotten the same treatment as Hunter’s laptop: covered, with a pillow, until it stopped moving (per Iowahawk).
@ Kate > “no one uses the old good china and glassware, because they must be hand-washed.”
There weren’t many other options for our grandmothers, so I guess that didn’t factor into their choices.
We opted not to get fancy china for our wedding, although we did select a nice pewter “silverware” set. AesopSpouse’s mother gave us a nice crystal glass set anyway, which one of our daughters-in-law has now.
I’ve since bought and “turned over” several old china sets from the thrift store just because I like to look at them in my china cabinet. We generally use disposables for family meals at holidays, because washing that much really is a chore.
So — we also have too much stuff, but after paying storage units for warehousing my mother’s prized possessions after she passed away for 3 years instead of the anticipated 6 months, we moved it out to one family member’s house or another, mostly ours, and it’s been integrated into the rest of our material goods.
This summer AesopSpouse built a “storage unit” in our back yard for those things that are: keepsakes that the kids or grandkids might possibly want; useful, but only once in a while (holiday decorations mostly, sports gear, seasonal clothing, etc.); and (more of this than we had 2 years ago) supplies for the Zombie Apocalypse that the Democrats are encouraging.
My mother bought me a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe for college. I lost it when most of my young valuables were stolen while in storage in a friend’s basement.
Later I bought a handsome turquoise Olivetti manual with a lovely action. I avoided the electrics because I was halfway convinced civilization was due to collapse. I wanted to type up my poems and stories without electricity.
Since then, I’ve let go of a lot of my possessions in my various moves, but I still have my Olivetti.
Ah, keyboards, china and downsizing!
Touch typing in 10th grade; moderately good at it, but never learned to do the numbers. Now the white letters have worn off my computer’s A, S, D, L, N, E and C, so I’d be lost if I couldn’t touch-type. My father always had the latest technologies when they came out, including a Vari-Typer to compose his first Doctoral dissertation on, because it was the only way in the early fifties you could produce Akkadian text, as well as the more common Greek, Arabic and Hebrew texts. Of course the accents had to be on dead keys so the carriage didn’t move when you hit one.
Yes to teletype when I was embassy press officer for a White House visit (Jimmah’s mother) after the local operator left for the day and the White House Press Corps just HAD to file a story about something she had done that day. Wasted a lot of time learning how to correct an error.
Now I’m typing with. one hand until shoulder surgery heals.
We’re down to just a few pieces of wedding-era china, and no one will want what’s left when we go. But the children don’t want the silver either, and at one time that was pretty pricey. Tastes change, and what was once valuable is no longer.
I had an Olivetti throughout High School, College, and into my very early thirties. I bought myself for my 32nd birthday an electric typewriter and I felt so modern (this was in the mid 1980s!). I took a typing class in High School (Autumn of 1969) and my mother told me that learning the keyboard would be the most valuable skill I would get out of High School – she was right. I still cannot type more that 20 -25 words a minute.
I remember in the 1970s and 80s how awful it was typing up a resume (I had to type several different versions of my resume as most people did) as well as cover letters when I applied for jobs listed in The New York Times classified section.
Acchhh!! This entire post is right up my alley. That’s what I get for going out of town for the weekend! Oh well, in case anyone is still here…
I am a helluva typist. My mother was a keypunch operator and taught me to type at an early age. I also took a class. I’m sure my mother typed 120wpm or more, I probably was close to that pace in my prime. On a manual.
In High School I helped a friend’s family move his grandmother’s belongings when she passed away. His mother noticed that I seemed enamored of the grandmother’s typewriter when I carried it to the moving truck and the family later gifted it to me. An L.C. Smith manual circa 1910? 1920? I typed all my High School and Undergrad papers on it, as well as many for friends. I still have it.
I also taught myself shorthand from a book.
Mike K.,
I can type what people speak, in real time. Without looking at the keyboard at all. Freaks some people out. My wife is in the medical profession and all her reports have been typed by me as she speaks the words.
The people who really amaze me are U.N. translators who listen to a speech over headphones in real time and orally translate in a different language through a microphone. In real time. I knew a Japanese woman who was going to school to learn that as a profession but gave up because she felt it was driving her mad.
I hate to judge on limited information, but I highly recommend pushing your Ex to get rid of everything in the storage locker(s). And the same goes for you, neo.
“She who owns little is little owned.”
As many have pointed out here (including yourself) there is a good chance none of your relations will be interested in the things, but there are people who would make use of them. Why keep them hidden away in a locker when they can be out in the world, being useful to others? And, regarding any value, what is your ex-husband’s time worth? I know several people who are convinced this or that thing is worth something, or important, and they just need to find time to dedicate to researching it, or fixing it, or getting it ready, or listing it on-line… Years go by as the owner of the storage facility gets rich off the monthly payments…
That gorgeous crystal and china aren’t gorgeous in the dark, covered in spider webs and eggs. Get them out in the light and in the hands of someone who will cherish them, as your mother and grandmother did. Bring them to a woman’s shelter. Drop them off at a charity drive. Offer a niece or nephew half of any proceeds if they clean them up, research them and list them on-line. The niece or nephew will learn something about their ancestors, learn how auctions work and be excited to make some money in the bargain.
As some commented, my writing style changed when I finally got access to a word processor, in graduate school. As neo wrote, using a manual typewriter I had to be perfect, first time. I would often handwrite drafts prior to typing the paper to hand in. But, with a word processor, not only did I not need to handwrite anything (which was great, because I type so much faster than I write), but I could basically type as ideas occurred to me; stream of conscious.
I quickly learned writing with a word processor was all about editing. Type a bunch of stuff quickly. Get a lot of words on the screen. Then read them and move them around. Get rid of what’s not needed. Expand and expound where necessary. I often find my third or fourth idea (usually third) is more relevant than what I started with, so I’ll copy and past the third section to the beginning then use the former first section as filler. I imagine I would now struggle with writing a first draft in real time if I knew I could not quickly rearrange and edit it.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You wrote:
“I hate to judge on limited information, but I highly recommend pushing your Ex to get rid of everything in the storage locker(s).”
That made me laugh. Indeed, your information is limited (not your fault). I’ll augment it by adding that I’ve been doing just that for close to 50 years (that’s how long I’ve known him). He is a hoarder, although not the worst hoarder I’ve ever known. Hoarders are very very very difficult to change in that regard. Very. They do not listen to advice.
I don’t really have much, comparatively speaking, and one of the reasons I haven’t been able to get rid of some of it is that it is so covered with his stuff that it cannot be found until he deals with the unit. He seems determined to do so now, but it’s like pulling teeth, and that’s why he’s enlisted me to help.
@ PA Cat > “Lest we forget: Leroy Anderson’s light orchestral piece, “The Typewriter.” It won’t take too many more years before the program notes for concertgoers will have to explain the original purpose of this percussion instrument:”
Our HS band played that in the final concert every year.
Someone was called up from the audience, who just “happened” to have a daughter in the band, and she sat in Dad’s lap and “played” the typewriter.
It was always the star turn of the show.
How many coders know that the ASCII characters for “carriage return” and “line feed” that were (are?) used to instruct printers on how to format text actually had a physical meaning once upon a time?
@ SueK > “Judging by the comments, it seems likely that many of the commenters would enjoy both this article, and the comments made:”
Some of the people here MADE some of those comments!
Gerard Vanderleun is a treasured member of Neo’s salon, and the memorial essay for his brother is one of the best of many excellent posts on his site.
Thanks for reminding us.
One advantage to manual typewriters vs word processors and computers: the whole writing, editing, and revision process was so burdensome that a lot of people had *secretaries*. And many of those secretaries did a lot more than typing, they helped to organize the information flow of the office and prevent chaos.
Some people still have someone playing that role, typically called an Executive Assistant, but it doesn’t go as far down in the organization as it used to, and I believe that had actually been harmful to productivity.
There has lately been a vogue for execs having a ‘chief of staff’, and such roles have even been created in some fairly small startups. I’m dubious about this latter trend.
The only typewriter whose name sounds like a brand of cigar…