Typewriters to Laptops

 

When I was 16 I my mother told me that I was going to learn to type. No argument allowed. She said I would always find work as a typist, even if it were only temporary until I found something more interesting.  

She was right. At 16 I was hired as a cub reporter for the Lawrence Eagle Tribune and more than once when I was between jobs, I  temped.

The typewriter at the paper and in my mother's home office was what would now be called a clunker. My father at one period had an Underwood franchise in Bluefield, West Virginia. His office and the repair shop were on the second floor in mid city. I remember his bathroom sink had Lava Soap which was black and gritty, nothing like the Ivory soap we had at home. 

In the early 2000s when I went to the Christmas Market in Stuttgart, I was at the end of my NO-Buy year. There was a man selling posters of the typewriter featuring my father's former franchise. For 15 Euros, I bought it, NO-Buy year or not. It hangs on the wall of my Nest in the South of France.

A high school graduation present was an Olivetti portable. I studied (revised if you're a Brit) for exams by typing my notes from all my lectures. 

 

It worked.

 

My grades were As and Bs and unlike many of my classmates, I finished early enough to get a good nights sleep. When I moved to Switzerland, I often passed the Olivetti factory, then deserted in Yverdon, when I trained from Payerne to Geneva.

My model appeared in the film The Godfather. 

My first - after getting my degree - job was producing monthly newsletters about new businesses in six areas of the U.S. The IBM Selectric had proportional spacing. A little whisker helped line up the copy for corrections. Typing was like caressing silk in comparison to the Underwoods, which was more like pushing tanks up hill.

I interviewed for a job and they told me I needed three years to learn proportional spacing. I ended the interview. If they were that stupid, it would have been a bad match.

Living in Boston, my housemate and I started a typing service for professors who wrote their articles on yellow legal pads. There were at least seven colleges and universities in walking distance of our house and over 40 in the city. We rented an IBM Selectric and invested in golf balls to give our clients a wide choice of fonts.

All was well until the rental company demanded the typewriter back. Although they would have replaced it with a new model where our golf balls wouldn't fit. It got nasty when we refused.

I wrote IBM's president explaining our situation. 

Within a week we went to our front door to find two IBM VPs standing there offering to help. They'd flown in from New York. A call to the rental service and we were given the old model. As they left, one presented his card. "Please, please, please if you have another problem, call us directly. Don't write the CEO. 

We promised and imagined the conversation they must have had on the flight back.

What they missed, seconds after they unlocked their rental car, was our Japanese Chin Albert running down the stairs with a used tampon in his mouth.

Typewriters have long been replaced with a series of computers from humongous machines sitting on my desk to lightweight laptops that I tote between countries and cafés. 

I am grateful to my mother for the early lessons. I am even more grateful not to worry about fitting in footnotes, using Tipp-Ex to paint over typos then lining up everything so the typo was history.

Editing and rewriting my fiction is so easy, although I did learn Find/Replace had to be carefully checked. When I changed a character's name from Lou to Gino my manuscript had a state named Ginouisiana. Blouses became BGinouses. 

Over the years, I learned a number of word processing programs. A good friend, who knew three as well as she knew her own kids, made the comment, "Word processing programs are basically like men's sex organs. There are just minor differences."