Todd Nelson, Typing with America’s Sweetheart
I had no sooner finished watching the California Type-writer story on CBS, than I knew I needed to write a letter to Tom Hanks. A fellow typewriter aficionado and grand collector, he waxes eloquent in the film about the feel of real typing on vintage typing machines. It is an homage to the style, heft, timbre, and tradition of manual typewriters—word processors with moving parts, inky ribbons, and cacophonous clatter. No silicon. It is the sound of thinking and writing, in my humble opinion—a sound I was raised on. I fired off my letter—not an email. Though I’m afraid I did compose it on my laptop, it was duly printed and signed on paper. Not an electronic transmission.
Dear Mr. Hanks:
You had me at the black Royal behemoth in your CBS Sunday Morning piece about typewriters. I grew up with that machine, listening to my journalist father pound away after bed time. I still have that machine. It stares at me with encouragement.
I also have a small Hermés Rocket given to me by our local poet, Philip Booth. I like the provenance of that one, especially the worn spot from his right thumb on the space bar. Nothing like owning the machine your favorite poems were written on.
So, thanks for the stirring walk among the machines of real writing. I regretfully admit this letter was composed on a MacBook Pro.
I enclosed a photo of my father sitting at the Royal. And I did sign my note with a fountain pen—Dad’s. This was duly credited by Hanks. That is, no doubt, another story. To my great surprise and pleasure, Tom Hanks replied by mail within a few weeks. We are now BFFs. “That Royal is a desktop mountain of a machine,” he wrote. “It would last another thousand years, like mine will. What is the half-life of a good typewriter anyway?” Hanks typed his note on a yellow telegram facsimile he calls a Hanx-O-Gram—“the surest and safest service to all the world.” He thereby keeps another writing transmission memory alive—also personal to me. Long ago, my journalist father filed his stories via Western Union telegrams, after typing them on his portable Olivetti. That’s how all reporters did it. I can recall accompanying him to the Reuters office in London, as late as 1971, to file copy, and I’ve seen the facsimiles of his typed dispatches on Western Union wires from Mississippi in 1963.
Anyone sent a telegram recently? Is it still a thing? Tom thinks so. But you must be a person of a certain age to even resonate a little to his conceit. California Typewriter is also a small shop in Berkeley, Califor- nia with a big mission: keeping typing on typewriters alive. It is a mecca for typing on machines—paper-stamping engines of true writing. Missing a letter, a spring, a connecting rod, a roller for your Smith Corona or Underwood or Hermés Rocket? They’ll have it. They’ll fix it. Get you back on the writing road.
Though, sadly, I hardly use my typewriter any more, it remains the dominant emblem of my life. Sure, using this MacBook Pro has a speed and seductive ease; an editing facility that the type- writer doesn’t. But I realize that it also has an anti-draft conceit: there is only the present wording of my prose. I do not have successive copies that show my writing footprints, the evolution of my thought and expression. It doesn’t show where I’ve come from on this writing road. As I look over Dad’s Western Union typing, I can see that even as he finalized copy to send, he was editing. Words are crossed out; substitutions made. The prose is actively evolving up to the very last minute—and there is a record of it. For posterity: me. Like that big black Royal behe- moth staring down at me from the shelf. It says, writing takes muscles, intention, pauses, work . . . and rework. If there were a national typing day—and there should be—I would like to be the Grand Marshall of the parade of Royals and Underwoods and Olivettis going past on floats. I would tantalize my new BFF Hanks with the notion of riding along in the back seat of a suitably old school vehicle, just ahead of those writing machines with a hood like a 1955 Buick and diesel rumbling for the sound of writing production—the Ur sound of writing, for me. No silicon.
And I’m glad that Tom Hanks is finally getting some of the recognition he deserves. You might have thought it would be for his award-winning acting. But no, it’s for service to the cause of typing machines.