The big news this week — surgery on a deviated septum and a heartfelt good-bye to my dear old manual typewriter.
The typewriter was a mid-century Royal that my father had salvaged from his office in Detroit back in the 1960s. He flew it to New York, and hauled all ten-plus pounds of it up the stairs to my second-floor brownstone apartment on the West Side of Manhattan.
I was hoping to establish myself as a freelance writer and I needed a typewriter. My father didn’t understand my writerly ambitions. He was businessman; he knew there wasn’t much of a bottom line in the writing profession. But he was also my dad and he had decided to help me out.
Later, the typewriter followed me to San Francisco, where I wrote some stuff on it that I actually got paid for.
My Dear Old Manual Typewriter
It’s been years and years since I last typed my last story on that old Royal. Its keys are bent and they get tangled up in each other. Its platen has a major crack in it.
But I couldn’t bring myself to part with my trusty writing companion until this week, when the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant Sale truck showed up in my driveway and took it away.
That old thing had been taking up a full cubic foot of otherwise useful space in my house for decades. It had witnessed a marriage and the rearing of two kids. Why did I cling to it for so long?
Because it connected me to a particular moment in my past, a youthful moment that I’m fond of and I want to keep close.
What are we, anyway, if not our pasts and the people who met us there?
That’s it for today’s post, friends. My nose and I need a nap!
Manual typewriters like mine had disappeared from the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle by the time Armistead Maupin was writing “Tales of the City,” his Quintessential San Francisco Novel — On a Newspaper Deadline at a desk not far from mine. Armistead was given a fancy IBM Selectric typewriter to type his tales.
More about the writing life at “Different From, Different Than — Which Is It?”
So long to the ‘Loyal Royal!.’ I think I first came across that phrase reading Herb Caen. My Mom had a script Royal typewriter! My sister and I thought it was so cool! Not sure what became of it . . . .
Yes! I can just hear Herb Caen writing that — either at the end of his career as a columnist, or when he might have been forced to go over to an IBM Selectric like the rest of the Chronicle reporters and columnists.
The change to the Selectric was necessitated by computerization of newspaper printing. We’d type our copy with a Selectric, and computer scanners would read and digitize our stories.
A lot of us hated the Selectrics because it was hard to control them. Press the wrong key and all kinds of crazy stuff would end up in your copy.