THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110382
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Everybody is writing a dirge for the typewriter because Smith Corona folded. Five of mine are at home on a high shelf: three table-model typewriters, two portables.
An aunt gave me her old one to put out 60 copies weekly of Community Life, 5 cents each.
With the second I earned 30 cents an inch stringing for the Nyack (N.Y.) Journal-News while Gin and I were in a veterans village. I wrote long.
The third was a relic used by Francis Stansbury, our society editor. When she retired, so did the typewriter. I rescued it for $13.
The first portable was so large, you could stand on its case to cover parades. I carried it following Nikita Khrushchev on his two-week tour coast to coast and, en route, I stored dirty laundry in it.
In Des Moines, at the end of a red carpet, the Secret Service ordered me to open it while the crowd pressed in to see. ``You're going to be sorry,'' I said. ``OPEN IT!'' they said. I did. Dirty laundry spilled out. The crowd roared; their faces turned red as the carpet.
The slim second portable's case is plastered with colored tags slapped on it at check points at national presidential conventions.
It went with me to Germany for a three-week job on ``The Virginia Way,'' a mix of photographs and text. Publisher Burda put me in a Michelin inn.
Each morning, photographer Wolfgang Roth picked up what I'd done the night before. ``By noon,'' he said, ``we will need 5,000 words.'' At the noon pickup, he said, ``Give us, please, 7,000 tomorrow morning.''
So I ate and took a half-hour walk three times a day and wrote. When the text was done in two weeks, I had a week at the plant writing captions and reading proofs.
Those German youths were wonderful friends. As they worked, they sang, told jokes, sipped wine, took a long break for lunch and toiled into the night. I never worked harder or had more fun; and, stashed all over my clothes, I carried home the cash, which I flung, a fluttering cloud, over Gin, enough for that year's college tuitions.
When computers arrived, I was ready to go; but Abe Goldblatt taught me three things - how to get on the word processor, how to send copy to editors, how to get off. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know, Abe said.
The processor was so easy to use that the words seemed to go straight from the mind to the paper. A month later when, at home, I turned to a typewriter, the keys seemed so stiff they were impossible to move. I had lost the touch.
Every once in a great while, the computer system goes down and we sit and look at each other, benumbed. All my life I never knew a typewriter to go down.
Ever there is a global computer crash, I know where there are five typewriters on a high shelf.
Be glad to lend you one.
Your choice. by CNB