I’ve been listening, half watching a delightful documentary about the typewriter, which is streaming on Pluto History Channel. Of the several authors interviewed, David McCullough was featured, describing how he wrote every bit of his published work on his favorite typewriter. Typewriters have become vogue with this current generation of young people. In fact, one of my sixth-grade voice, students has taken to writing and prefers her typewriter over her computer.

I was in third grade when my parents bought me a typewriter. It was a red and white and hard glossy case. I used it extensively, even at that young age, to write my stories and my daily journal. When I ran out of typing paper, I resorted to my lined paper with the three holes already punched.

When I entered junior high school and some of our papers were expected to be typed, my mother allowed me to use her typewriter, which had once belonged to my grandfather. The portable Smith-Corona typewriter was purchased in 1953 shortly after my grandfather joined the Elwood Police Department and Grandpa Leroy used it to type his investigation reports. Once Mother entered high school in the fall of 1959, Grandpa’s typewriter became a shared fixture at 729 South A St. in Elwood Indiana. Mother claimed she had typed every high school paper on that typewriter.

After 1979, the Smith-Corona hand-me-down rarely left one end of the dining room table during my high school years. I can remember Mother teaching me how to clean the metal type-slugs with the obnoxious, piercing smell of the cleaning fluid, how to use carbon paper for two copies, and how to apply White Out or corrective paper. She attempted to teach me the home keys and proper typing but halted her instruction once she saw how quickly and accurately I moved across the keyboard without proper technique.

It was such a comfortable device on which to write. My fingers found those keys as comfortable as the keys on my piano and saxophone. It was on the typewriter that I learned to type lyrically and musically while I learned and practiced telling musical stories on the piano and saxophone. Making music and telling stories, for me, our one and the same.

When I entered college, the Smith-Corona typewriter found a new home on my desk in Swinford Hall, a part of the Ball State University honors college complex. Computers were just becoming popular for word processing, and of course, electric typewriters had been around for years. However, I preferred my manual Smith-Corona typewriter as it exercised my fingers more for the piano and saxophone, as well as the other instruments I was learning.

I have often considered pulling the Smith-Corona from the attic shelf, dusting it off, making sure it is still operable, and putting it to use with my current writing projects. The MS is now affecting my hands and I don’t know if the labor would be beneficial or problematic.

Of course, this blog post’s topic would not be complete without featuring Leroy Anderson’s comedic and masterful, “The Typewriter.”