A SWELTERING AUGUST DAY in the most humid, mosquito-infested corner of Indiana: It was the kind of day that makes you want to sit down in front of the air conditioner and forget about everything.
But on that summer day of my early teenage years we didn’t have air conditioning. It was the day of the annual - Association Garage Sale, the day when everyone in the neighborhood emptied their attics and opened their garages for all to peruse their wares. It was the one day of the year I was free to go from house to house in the blistering heat with whatever money I could get out of my dad, trying to buy up all the trinkets and treasures.
The greatest treasure that day was not in the garage of an elderly woman hoarding gifts from yesteryear, but in my own driveway. While I rummaged through a nearby sale, my mother emerged from the house with a prize from the past: a 1922 Underwood Standard No. 5 typewriter.
I marveled at this machine. I don’t know where in our house it had been hiding. I had never seen it before, this device with buttons and levers that all posed exciting mysteries.
I immediately sat down and began examining its parts—-the action of the keys, the cables, and the “ting” of the bell—-until I was called in for lunch. After eating I returned to the driveway to continue my exploration, but where my treasure once rested I found only an empty space. Maybe Mom took it inside? Maybe she put it in the car, or back in the house, or in my room?
Nowhere. It had been sold. Two dollars had carried away my priceless discovery.
I thought I was done with typewriters altogether until one fateful day years later, shortly after we moved into our new house. Something caught my eye as I walked through a garage sale. There was a typewriter sitting at the bottom of the FREE box: a 1996 Brother electric typewriter/word processor. It had a small LCD screen where the user could compose work and correct any mistakes before inserting paper and pressing the print key, at which point the machine would, with much commotion, commence to produce the work.
I showed all my friends, but they just didn’t get how cool it was; their loss.
Recently I’ve taken up collecting more typewriters. In a church attic I found a 1956 Royal desk model with brown “crinkle” finish and green keys. I call it my “laptop,” as it does function properly while sitting on my lap, though not without causing some pain. I learned that it had been left at the church after being one of several typewriters borrowed from parishioners to write letters to Congress protesting the Vietnam War. The owners never came to pick it up, so it sat covered in the attic for 30 years, just waiting for me.
About a year later I found another one free at a garage sale, a 1964 Facit T1 Standard made in Sweden. It’s an office model with unusually drab looks and stiff joints from sitting in a basement for decades, but it’s a sturdy machine with a uniquely twangy bell.
When my grandma moved out of her old house, I found a practically unused Smith-Corona Electra 120. It had a glistening baby-blue body and typed beautifully, so she let me keep it. It looks and works fine, but the motor makes a gnawing, crunching sound that would curdle the blood of anyone unaware of its origin.
Finally, there’s this old banger I’m typing this essay on. It’s a Sears and Roebuck Electric 12, circa 1959, and the only typewriter I’ve paid for. I bought it at an estate sale down the road from my house, and it belonged to the woman who had
lived there. I later learned that her husband was a Congressman in the 1960s.
That’s my collection, as it stands. My friends still don’t seem to realize how cool typewriters are. But it’s thrilling to hammer out lines and paragraphs on a living relic like this one.
The experience makes me wonder whether some things might have been better-—if not so convenient—-in the “old days.” We’re told we need to learn from the past, but these days, nobody seems to believe it. The collective memory is erased every time some newfangled invention appears with the promise to make everyone’s life easier. Like a backspace,
a built-in do-over. With no record, no adieu.
Computers make it too easy to erase. Words and works produced on my computer screen might disappear at any moment, but the typewriter brings permanence. And a tangible experience every time a keystroke slams the typebar onto the paper on the platen. The roller shifts into place with a satisfying “clunk.” The line of type rumbles along toward the ringing of a bell hidden deep within the bowels of the machine. Every letter, every line, struck with confidence (or erased and repeated until you get it right). A permanent record of successes and mistakes.
There were no easy “un-dos” in the heyday of typewriters. Perhaps they weren’t necessary. We live so haphazardly today, expecting a do-over to be waiting around every corner. Took out a loan you couldn’t pay back? Declare bankruptcy. Invested poorly and lost all your money in some bad deal? The government will reimburse you.
The typewriter makes me think before I write, before I press the key; to act as if the consequences of my errors may be indelible, not undo-able. Even after applying white-out or correction fluid, you and everyone else knows that a mistake was made. All you can do is try to fix those mistakes, learn from them, or learn to live with them.
It’s a lesson I re-learn every time I type.
Reprinted from Showcase, the collection of essays from Professor Tom Campbell’s 2010 Creative Nonfiction course.