POP CULTURE
Computers may be faster, but that old typewriter had personality.
Mr. Smith-Corona and me.
My manual typewriter has been hibernating in my attic for decades. I could never bear to part with it, this little piece of my personal history. I bought my Smith-Corona Classic 12 in 1968, the year I graduated from Solon High School in Solon, Ohio, before I headed off to Kent State University. I’d worked all summer as a waitress at a greasy spoon to save up for it. The color was boring beige and blue, and I thought the name sounded like a cigar. But it represented my future and was the first major purchase of my life.
The Smith-Corona stayed by my side for four years and into graduate school, spitting out my papers on Shakespeare and dutifully recording my bad poetry, until I figured out that I was a born journalist. The typewriter was the means by which I wrote, edited and published a campus underground newspaper.
I was a hunt-and-peck typist.
I’d taken a typing class in high school but quit after only three days because I hated the teacher, who would twist a long fingernail into the backs of students who weren’t sitting up straight. “You will never make it in the work world if you can’t type properly,” she grumped at me. That I still successfully hunt and peck for a living four decades later makes me want to gloat.
Manual typewriters are like people. They get worn in individual ways. I always liked those classic detective stories where an observant gumshoe notices that all the G’s or another character are oddly shaped on a ransom note. A discreet check of a suspect’s typewriter reveals the culprit.
I used my dear friend the typewriter when I began freelancing.
It represented my future and was
the first major purchase of my life.
I typed stories at home, often with a baby on my lap, seated at the kitchen table. In warm weather I could take it outside and work at my picnic table. My typewriter and I raised two kids together when I was a single mother, and I nod to it in appreciation.
As years went on, I bought computers and finally moved my manual to the attic.
I never did go back to it. But I owe that typewriter a lot: a college degree, a journalism career, an outlet for creativity. It fed me, kept a roof over my head, and occasionally brought me recognition.