rechelle's lifelyrics

By 1995, the last major manual typewriter manufacturer, Smith-Corona, shut down. About 16 years later, manual typewriter production ceased in the world when Godrej and Boyce closed their plant in Mumbai, India. These events came and went in my lifetime with no notice or sorrow attached to them. When I was in High School in the early 1980’s, my dad insisted that I learn to type. I argued, and dreaded it, but I managed to do well in Typing 101, even though I believed it was one of those things I had to do that was hardly worthwhile. I questioned, “When am I ever going to use typing in my life after school?”

My short-sighted view was short-lived when I needed a job, and one of my mom’s hairdressing clients was looking for someone to help her with her home business, “The Silk Purse.” She could make “a silk purse from a sow’s ear” with people’s resumes, documents, thesis papers, and other such business needs. That was when creating typed documents on a personal computer (PC) was called Word Processing.

My days of working on a stiff manual typewriter with a hard backed steno-pad of sample documents to recreate for school were long forgotten.

On my recent Mother’s Day trip to Tennessee, when I discovered the book, “Uncommon Type” by Tom Hanks, I felt a little percolating of interest toward the antiquated machine I thought I would never use. I came home from the trip and listened to most of the book with Ray before purchasing a physical copy to refer to as we listened. I was 9 stories in by the time I realized each story highlighted a different typewriter that was weaved into the fabric of the tale! Then my suspicion was confirmed when I got my copy of the book and found the picture of the particular typewriter to be included at the beginning of each chapter. I told Ray I thought I’d like to get a manual typewriter for poetry and song writing. He has a very mechanical, engineer brain, so the idea of one of these brilliant, complex machines seemed to be appealing to him as well.

We found a badly kept Smith-Corona and Hermes 2000 that we were able to try out at an antique store, but I really wanted to find a place like in the story, “These Are The Meditations of My Heart,” from “Uncommon Type” where we could get the feel of a few different makes and models that were in good working order instead of taking a stab in the dark with a machine we couldn’t be sure about. Ray told me there is a shop in Portland, Oregon, and we planned to visit TYPE SPACE the next time we were out that way.

Well, upon arriving that Sunday afternoon, I knew our trip would not be in vain. We waited a few minutes for the storekeeper to return from an errand, and when Tony opened the door to TYPE SPACE, we entered a modern shop with the old world vibe I was looking for. One of the first things I noticed amid the selection of machines was a picture on the wall of Tom Hanks standing in the store with Tony, which felt to me so appropriate, since we made this journey based on that indelible yearning for a typewriter of my own based on the reading of his book. I only tried a couple of the manual typewriters on display, because I wasn’t sure how much I would really use it, and my birthday budget was about $200. We happily headed home, after a delightful visit with Tony, with my new 1961 Olympia SM-7.

I typed thank-you notes for the gifts I received at my 60th birthday party on pink paper, and thoroughly enjoyed the process! You can imagine how sad I was when in the middle of my last note, the carriage started slipping and I could no longer follow a small letter after a capital without it jumping to the next line!

For the next few days, while messaging back and forth with Tony regarding my options for repairing my machine or swapping for the other one I had tried that day at his store, I realized I was willing to spend a little more for the possibility to have just the right typewriter for me. Ray and I drove up to Portland again, and I’m so glad how it all turned out! I ended up trying the one with italic typeface that was about $100 more than the first one I bought. I know I couldn’t have felt good about spending that much at the onset, but after the experience of typing all of those thank-you notes on pink paper, I thrilled to have basically the same machine with a font that felt so much more creative as it appeared on the page!

I have a pretty little antique desk by the window upstairs with my new 1962 Olympia SM-7-Italic manual typewriter waiting for my pensive, creative moments. I’ve written some poetry, a letter, and even Ray wrote a sweet poem on my new Olympia! It makes me happy to think of coming full circle on that memory of my Dad from my childhood, and for this new facet of my “dream job” in my quiet days of retirement.