Love letter… to a Smith-Corona

You may remember the interview I did with novelist Jim King who after being rejected by 54 agents, finally got his book “Bill Warrington’s Last Chance” published to great acclaim.

Jim has a blog and had a recent post I thought was quite charming: Letter to a first love. That first love being a Smith-Corona typewriter:

Dear SC:

Surprise! I know it’s probably weird hearing from me after all these years. But the other day I was on the internet and your picture came up on a Google search and all of these memories overwhelmed me and, well, I just had to write. 

Remember the day we met? High school graduation, June1973. I knew from the moment I opened that big, black Smith Corona carrying case and saw you for the first time — sleek, blue, and ready to qwerty — that you and I were going to do great things together.

Sure, you were a bit heavy and, true, a lot of writers would have preferred an electric. But you seemed to know, somehow, that I wasn’t like other writers — probably because you found out, first hand, that my writing sucked. LOL!

But you stuck with me through college, waited patiently for me to return from overseas, and then came all the way out from Ohio to join me in San Francisco. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on you. The Great American Novel awaited our combined talents.

For us old farts, we learned to write on typewriters. If you young ‘uns want to get some sense of what I’m talking about, you can go here to see a variety of old typewriters. 

My first typewriter was a manual version, a Royal. While not the exact model, but it looked a lot like this:

I got that as a gift from my parents as I headed of to UVA. I’d actually learned on an IBM Selectric in perhaps the single best high school class I ever took: typewriting. Not that I enjoyed it, rather I have used that skill almost every day of my life since I was in college. I have always been a really fast typist, one of the reasons I’m able to keep up this blog. In fact, I paid for much of my college education typing papers for my fellow students whose skills on a typewriter ranged from anemic to non-existant. Fifty cents per page. Seventy-five cents if it was a rush job. 

Typing on that Royal machine was a pain in the ass. If you went too fast and struck two keys at the same time, they would get stuck, and you would literally have to stop typing, reach up and separate them. Ink would gook up the key-heads, so you had to use rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs to clean them every other day, or else the letters wouldn’t show up properly on the page. And if you made a mistake? Before white-out, there were these little strips of white something or other you could use. The steps involved: (1) Backspace to the mistake. (2) Insert the white strip between the paper and this guidepost dealie. (3) Strike the key of the mistaken letter. (4) Remove the white strip. (5) Type the correct letter.

Given modern technologies, it’s mind-boggling to think back on what we used to do to write something.

By my third year in college, I saved up enough money to buy an electric typewriter. And then a newer model in graduate school that actually had the capability of remembering up to 20 letters and correcting them if you’d made a mistake. Revolutionary!

I used that typewriter for all the stories and song lyrics I wrote until 1986. That’s when I bought my wife an Apple IIc. I wrote my first three screenplays on that computer — complete with the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy discs — including K-9.

But it all started with a Royal typewriter.

How about you? What has been your journey in typing? If you started with computers, can you remember the chronology of what you owned?

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