Tribute to a typewriter

More (and last) from San Francisco: since my son-in-law Jerry was driving us into the city from the airport in a rented hybrid (another new experience for me: these things don’t go vroom-vroom at startup), and since Jerry and I share the same passion for old mechanical objects (vintage pens for me, vintage radios and aeronautical books for him), we decided to stop over first at the San Francisco Antique and Design Mall, which was on the way.

I was giddy with eagerness, and as soon as we stepped into the place, an ancient beauty caught my eye – no, not a pen this time, but another writing instrument of yore, a typewriter. It sat on top of a glass case near the store manager’s desk, where it shouldn’t have been, suggesting that it had just come in and was probably still being inventoried. I don’t think it will surprise anyone who knows what a pack rat I am to be told that, yes, I also collect old typewriters (and old Macintosh computers), albeit in a much more modest and haphazard way than I amass fountain pens. While my pens now number in the shameful hundreds, I have only four or five typewriters tucked beneath some bed or into some drawer. My affection for typewriters goes back to a sad story. My father was a clerk, and I often hung out in his office, entranced by the majesty of it all: the large wooden desk, the swivel chair, the red-blue pencils, the desk pen, and yes, the heavy typewriter whose signature clackety-clack announced important business in the making. Early in high school, when I began nursing fantasies of becoming a writer, my father had gifted me with a Singer typewriter, the virgin newness of which I could hardly bear to disturb or to mar with carbon smudges and eraser chaff. I loved that Singer, and slept with it by my side. And then one day it was gone, repossessed by the installment people in one of those dark swings of fortune we’d learned to live with, but this one hit me particularly hard, and I swore, like some raving Scarlett O’Hara, that “As God is my witness, I’ll never be typewriterless again!” And so it happened that I bought a used typewriter as soon as I was able to, and churned out dozens of stories and scripts on one battered Royal or Underwood, then another. In the 1980s, when one of my employers and mentors – the kind Dr. Gerry Sicat – resigned from his post and prepared to leave for work abroad, I found the gumption to ask him for a parting present I spotted in a corner of his library: an Olympia portable typewriter, which accompanied me to graduate school in Michigan, even as my American classmates were already beginning to use Macs and PCs, which I stubbornly resisted. This one in San Francisco was truly special, both in its design and its condition. It was a Corona portable, still in its open carrying case, which also contained the original manual and cleaning accessories. It had been well used, as the indentations of thousands of keystrokes on the platen or hard rubber roller testified, but it had also been very well kept. The black enamel gleamed on the machine; its stainless steel ribs and ligaments were bright and fragrant with oil; a perfect decal marked the paper table behind the platen, the roseate glow behind the white dove still intense despite its age. I was smitten, but like a young man stricken by but slightly dubious of overwhelming pulchritude, I had to move and look away for a while, and I spent the next hour reconnoitering the stalls and shelves, trying to interest myself in this old leather bag and that old book, my restlessness mounting by the minute. I found and picked up a Parker 51 Vacumatic pen in near-mint condition, a steal at $10, but even that failed to stop the quickening that I felt every time I glanced in the direction of the Corona, just to make sure it was still there, and still no one else’s. Finally I could resist no longer and returned to the manager’s counter. I asked him if I could handle the machine. “This just came in,” he said, smelling a sale. “You’re only the second one to ask.” He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter; I pecked out some letters: “The quick brown fox….” They all came out crisply, and something in me groaned. Perhaps I had been hoping that something would go horribly wrong – like the letters would come out broken, like buck teeth, or not register at all. This one even had a fresh ribbon – and the ribbon reverse worked. I sighed in surrender and asked, hoarse with hopelessness, “How much?” “One hundred twenty five dollars,” the man said. “Any discount?” It was Beng, who had drifted into the transaction in a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable. “Nope,” said the man, knowing a goner when he saw one. I tried pulling the lid over the Corona, in a last-ditch effort to locate some mortal flaw – aha, it wouldn’t close! The machine was simply too big for the box – I knew there had to be a catch somewhere! Indeed there was; the manager seized the platen and just bent the whole thing over on itself, and the machine collapsed compliantly, fitting neatly into its case, and I went over the edge of stupefaction at the mechanical genius of the thing: a collapsible, therefore portable, typewriter, the clamshell notebook of its time. “Sold!” said my speechless smile. (Thankfully, my daughter Demi picked up the tab – an advance Christmas present for her daffy dad.) I would later establish that I was looking at a collectible classic, the “Corona 3,” made between 1916 and 1941 by the Corona Typewriter Co. in Groton, NY; a check on its serial number told me that this one had come out of the factory in 1922. That was almost 50 years after the first Scholes and Glidden typewriter – the first truly useful and commercially successful model – was sold. The price in 1873? $125. Sometimes I forget – or am rudely reminded – that not only are there kids these days who have never written with a fountain pen; some of them have never touched a typewriter, much less composed a story or written a book on one. The only keyboard they know is that whose keys travel mere millimeters, with the barest of clicks and whispers to announce the deed. “Ay, Tatay! Why will you even lug this home to Manila,” Demi kidded me, “when you’ll be leaving it to me anyway when you finally go, along with all your pens and Macs and watches?” Because, I should’ve told her, I just want to look at it for a while, and to feel the keys, and maybe listen to how they clackety-clack. I hope she does, too, when the time comes. Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.