Let's talk typewriters!

HALLIE: I remember my love affair with the Remington typewriter that sat on a typewriter table (remember those?) in our family room. I loved the way its metal body smelled -- a lot like the hood of our Buick. I loved coming to the end of a line, hitting that metal handle, and sending the carriage return flying back to start a new line. I remember how dirty my fingers got when the ribbon ran out, and it was time to reverse the spools. How I wish I still had any of the dreadful stories and, heaven help me, poems, that I rolled off it.

My mother and father were Hollywood screenwriters. They wrote a movie ("The Desk Set") with a computer in it named EMERAC (IBM's was UNIVAC) which Katharine Hepburn refers to fondly as Emmy as it spews reams of useless information and inadvertently (and presciently) fires everyone.

As a thank you, IBM sent my parents one of the first electric typewriters. (We once got a case of Baskin & Robbins ice cream when they put that in a movie; ah, for the days before paid product placement.)

She used that electric typewriter for years to type out movie scripts, the lines centered on the page, with three carbon copies. White-out and copy machines hadn't been invented.

I remember everything about that machine, and especially that there was no lever to make the carriage return. Just a button that sent if flying (they hadn't yet invented the key ball).

And then, how sleek my first portable electric seemed, the one I took to college. In those days you have to remember, we thought bowling balls were portable, and this thing weighed only slightly more.

When I see those bracelets made of old typewriter keys (I have one) it makes me sad to think of all those mutilated typewriters, moldering away somewhere.

Do you all remember your typewriters, and was it a love or hate relationship?

ROBERTA: Oh boy, Hallie, you're making us show our age! But I did get a little black typewriter (not electric!) in college, most notable because it had keys with French accents on them that were specially attached. I majored in French literature and had to write a big junior

paper in French and then a senior thesis--so this was a necessary luxury! It was a very cute machine and I wish I'd kept it.

I don't have such fond memories of the key punch machine we had to use to record hundreds and hundreds of data points for my graduate school research. Though it was fun when that tedium was over and you got to slide the stack of cards into the machine and watch the results come out.

JAN: I remember when I started my first job at the News-Tribune, we had IBM typewriters. I remember swearing, A LOT. The first thing I noticed when I converted to a word processing system at the Worcester Telegram, was that I no longer swore when writing. There was no frustration. So no, no fond memories of typewriters, except..... My brother who passed a way tragically at age 26 used a typewriter to write letters. And he always made a carbon copy. He was a prolific letter writer and I have all his carbon copies. So I thank the typewriter for that!


ROSEMARY: I don't remember typing that much - I must have been a terrible student! My typewriter was a small, orange portable as I recall. My sister had the same little number in blue. We shared one long desk that my uncle had made and with the orange and blue it must have looked like the office of the Mets or the Knicks.

As it happens, while cleaning out the home of a recently deceased aunt, I just scored a beautiful old Royal and it's now in my office. It still works and the old dear even had extra ribbons, $1.29.

RHYS: My relationship with typewriters was much more hate than love. Having to retype a page with 3 carbon copies when one made a mistake, which I did frequently having never taken a typing course.

I was editor of my college newspaper and we had to type skins for the duplicating machine. Ah, the swearing that went on in the early hours of the morning when that blankety blank skin had to be retyped.

Then I was doing PR for the California Nurses Association (yes, I've had a chequered career) and had to turn out a newsletter every night after the last session of their convention, again on a wretched duplicating machine. By then my language had become even richer.

I remember applying for a job in Hawaii and having to take a test on a Selectric. I complained that I'd only ever used a manual typewriter. The large Hawaiian lady put her hands on her hips and declared, "Honey, there ain't a manual in these whole islands." Didn't get the job.

The day they invented PCs was bliss for me. Now I can type as fast as I can think and changes are so easy and I never, ever swear! Well, hardly ever.

HANK: My Gramma Minnie taught me to type...gosh, back in 1959? I bet it was. She had an Underwood, I think it was, that came in its own boxy suitcase. You'd flip it open, put it on the table, and type away. I LOVED it.

Here's how long ago it was. I practiced by copying out jokes and essays from her stack of Readers Digests. So funny to think back on that. I was big on doing the vocabulary words---what was that section called?

And of course when I started as a reporter, you could hardly hear anyone talk over the clatter of the typewriters in the newsroom. Now--it's silent.

DEBS: My parents worked from home, so the clickity-click of my mom's typewriter and the ding of the carriage return were very much part of my soundscape when I was growing up. I, however, didn't learn to type until I took a break between institutions of higher learning (my very checkered educational career.) My parents sent me to secretarial school so that I would learn to do something that "could actually make me a living." We used IBM Selectrics, and I passed all my secretarial courses with flying colors, except--typing. I could never get my speed up to the required level with no mistakes.

Now I type faster than I can think, and I don't bloody care if I make mistakes. I think word processing was the greatest thing ever invented. And I do make a living typing, which I think is nicely ironic. No nostalgia for typewriters here, although I do have a wonderful vintage Underwood that was a gift from friends. I keep it on the same desk as the computer, just because I like the juxtaposition.

HALLIE: Oh, Debs, your description took me back. Whenever I got home from school, I knew if my mother was home from the sound of the typewriter, too. That, and the smell of Kent Cigarettes. Didn't we all once-upon-a-time smoke? A blog for another time...

Please, share your memories fond and otherwise. The QWERTY lives!