Mar 12, 2021 4 min read

The great author of history, David McCullough, writes on a manual typewriter. So did the late playwright Sam Shepard. Tom Hanks owns dozens of typewriters, his favorite of which he uses to type thank you messages, noting a quick e-mail doesn’t convey real effort or gratitude.

These are the things I learned watching a terrific film called “California Typewriter,” which came out in 2017 but is available on demand now. The film takes its name from a typewriter repair shop in Berkeley, but reaches all across the analog landscape to explore typewriter history, a typewriter orchestra and an artist who builds sculptures from typewriter parts.

The film let me scroll back to all the typewriters that sparked my imagination, filled my homes and workplaces with happy clacking sounds and captured my thoughts.

Before I could even read, I would sit before the heavy, black Underwood on the kitchen table and, looking at an open book beside me, “write” a sentence by matching the letters on the page to the letters on the keys. Years later, my mom would sit at the kitchen table of a different home, composing her master’s degree thesis on that same machine.

College called for something more portable.

Clearing out a relative’s garage, my dad unearthed a small, elderly manual in a hard, gray case. He cleaned it up and off it went with me to California State College, where my journalism career would begin. The outline of the “o” key was too sharp and punched a hole in the paper with every strike. Unable to avoid words containing the letter o, I handed in term papers that looked like keypunch cards, causing a few professors to mark big red question marks in the margins.

The film reminded me of other typewriters: the light blue machine our faculty advisor brought each Thursday when the staff and I laid out the campus newspaper. When he finally rolled paper into the machine around 2 a.m. to order final corrections, we knew we’d put the “Times” to bed. At my first news writing job in Pittsburgh, typewriters lived on every desk. My favorite was the manual Olivetti whose keys were curved to fit my fingertips; the typeface was curvy and friendly. Other models around the newsroom were too clunky and required arm strength.

By the time I moved to TV, newsrooms went electric and words sprang not from letters on arms but from letters on little rotating globes. They’d get gummed up with ink and we’d remove the globes and dig at the letters with pencil tips.

We fed our last sheets of paper into a machine around 1987, when personal computers came to the newsroom. Writing became sleeker and quicker; mistakes were easily corrected and the walk across the newsroom to hand a draft to the editor became a shout across the newsroom that “my story’s in the file.”

I’m writing this while reclining with a MacBook Pro on my lap. The heels of my hands are resting on the border of the keyboard as my fingers dance across the keys, a task requiring no effort beyond what’s happening in my head.

Progress brought me here.

But there’s something to be said for that cacophony of clacking that filled the newsroom around deadline; something satisfying about physically punching out the words as they come to me. As David McCullough says in the film, pushing the keys becomes part of the creative process.

All that feeding of paper and punching of keys – all that happy clacking noise I made? Maybe those were the things that helped me learn how to think and to write, all those years ago on that heavy old Underwood.