Already, 2011 has been a year of loss. Elizabeth Taylor died. So did Jane Russell. And let’s not forget the Denver Nuggets’ loss last night to Oklahoma City.
But nothing rocked me quite as much as the report that the typewriter had clicked its last clack. India’s Godrej & Boyce—the last company in the world producing standard typewriters—was closing its doors.
While the news turned out to be semi-erroneous—there’s still a company in New Jersey cranking out tiny portable typewriters, mainly used in prisons, oddly enough—Tuesday’s news hit me harder than you’d think. In my whole writing career, I’ve never used a typewriter—ever. I’ve been clattering away on computer keyboards from the time I was a cub columnist for the high school newspaper. It’s not like I had a professional attachment to one of those antiquated ribbon-munchers.
But I did have a personal one.
When I was a kid in the early 1980s, my dad (who worked at a newspaper) brought home a used typewriter for my sister and me to play with. The newspaper was making the switch to computers at the time, and they were getting rid of all their heavy, antiquated Smith-Coronas and IBMs. The one my father brought home had to have been the oldest of the bunch: It wasn’t electric and didn’t have a typeball. All the keys were connected to individual typebars, which smacked the blank page with a satisfying “clap” when you pushed one, and if you typed too quickly, all the typebars would get tangled up. One of the letters—the “n”—was broken: It’d land about a half-line higher than the rest.
I wrote my first newspaper on that thing when I was about 10 years old. I wrote about how a cadre of bank robbers had been captured by our fine local police force, and how the U.S. was surely on the brink of war with the U.S.S.R. There was no sports page—I couldn’t care less in those days—but I dutifully put together a weather report: Mostly sunny but a little breezy, I wrote, with gusts of 200 miles an hour. (I was a little unsure of how fast wind traveled back in those days.)
I wrote several newspapers—at least one covered the very unusual happenings in Transylvania—several short stories and even a few pages of a novel or two on the typewriter. And, strangely, I don’t think it was my innate love of writing that kept me going down to that keyboard: It was, I think, the sounds: The clack of the keys, the “fi-fi-fi-fi” of the paper when you rolled it into the machine, the “ding!” you heard when you hit the end of a line.
And I felt strangely connected to a litany of writers who, somehow, managed to craft some amazing works of literature on those crude, unforgiving devices: Hemmingway and Faulkner never had the advantages that came with Microsoft Word or Quark—no spell check, no grammar correct, no nothing. They just had their typewriters, and maybe a little touch of Wite-Out if they did make a mistake along the way. And I kind of liked to imagine that, just maybe, their typewriter’s “n” was a little quirky, too.
Now I find myself wondering, and marveling, about what it must’ve been like to regularly work with typewriters. The most heavily used key on my keyboard is the backspace button, and I can’t imagine cranking out copy without deleting and rewriting every word at least twice. I’m quite fond of my computers, thank you.
But even though I never spent much time with typewriters, is it possible to still “miss” them? To miss the clackity-clack din of a 1970s newsroom, the peckapeckapeck in a writer’s solitary study? I think I do miss it, in a way. Not enough to want to go back, but still.
So with that, let me raise my Mountain Dew in salute to the cranky old typewriter. So long, my friend. I hardly knew thee.
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