Noisy Typewriter is software that makes the sound of a typewriter when you hit computer keys. It produces a comforting clack. When you hit the backspace key, it makes the sound the typewriter would make, sort of an errrt. When you hit the tab for a paragraph, you get a ding just like returning the carriage. When you hit the arrow key up or down, you hear the sound of the roller as though you were loading paper.

I love this program. In fact, from time to time, it stops working, sort of decides to go outside for a smoke. Or I have turned down the computer’s speaker volume. In any event, silent running is now unsettling. But it’s easy enough to coax it back to clack.

It took only a short time for me to become addicted to the sound of the keys banging. It’s a DNA thing. My writing life started with the typewriter. I started composing with the typewriter rather than a pen. I did not realize how much I missed the sound. The only analogy I can think of is comfort food. It’s like having grown up having meat loaf once a week. Then for like 30 years you go without meat loaf. Then suddenly, it’s there on your plate. You don’t eat so much as devour.

The typewriter sounds spark all manner of nostalgia, particularly of the newsroom and the machine I used, an Underwood from the 30s or 40s. It had many a user. From what it weighed, I figure the metal could be melted down for a Volkswagen.

I was obsessive about gunk in the keys. I wanted crisply struck letters. I also wanted to procrastinate. I felt I had to rid my copy of ink-filled “o”s and “e”s. The “e” was a serious problem. I used chemicals to clean the keys, which spread with a toothbrush. Later, there was a gummy ball of clay-like material that would clean the keys. It was a ritual. At least I did not invoke  incantations or mantras.

I was also obsessive about my glue pot. The paper bought rubber cement by the gallon. The glue was poured into plastic jars. The  jar top was attached to a shaft with the brush at the end. You used the glue to attach sheets of copy paper. One story thus could have several sheets of copy paper — this is newsprint cut to size that was somewhere in between regular eight and half by eleven and legal size. The advantage in gluing pages was in the fact they didn’t get lost.

When rubber cement is exposed to air long enough, it hardens. This is a bad business. Some reporters took advantage of this characteristic and rolled gobs of glue into balls and used them as projectiles.

The daytime shift was usually 9 to 6, and at the end of the day, there were 20 or 30 typewriters giving full voice to the orchestra, writers hunched over their instruments — except for AJM. He never looked at the copy he was writing. He raised his head high as though he were Horowitz at Carnegie Hall, turning his head left and then right, swaying to a music only he could hear. His copy, however, left much to be desired, and the last I heard he was working at a Circle K. He was not the first such newspaperman to wind up tending a Circle K, and for a while I wondered if that was where all of us would wind up eventually. In those days, you didn’t take much of a pay cut when you landed behind a Circle K cash register.

Just to round out this little nostalgia waltz, I want to point out that I still have the pica pole first given to me when I started at the Star in 1971. My name is engraved on it. This was done by Swanee — one Porter Swanson — the Star’s librarian, a very nice man with many fine qualities, none of which, I suspect, included library skills. I also have my scissors from the time, a pair of exquisite shiny chrome with an edge that has held for 40 years.

Finally, I must mention the reporter’s desk. This is a custom I have preserved in old age. I am amazed at the amount and quality of flotsam that unconscious hands seem to broadcast on my desk. At least I do not eat over my keyboard. I recall vividly an editor one early morning in the newsroom using a full-sized vacuum cleaner with hose to extract what must have been a ten-year collection of bits of  pizza, sandwiches, hot dogs, Pepsi, coffee, tea leaves, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Jack’s Barbecue from the keyboard of a recently departed reporter. It took her much longer than she would have liked.

One reporter, DW, who was both dyslexic and a slob, was famous for her desk. The janitorial staff was directed not to clean reporter desks because there might be precious material buried among the three-week old newspapers, scraps of paper, tin foil and doggy bags. I know of no Pulitzer Prize that was buried in garbage. Nonetheless reporter detritus was allowed to accumulate on desks. This consisted mostly of pizza boxes, scattered rather than stacked, and containing gobs of now-hard cheese, sausage and pepperoni. In between the pizza boxes were square Chinese take out boxes, half filled with fried rice, moo-shoo pork and kung-pao chicken. The desk itself was known as D’s landfill. Sometimes an editor with authority would leave her a note to clean up her desk top. She threw these away, muttering to herself that she possessed no desk pot.

I have seen many newsrooms, and they are typically in great disarray. Some reporters, of course, are worse than others. But the most startling newsroom I ever saw was in Fort Lauderdale at the Sun-Sentinel. Every desktop was clean. As a whistle. There were no newspapers, no pencils, no nothing. I asked my guide if this was an insurance office rather than a newspaper. He said the publisher had ordered all reporters to clear their desks or be fired. I could only shake my head. It was just one more piece of evidence to add to the great pile I had collected over the years and had led me to the unshakable conclusion that newspaper publishers of my time, with rare exceptions, were a brain-dead life form.

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From Bunny Fontana:

I taught myself to type on a Remington standard when I was still in elementary school: three fingers and a thumb at a time.  That’s the way I type today.  I never learned the keyboard and still couldn’t type blindfolded.  But I can whack out about 70 wpm.  And have whacked out millions of words over the years.
Hazel used a typewriter almost to her dying day.  She never touched a computer.  She had her typewriter mounted to a board attached to the handle bars of her stationery bicycle, and typed letters to family members as she pedaled away.
They were wonderful machines, bells, black-and-red ribbons, and all!
Thanks for the memories.  B.

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From Adolfo Quezada:

This post prompted a lot of memories of the Citizen newsroom in the 70’s . Funny, sad, I miss some of it.
Adolfo

I worked for many years writing and editing editorials at the (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star with Tom Turner. His work brought the Star as close as we could get to the Pulitzer Prize: One year his editorials on water conservation made the judges’ short list.

We wrote this parody after realizing that some columnists kept scratching for a certain tone and feeling in their columns. We wrote this for our own amusement. It has never been published. Tom is retired and lives in San Diego. He is the author of “Soldier Boys,” a novel, available through Amazon.

ON THE STREETS

An editorial column

By PETE BRESLIN EARTHY

THE DOCKS — The last time I saw him he was throwing chairs and smashing a bloodied fist into the faces of all comers with an explosiveness that split their lips, popped their teeth and pulverized their noses. He was depressed.

But Sunday mass was like that. It was the only way to get his message of love through to this parish of leather-faced dockworkers.

That was 30 years ago, when rotgut and I were friends and we all wore the look of the slums. We were poor. But we knew how to survive. With guts.

And Father Timothy O’Shaughnessy McGuire O’Rourk had more guts  than any of us. He was known on the docks as “Padre OMO,” and when Padre OMO said, “Kneel!”, you asked only, “For how long, Padre OMO?” He had a way with words. And an even more persuasive left hook.

But even Padre OMO, who wore the face of the docks, could miss the boat. And he did. He missed women’s lib — and he was not ready for Trixie Malloy. When it was finished, Trixie Malloy, with her look of scarlet, did him in.

Trixie was the first of the long-shore broads. She was a descendant of Tugboat Annie, born on a dark and stormy night in the bowels of a barge on Murky Bay. She had red hair that flowed down over smooth, muscular shoulders, green eyes that cut fog, a narrow waist and long, slim legs — and a chest that bulged the bib of her overalls. Lead anchors hung from her long, pierced earlobes. Any man who got too close rank the risk of getting his throat cut with a quick jerk of Trixie’s head.

Padre OMO grabbed the neck of the whiskey bottle and stood it on end. His Adam’s apple bobbed as the rotgut reddened his face stilled the volcano is in his belly.

“Salud a todo el mundo!”, he exclaimed as he hurled the bottle against the wall. “It was the overalls,” he reflected, “I had to see what was inside.

“At first it was good,” he said. “I left the church and she left the docks.” But it wasn’t good for long. Trixie had been to Boston. She was beat up and burned out from a hard-hearted and bloodied effort to unionize professional anchovy filleters there. She had failed, and Trixie was tired and ready to leave the East for the golden West.

When she left Padre OMO, he thought of her dressed in a pinafore jumpsuit, standing at the kitchen stove, basting eggs. She made her way slowly cross-country with a group of over-the-hill roustabouts, shoring up their tents and their spirits with her strength.

She had charm. She could sing. She could dance. But most of all, Trixie could play chess. She moved in with Bobby Fischer, then Viktor Korchnoi. Fischer was too erratic, always a sucker for the Vienna Gambit — first used by U.S. Grant in a drunken stupor while fighting the Battle of Lower Chicamaugua and Upper Chancellorsville.

Korchnoi was her complaint. It infuriated her that he always led with queen’s pawn-2. It was maddening, but Korchnoi, complaints notwithstanding, held her attention. Each time, she tried to leave, he would show her the Russian End-Around Gambit, named after one of Nijinky’s moves.

It lasted until Korchnoi’s complaint got out of hand, and he beat her with a queen’s rook. Checkmate. It was then she discovered rodeo and Chico Hernandez Alfonso Smith. She moved in with a rodeo bull rider.

That was when Padre OMO made his move. The rodeo was playing Madison Square Garden. Padre OMO made his way to the dressing room when the bull riding was over. But Chico, who wore the look of the bull, pounded Padre OMO’s face. Padre OMO wore the look of hamburger.

“I guess,” said Padre OMO, taking a slug from a fresh bottle, “that’s why I’m telling you all this. You’re the greatest bull-slinger in all New York.”

I roam the Big Apple for stories like Padre OMO’s and Trixie’s. But I do not wear the look of the docks. I prefer corduroy.

There was a time in this country when retailers held “sales.” There are no more “sales.” There are “events.” I do not know where the sales went, possibly to visit grandma and got eaten by a big bad wolf. I believe it happened at about the same time “robust” replaced “strong” and “improve” gave way to “enhance.”

It offends my ears to see “Labor Day Event” in a newspaper or television ad. It sounds like the reference should be to a track meet. I have robust objections to such abusive language. The language could be greatly enhanced if fewer euphemisms were used by advertisers. I might even find closure. And why, “find closure”? It’s not as though I lost it. Moreover,   if there is closure, was it preceded by openure? Surely openure precedes closure just as cases opened are then closed, thus resulting in open and closure cases, which were once open and shut. But one cannot find closure when already shut. That would be “shuture,” as in shuture face.

There once was a very good word used before “closure” reared its offensive head. It was used well and often, with resolve and often with resolution. If only we could return to those golden days of yesteryear. Or is it yesterure?

How is it that the Washington Post was worth three times the Boston Globe? That is, the Post sells for $250 mil, and the Globe for $70 mil. Or are the Sulzbergers just chimps rather than publishers? Granted, you often need a program to tell the difference, but really, what gives?

Why would an otherwise sensible person like Bezos want the Post?

And, finally, let’s hear it for Donald Graham. He should cash the check quick before his Bradlee explodes and he gets his tit caught in a ringer. On second thought, that could never happen to Donald. His mother had all the balls in that family.