The Gen-u-ine Article!

It's Saturday. I'm at home, in my own carefree world. But in the background, I can hear my mom in the kitchen. No, she's not cooking this time. Since it's Saturday, she's typing up the Sunday program for church. She starts with her primitive method of centering the title: counting the letters and spaces for the title, then backspacing half that amount from the center. I hear the even rhythm as she hits the space-period-space-period pattern of the lines between the words. Then, the uneven sounds and extra-loud thunk when she hits "shift" as she types the names and songs. Then, the "ding" of the little bell she comes within an inch of the right margin. And yes, I do hear the occasional colorful exclamation, uttered under her breath, when she makes a mistake.

Which was always worse on the Sunday program, because she was using a ditto master. I know -- it's an ancient term for a post-industrial revolution method of duplicating documents. Does anyone else remember those old purple-inked copies??? There was no way to correct a mistake, not even with correction tape. And if she was having a rough day, she would have to give up and start over with a fresh master. That was the ultimate waste in her eyes.

Her method of attack always involved this:

Yes, that's an old manual typewriter. In fact, it's the SAME old manual typewriter that my mom used all those decades ago. I believe this is probably from the early 1940's. Even after "modern" electric typewriters were invented, my parents still used manuals (we had two). Call me weird, but I did want to bring this baby home with me, on our recent trip to Utah/Southern Idaho. Like a lot of other things, this was still at my sister's house, along with so many other things that were my parents'. Since no one else had expressed an interest, Karen sent it out the door with me. I would have taken the wood-and-metal stand it was on too, but we were out of room in the Suburban. Next trip.

My kids thought it was pretty cool, and had to try it out. There's a big difference between typing on this old hulk and typing on a modern computer keyboard. About the only thing in common is the QWERTY layout!

I LOVE these keys! And I love the wear marks from where countless times one of us rested our hands on the edges. And even though I thought it was kind of dumb at the time, I get a kick out of using the lowercase "L" for the number "1", because there is no "1" on the keyboard. (An exclamation point could be made with the apostrophe and a period!)

Mom, being the organized person she was, typed a lot of things. She typed up minutes from meetings, ward newsletters, recipes for her collection-cookbooks, and she typed letters. She actually preferred typing to handwriting. I still have a few of those typed letters. I also have recipes on 3"x5" cards that I typed on this typewriter. They were Mom's recipes that I wanted to have with me when I left home for college.

It may be unnecessary to have this old typewriter. But I'm hooked. And it is a link to both my parents: my mom, the typist, and my dad, the printer. And it adds to my modest little collection of antiques.

TOTALLY cool!!

P.S. Maybe you remember this post, that showed a few of my antiques, and antique wannabes.