Granddad, What’s Typewriter?
by Chuck Peek
Well, Grandson, my experience of typewriters is this: it turned out to be a device designed to thrust the mind unconsciously toward thought!
Almost always, you hear about outmoded machines like typewriters only in terms of how far we have progressed from less savvy days, often in the form of jokes. Fair enough. I can do lots of things on my computer keyboard and word processor that I couldn’t do on a typewriter. There really is such a thing as progress, Virginia. I wouldn’t go back for a minute . . . or at least as Ed Stevens reminds us in one of his poems, I might well go back, but I wouldn’t stay.
The world may well now open its cell phones to find the time and only as an anachronism may we keep looking on our bare wrists to see what time it might be. Onward and upward, I say.
But . . .
Before we look backward too condescendingly, just a word in behalf of the old noisy machine we called the same name as its operator—a nice conflation and better, I think, than ‘user.’ It would be well to note that though almost every electronic device possible has a keyboard now, they are no longer uniform. Your typing has to adjust to different placements of the numbers, letters, and symbols—and often requires not all ten fingers but just your two thumbs. Whatever does that do to the phrase “I’m all thumbs”?
Four typewriters played a role in what I am now old enough to call my youth, and looking back I have to wonder how much each did to place something in my unconscious mind that made the arduous journey to becoming a writer almost inevitable.
My first memory of a typewriter dates from sometime 1946-1947. Well, I don’t actually remember it at all, but somewhere in my little traumatized psyche it must have registered.
The trauma was the return of my dad from the Navy at the end of WWII, the fresh dew of naval discipline invigorating the parenting the war had forced him to delay. His return took me out the idyllic setting of my grandparents Charles and Lena Urie’s house in Greeley, Colorado, where I lived with them, my mom, and my older cousin Dorothy Link. Dotty was named for my mother and she was completing high school in Greeley. Her parents, the aunt and uncle closest to me, had moved to Grand Lake, where at the time there was no high school.
Nana and Papa Urie had two girls, their oldest Margaret and her husband Art also had two girls. Then along came to the youngest daughter and her husband the fair-haired boy to be spoiled by a doting grandfather, Dr. Charles Clyde Urie, while the boy’s father was away in the Navy.
Upon Dad’s return, we moved into what had once been the Rectory of Trinity Episcopal Church. Its Rector, Charles V. Young, was in the process of sponsoring my dad for ordination. At some point, Fr. Young and his wife Tis moved to a new Rectory, vacating the old. We were to live there while Dad served as Trinity’s janitor, led the youth groups, and took 21 hours of graduate work for his Master’s Degree in History at then Colorado State College.
We didn’t see much of Dad, which was plenty all right with me!
During that time, though, he wrote his thesis on the History of the Episcopal Church in Colorado, and he wrote it on a portable typewriter. It had a bulky plastic carrying case, from which the typewriter itself would be removed to sit on a desk or table or countertop. I don’t recall him typing away at it at all. I was only five and so maybe was already in bed when he worked on the thesis. Or maybe I was shutting out his presence and his activities.
Still, I later learned to type on that typewriter. It was the one I used for homework assignments when I enrolled one summer at McCook College in E. P. Baruth’s typing class for the sole and salutary reason that Anita McBride was taking the class, making it a chance to be near her on a daily basis!
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” never before or since had such a romantic ring in my ears.
I nearly lost that typewriter. Many years later, my parish gave me most of a month (the only month off I had in all my ministry until its last year before I retired) to take a course in the Gospel of John at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP), by then part of the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. The course was team-taught by Donn Morgan and John Bogart. I flew out, took a taxi to CDSP, set my bags and typewriter case down at the door, and stepped in to see if I was at the right place. When I stepped back out a minute or two later, I found my bags and typewriter stolen.
There was a nun who was welcoming participants in the class, and she showed me to my room for the term, told me to freshen up, and asked me to then come down to her office. Meantime, she would see what she could to recover my stolen goods. Not likely, I thought, already sorry I’d even come. But pretty soon, some staffer knocked on my door to say that Sister would like me to come down and check if she had gotten everything back. There were my bags and typewriter and case. The case was a little banged up but everything was there and the typewriter worked.
It turned out that Sister had a lot of street cred! She was the “Blue Nun”—I never knew if that was the color of her habit (I never saw her in one), a play on the name of a then popular white wine, or how else she might have come by that name, but she had so served the needs of the neighborhood that when she sent out a plea about my stuff, back it came quickly, deposited at the front door just as though it had never been taken.
Memories of course often reside in things we associate with them. I cold never look at the typewriter again without thinking of the “Blue Nun,” that wonderful course, and the surprising effect that seminar’s fellowship had on me and my ministry—but that is another story altogether.
The second typewriter, and the first to form a conscious memory, came shortly after our short time in Trinity’s rectory in Greeley. By fall 1947, Dad was enrolled at Seabury Western Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He had wanted to enroll the previous year but our seminaries in those days were completely unprepared for two things: the GI Bill and married students. He’d had to wait a year for the seminary to catch up with history—possibly my first experience, however unconscious at the time, in how institutions lag behind events.
Even by the time we arrived at Seabury, he and Mom couldn’t find any married student housing, so we spent a fairly frantic couple of weeks as Dad refinished the three rooms of a fourth story attic in an apartment building just across a yard from the seminary. Mom had a combined living/dining room, a bath room, and a bed room. Period. No kitchen. She cooked on a hotplate in the dining room and did dishes in the bathtub!
Anyway, for the summer of 1948 and 1949, as well as at each Christmas break, by way of the old Denver or California Zephyr, Dad, Mom, and I would return to Greeley, Colorado. First, the trains were powered by steam engines, and then later by the new diesel-powered locomotives. As I recall, we stayed one summer again in the old Rectory but one summer moved back in with the Urie’s. Possibly, though, the summer with the Urie’s came a year later, after Dad had graduated. Then, once we moved to Salida, where my dad served his first congregations (Ascension, Salida; St. Luke’s, Westcliffe; St. Mary’s Buena Vista), I would spend a week or two each summer with Nana and Papa.
I’m not sure, then, which summer (1949, 1950, 1951), when I was somewhere around 6-8 years old, my chief preoccupations—mumbledepeg, fishing at Glenmere Lake, and wandering about the neighborhood or walking to Doc Urie’s dental office—were interrupted by the sound of a typewriter.
Papa and Nana had moved from their big home at 1865 10th Avenue across from the college (and herein yet another story for a future time) and into a smaller home, again eventually sold so Safeway could build a grocery story (yet another ‘learning experience’), but while they lived in that house they had a next door neighbor who was, oh how history cycles through our lives, typing out his thesis. Daily! It was the sound of his typing that woke me each morning, the room I slept in being just across a drive way from whatever room he used for his typing.
I know nothing at all abut who he was or what he was studying or why he was in school—I’d guess another soldier home from war and resuming his delayed life. I do recall Papa or Nana saying he was typing his thesis and comparing it to my dad’s thesis as an explanation of what a thesis is.
So, once unconsciously by proximity and once daily and loudly enough to waken me each morning, hearing those typewriters employed as they were in similar scholarly tasks, quite likely turned out to be one thing among many that prompted me to an academic life!
Even as I was beating away on my dad’s old portable in college (and reading Whitaker Chambers’s Witness with that other old typewriter that played a role in the Alger Hiss conviction), the world took a technological leap. IBM introduce its Selectric typewriter!
No longer did a platen move back and forth across the typewriter, its direction changed manually by a shift lever manipulated at the end of each line wherever you had set the margins. Now a magic metal ball, with all the alpha-numerics and symbols standing out around it, placed a letter just where the typist’s touch on the keys directed it to land. And there were many balls with different type faces! You could spruce up a document to a fare-thee-well. Typing on the Selectric was, at least at first, more like play than work.
There seemed to no end to the constant quirky variations made possible by a multiplicity of balls that the Selectric not just allowed but encouraged. I suspect that in turn encouraged publishers to issue style sheets for things submitted on a word-processed document, style sheets that usually specified a font style and size!
A real typist could pound out a document at a tremendous rate on the new Selectric. Which brings me to my fourth typewriter, one I had forgotten until I spotted it sitting idly in an unused desk in an Andrews Hall office and, looking both ways down the hall, promptly commandeered for my own lowly typewriter-less desk. After some time using it, I thought to write a humorous note to Dudley Bailey. The note read:
Mr. Bailey:
The seventh veil has been rent and I have seen a vision of the department chairman whose thunderous voice was questioning the presence of an Olympian typewriter in room 327. I replied that in the time of the Great Move from Seaton I marked the machine for 327 Andrews in order that the revision committee might have it for their last minute use in preparing materials for the fall semester, and to such place it was duly brought and so used. At that point, the vision ceased, and I was left without the chairman’s reply. I write to you in the hope that the wise counsel for which you are known will be able to interpret this vision.
Dudley’s reply was soon forthcoming:
Pretty generally administrators are people to be ignored. If you got you hooks on a typewriter that the CHAIRMAN hadn’t marked for somewhere else, you a man who will go far in the world. You made but one wee mistake—you reminded me of it. Rule 2 of Administrators: their brains are rarely capacious and always sieve-like. Never refer to this matter again.
DB
His Mark
While I have the chance, though, I really should mention another typewriter I never saw or heard. When it came time for my Ph.D. dissertation, I scraped up enough money to hire Linda Rossiter, later married to Professor Franz Blaha, to type it for me. She was English Department Chair Dudley Bailey’s secretary at the time and earned money on the side typing up theses and dissertations. One of our later joys was to be present for the University of Nebraska Department of English’s fete in her honor when she retired as office manager and senior departmental secretary across the college. It was another chance to tell her how eternally grateful I remained for her typing my dissertation.
The ceremony for Linda was held in the second floor of Andrews Hall in the English Department library and social room. The same library where our cribbage tournaments took place. The same library where John Neihardt had plopped down in the corner to recite from memory from his Cycle of the West for a standing-room only crowd. The same library where, in gratitude for all the department had done for me, I left a leather-bound set of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica the summer we moved to Arizona—and found it missing the following summer when we returned for a visit! Lots of good and not-so-good things happened in that library, but reuniting with the fine person who typed my dissertation was one of the most enjoyable.
There would be other typewriters, of course, before the advent of the computer and word processor. By the time I was at Northern Arizona University, the Selectric was still the typewriter of choice, but it had by then lost its novelty. On it I typed out the report to the Faculty Senate on the quality of academic support systems, a design for an American Studies program the University created, and a Southwest Studies program it did not then create.
My last typewriters, at St. Luke’s Church when I became Rector in 1977 and Kearney State College/University of Nebraska at Kearney where I began teaching in 1987, churned out tons of sermons, lots of syllabi and exams, and several books and articles. But soon after I began teaching at KSC/UNK, the computer made its advent. Even before I’d arrived, I think there was a monstrously huge mainframe that took up a lot of A. O. Thomas Hall. Then I seem to recall the first major advance was the purchase of a desk top for each of the four colleges. There, that should do it!
When I took my lap top with me to China in 2005, I accidentally spilled coffee on the keyboard. Quick thinking saved it—all but the 2 key, which sizzled out and took with it, of course, the @, meaning I could only email people who emailed me by hitting reply. I wished at the time I had brought instead a typewriter—but then I couldn’t have emailed anyone!
Anyway, just maybe typewriters played some role in steering me to teaching, preaching, and writing. I’m sure it is a blessing that they’ve gone the way of the dodo. But, then, I’m mindful that in Jasper Fforde’s novels, the dodo has made a comeback! It gives you hope for typewriters.
Next blog in March
capeek 