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To Our Readers
THE Smith Corona Corp. filed for bankruptcy protection this week and announced it will sell its assets to Carolina Wholesale Office Machine Co. The news marked the demise of another once-prominent brand. When journalism
wasn’t just typingUnderwood, Royal, Remington, Olivetti, Smith Corona -- these names are engraved in the memories of writers from the pre-PC era. We stared at them for hours, struggling to clear a block or turn a phrase. The quiet rattle of computer keys has none of the romance of rapping out a story on deadline or banging out a masterpiece -- even just an overdue term paper -- on a typewriter.
I still have a classic, upright 1930s Royal manual in my office. It works, although I haven't changed the ribbon in a decade. I bought a Macintosh and a dot-matrix printer in 1984, but kept the Royal around to type notes, forms and envelopes. Eventually, it moved off my desk and retired to the bookcase.
When newspaper city rooms were still populated by hard-drinking, hard-smoking reporters out of the old school -- not the journalism school -- many of those guys never had a typing lesson.
My first city editor, Fred Hartmann, liked to recount a prank his nightside crew pulled. The paper had a reporter named Jack who was famous for somehow pecking out printable news stories while almost too drunk to walk.
The engraved letters -- QWERTY, etc. -- on the keys of manual typewriters would wear away, so they used to make rubber replacement key caps. One evening, the rewrite guys pulled the caps off Jack's keyboard, rearranged them willy-nilly, put them back on and waited.
Jack weaved into the office, sat down at his Underwood and began banging out a story. Never looking at the paper in the carriage, he just hammered away while the city desk staff watched.
Finished, Jack ripped the copy paper out of the machine, dropped it on the editor's desk and staggered out the door for a nightcap. "We never found out what the hell he wrote," Fred said.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.