Growing up in the Typosphere

Let me start this great endeavor by getting a bit autobiographical, typospherically so to start with, as that seems most germane to the scope of things here. Basically, I grew up around typewriters. From my early days and through my high school and college days, they were as much a part of my memory's view as the TV in the living room, the pushbutton light switch by the front door, or the magnolia wallpaper in the piano room in my grandmother's house. It is only natural then that I should feel a sort of nostalgia for those machines as they are familiar and nice connections to the past. 

The reason for all this typewriter exposure is that my mother. She was a legal secretary, and as such one of her main work duties was to type, and according to all sources she did that very well in that fast and accurate sense of things. I suppose that might have been a sort of curse since it meant that she was often asked by friends and family to type various letters and documents, though I never noticed her minding at all. She seemed proud of that skill she had, as well as her command of grammar. 

Doing all this typing meant that she had to have a typewriter at home, and although I know there was a big old black on somewhere in the house in my earliest of earthly years, it was a late 1950s Smith-Corona 5 series Portable Electric, which seemed to appear in the house when i was in third grade, that I remember first and, I'd say, best.  It was gray with ivory-colored keys and had, to my young eyes, nice lines. It looked sort of friendly and inviting. It is odd how vivid my memory of the machine is, so vivid that I can even remember the texture of the finish on the case and the scratches at the bottom rear of the machine, where the clamp in the case gripped the machine overzealously a bit too often.

One of the things I liked about the Smith-Corona was that I was allowed to touch it, that is I was allowed to try to type, jamming the keys up and all, and no one seemed particularly upset about it. That all stopped, however, when I was in junior high, and my father bought my mother, per her informed choice, an IBM Model D, the office standard of its day and the standard in her office.

The IBM struck me as a tank. It was massive and very serious in appearance, as if it was designed to say "this is not a toy." It looked nice enough in its own way, but I hated that I was not allowed to touch it. "You'll ruin the touch," my father would say. No on mentioned the "touch" being damaged on the ol' Smith-Corona when I would muck things up on it, and yet this IBM must be treated delicately. A bit odd, I thought. Anyway, I think that a less offensive way to have kept me away from the machine would have been to say it was dangerous. I mean, it was. Unlike the Smith-Corona, that though while electric had a manual carriage return, the IBM had an electric return - push the return button, and BAM! that carriage would shoot to the right like a battering ram, smashing all in its path. It was also really sensitive in terms of typing, so jamming up the keys was a matter of course, frequent course, for a non-typist. Uh oh. I guess I sort of let out that I was not completely obedient about the hands-off rule. Gosh.

Anyway, one of the perks of not being allowed to use the IBM was that if I needed something typed, my mother would do it for me. That means that every club newsletter, membership card, or other goofball young teen project of mine would end up being work for her. Again, she did not mind this since she seemed proud of her work, but I am sure I was a bit annoying pacing around like a frustrated and demanding artist, while she tried to figure out what I was looking for. Of course, once I took typing class in high school and had to access to typewriters outside the home, this arrangement ended. 

In addition to the end of my free typist services, two other things happened in my own typosphere at the end of my secondary education. First of these was that my mother replaced "the tank," i.e., her IBM Model D, with a new machine, and equally tank-like IBM Selectric II. This surprised me in that the Selectrics were ball-type typewriters, and my mother had spent much of my teenage life condemning that particular. . . technology. She was firmly in the basket camp. When challenged on the point, she explained with a mix of she had gotten used to them, they were better than they used to be, and they were what all the offices were using now. That last point was a big one, as it was the same reason she had bought the Model D earlier. There was also the fact that the Selectric allowed you to change typefaces and point sizes by merely buying and snapping in a new type ball, which I must admit to have found sort of cool. 

The second big development was that I bought my first typewriter - a Hermes Rocket with Russian Cyrillic keyboard. Now, you might think it odd that my first typewriter would have a Russian keyboard, especially if you knew that I did not even speak Russian. I was studying on my own, and that's about it, but when I walked by the computer shop there on the ground floor of the Spring Arcade Building in Downtown Los Angeles, back when it was all offices upstairs rather than apartments. Looking at that machine, I could not help myself. I had to have it, and so I took my hard-earned money, earned from my paper routes, summer days at my uncle's hardware store, and the occasional oddball job here and there, and bought it! Of course, European goods were still cheap back then, so it did not set me back to a painful degree. 

The funny thing about my Russian typewriter (made in Switzerland, as Hermes Rockets generally were) is that I actually used it. I learned the keyboard layout and practiced a lot by copying the magazines and flyers that the priest from the Russian church across the way would give me. I would type out the exercises in the Berlitz Teach Yourself Russian textbook, and I even tried to write a primitive diary per my even more primitive Russian abilities. I am pretty sure that by the time I was ready to graduate high school, I was the best, if not only, Russian language typist in all of Hollywood High School. Unfortunately, I did not keep the Russian studies up, losing steam, oddly enough, once I actually took a couple of Russian classes, first at UCLA Extension, and then at Los Angeles Valley College. And now about all I can do is read things written in Russian out loud. . . without any idea, for the most part, what the words mean. 

I am not sure what eventually happened to the Hermes, but it vanished in one way or another. Did I donate it? Sell it? Give it to a needy Russian somewhere along the line? I really don't remember. What I do remember, however, is that as a typewriter, language issues aside, I didn't much like it. It felt plasticky after a while, and the touch was weird for me. I also didn't like how the case was more of a snap-on cover, making it seem less professional, which for some odd reason seemed important to me at the time. On top of all that, I didn't like the very cold gray color of the body or the almost translucent whiteness of the keys. Oh well.

To make a correction of sorts, I said earlier that the Hermes was my first very own typewriter, but that is not completely correct. I had a typewriter of sorts as a kid - a Christmas gift from my mother. It was one of those tin machines with no working keys, just embossed images like that in the Mickey Mouse machine shown below (mine was not a Mickey version, though). The actually typing was done via a selector wheel at the center of the machine. You would select the desired letter in the wheel, and then press a button to print it. Needless to say, it was a long and tedious process to type anything more than a word or two in length. 

A few years later, while I was a college student, I decided to take a Swedish language class at UCLA Extension. I forgot what made me do that - maybe the popularity of ABBA, but at any rate, I did quite well in Swedish, and since I looking to buy a typewriter for school purposes, I figured I might as well get one with the additional Swedish keys: å, ä, and ö. I asked my teacher, A serious but kind woman by with the surname Drott-Huth, if she knew where I could find such a beast, and she did, telling me of a shop in Studio City. I went, they had one, and so I bought it: a Facit Privat, known in the USA as the Facit TP2, though the front nameplate on my machine said only "FACIT," unlike the machine in the photo below. 

The Facit, made in Sweden, was a good, strong, tank-like manual machine. It was a bit on the heavy side, but it was very dependable and pretty easy to type on. Despite the presence of the extra Swedish keys, there was nothing essential missing that hampered my typing in English other than the lack of a dollar sign, but small enough matter. The Facit remained my main, and only, typewriter for the entirety of my undergraduate college years and longer, finally being retired from duty a few years later when I decided to do a one-year post-bacc linguistics program at UCLA. I am not exactly sure what I did with it then.

At any rate, I was at UCLA that I decided to go modern by buying an electric machine - an Adler. I cannot for the life of me figure out which model it was, but I do remember that it had an auto-correct function and had an interchangeable daisy type wheel allowing one to change fonts if desired. It was similar to many Brothers and Royals of the day, so I think it might simply have been a rebadging of one of those. At any rate, I did not love the thing, but it got the job done, and when the program was over, that machine was sold to a classmate who was staying the extra year for the MA degree program. 

It would be years, many years, before I would even think about typewriters again. You see, that one year in that UCLA post-bacc program coincided with the release of the Apple Macintosh, and after having put my hands on one in the student store in Ackerman Union - and every day thereafter until I finished the program, it was the only wordsmithing machine I could think of until I finally got one a few years later - a Mac SE.

Typewriters would be back on my mind after a few decades or so, though, but we'll save that for another post. Stay tuned. . .