Saying Goodbye to Our Typewriter

Photo by Jim LaBate

I must be getting old. Every Saturday morning when I take our garbage to the local dump, I always take one last look around the house and ask myself, “What else can I throw away or give away this week?” I have officially ended the accumulation phase of my life and begun the distribution phase.

For example, within the last year or so, my wife, Barbara, and I have redistributed all of the following: we sold some of our music albums and donated the rest; we donated some of our VHS tapes and recycled the rest; and we have gradually thinned out our book collection, again through either donations or recycling. And just last week, I realized it was time to get rid of our old typewriter.

For you youngsters out there, the typewriter was the first printing press intended for individual use, either at work or at home. Like a modern computer, of course, a typewriter has a keyboard, but users have to feed the paper in one sheet at a time or use special “carbon” paper to make a copy. And the machines I learned to type on did not even have electricity or a battery to simplify the writing process.

Photos provided by Jim LaBate from The Recorder and Wikimedia

When I was growing up during the 1950s and 1960s, these machines were so popular that my…