Clermont, FL - Typin'

I just happened to stumble upon this picture of a typewriter on line. Nothing special here, beautiful antique. BUT - my mother loved and collected antiques and had one just like this one. Don’t know where she had gotten it or what she planned to do with it but, when I went to high school my teachers wanted papers typed. ‘Hey, Mom, I have to have a typewriter’, I said when I got home from school. ‘Oh’, my mother sweetly said, ‘we have a typewriter up here in the closet’ and she reached up, dragged this out and placed it lovingly on the dining room table. She smiled as she gestured that I could use it for my papers. OMG. I had taken typing in 9th grade - one of the most helpful classes I ever took (and I’m using those skills right now as I type) and the typewriters we had in class were nothing like this one. Note the red line where you set your margins. Note the silver bell on the left hand side which dinged when you got to the end of a line. Those keys were small and there was lots of space between them to catch errant fingers. I probably broke every finger nail I had on those keys. I can’t believe that I used this all through high school. How did I ever get any papers written on this?

This is the kind of typewriter that Gary got for confirmation that he used for typing papers in high school. How cool was this one and how much easier it must have been for him.

Finally, when I graduated from high school, this is the graduation present I got from my parents a brand new, state-of-the art typewriter. Remember using onion skin paper for reports because it was erasable? And, then there was the tape with white stuff on the back that you put over a wrong letter and retyped the right letter. Somehow, I never was able to get the piece of tape in without moving the report paper and the new letter was never on the same plane as the rest of the word. How archaic. Kids these days have it so easy when writing a report: computers. Just back space to change an errant spelling, just set the spell checker - it’s all so easy now.