Time Capsule #5: the typewriter

Although there must have been some handwritten papers turned in at Dartmouth, I remember them all being typed.

Maybe that's because I'd taken Typing 1 in high school. My fine motor skills were far below those of the class aces, Guadalupe and Rocío, who could bang out 90 words a minute with fewer than 2 errors in classroom time trials. Still, my 55 wpm with 10 errors touch-typing was good enough for me to keyboard manuscripts of roomie Shanahan's 5-page English papers.

One unnamed '70 turned his typewriter training to good use by typing the papers of his Smith acquaintance, then friend, then girlfriend, and ultimately wife. As Dante would have said, the typewriter was Galeotto and "that day we read no more."

Typefaces were standardized in those days, and pica, by far the most common, meant that every monospaced letter and punctuation mark was 1/6" wide. With 1" margins, each typewritten sheet had about 250 words. Those 5-page papers were all approximately 1250 words long.

As I remember, we used so-called erasable bond paper and those pink, wheel-shaped erasers to rub out and correct the numerous typos. The worst was when you didn't pay attention near the bottom of the page and typed an extra line in the 1" bottom margin. Cursing. New sheet. Start over. I don't remember seeing Liquid Paper until the 70s.

The electric typewriter had been around since we were babies, but it was in offices everywhere by 1960. The marketing geniuses at Smith Corona figured out that the home market was limited --except for Baby Boomers going to college.

Magazines of the late-60s are full of ads for portable electric typewriters for every family's high school grad.

My grandfather gave me a Smith-Corona for a graduation gift in May 1967, and I took it to Hanover.

In the photo of 103 New Hamp, there are two electric typewriters. I think the one of the back wall was Roger Prince's. (My clue is that the one cropped off on the left side is on a desk with a Budweiser can, which means it must have been mine.)

For those of us in foreign language literature classes, there was the hassle of going back to add by hand all the missing diacritic marks after the paper was typed. Sometime later in my checkered academic career, I traded the Smith-Corona for a little non-electric Olivetti that had 'dead keys' that didn't advance the platen when struck, so you could hit an accent or a tilde first and then put the vowel or N underneath.

I can still remember early morning hours Winter Term sophomore year in Bissell, falling asleep (or passing out) listening to Mac Rauch next door peck-peck-pecking away at the pages that would become Arkansas Adios a couple of years later.

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