Touching the world of Ernest and F. Scott

“Yeah, you can have any of that junk in the basement. I don’t care.” The tone of Tom’s voice made it clear he sincerely did not care.

Many things had drifted into his basement as older relatives died off, and Tom felt little connection to any of them. He had gotten rid of as much as possible since his wife, Deb’s older sister, Jan, had died. Deb asked if he had her father’s typewriter.

“I think it’s still down there. It’s just a piece of junk (‘junk’ is a go-to word for Tom).

“Mind if I look?”

“Suit yourself.”

She did and emerged with a sturdy brown leather case in her arms. The rotten handle dangled uselessly. We loaded it into the car and left for home shortly afterward. Deb said she thought the typewriter was her father’s from when he went off to college. Deb’s father was born in 1913 (she was a late baby). Assuming he began his collegiate years at 18, the typewriter might date to the early 1930s. That didn’t bode well for what we would find.

When we arrived home, we set the case on the kitchen island and slid out the machine inside — a fully functional four-bank Underwood Standard Portable!

I looked up the serial number in the Underwood database (yes, such a thing exists). It was manufactured in 1929.

Since it wasn’t very different from the Sears portable I’d used in college, I ran some paper into it and gave the Underwood a try. The action was stiff, but no stiffer than the portable I used as a student. The type size was elite. Aside from the slugs needing a cleaning, none were damaged. Amazingly, the ribbon was still in reasonable condition. Deb’s father used this typewriter most of his life, but he died in 2002. It had not seen action in over two decades. I have no answer for that.

I could still bang along at 35-40 words a minute. The action of the keys, so much stiffer than on a computer, gave a satisfying physicality to writing, though my little finger on my left hand wasn’t strong enough to adequately strike the ‘a’. Still, for a guy who has grown sloppy typing on an easily correctable laptop, my accuracy wasn’t too shabby at all.

I began to extemporize a story about cowboys watching and worrying about their herd as a storm approached during the night (yup, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’). What I wrote was garbage, just making words on paper from a prompt in my head. But I enjoyed doing it. The physicality of the experience and the direct link between my hands and the words on the page were powerful. Perhaps that was my imagination. Maybe it was only the novelty. I don’t know. I can say it felt more ‘right’ and ‘real’ than typing on a computer, as I am right now.

So, am I going to dump my computer and go back to 1929? Will I embrace the world of Ernest and F. Scott and make it my own?

Not on your life. But it was nice to visit them for just a little while.