{"id":42703,"date":"2024-10-26T00:34:35","date_gmt":"2024-10-26T07:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=42703"},"modified":"2026-06-05T09:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T09:52:07","slug":"my-dear-old-manual-typewriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/my-dear-old-manual-typewriter\/","title":{"rendered":"My Dear Old Manual Typewriter — Good-Bye, Good-Bye"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"my-dear-old-manual-typewriter\"<\/a>
My dear old Royal manual typewriter. I used it for years. It weighed a good ten-plus pounds and it had a crack in its platen, which left its footprint on everything I ever typed. A hyphen would be missing, or a P deformed. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The big news this week — surgery on a deviated septum and a heartfelt good-bye to my dear old manual typewriter.<\/p>\n

The typewriter was a mid-century Royal that my father had salvaged from his office in Detroit back in the 1960s. He flew it to New York, and hauled all ten-plus pounds of it up the stairs to my second-floor brownstone\u00a0apartment on the West Side of Manhattan.<\/p>\n

I was hoping to establish myself as a freelance writer and I needed a typewriter. My father didn’t understand my writerly ambitions. He was businessman; he knew there wasn’t much of a bottom line in the writing profession. But he was also my dad and he had decided to help me out.<\/p>\n

Later, the typewriter followed me to San Francisco, where I wrote some stuff on it that I actually got paid for.<\/p>\n

My Dear Old Manual Typewriter<\/strong><\/h5>\n

It’s been years and years since I last typed my last story on that old Royal. Its keys are bent and they get tangled up in each other. Its platen has a major crack in it.<\/p>\n

But I couldn’t bring myself to part with my trusty writing companion until this week, when the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant Sale truck showed up in my driveway and took it away.<\/p>\n

That old thing had been taking up a full cubic foot of otherwise useful space in my house for decades. It had witnessed a marriage and the rearing of two kids. Why did I cling to it for so long?<\/p>\n

Because it connected me to a particular moment in my past, a youthful moment that I’m fond of and I want to keep close.<\/p>\n

What are we, anyway, if not our pasts and the people who met us there?<\/p>\n

That’s it for today’s post, friends. My nose and I need a nap!<\/p>\n

Manual typewriters like mine had disappeared from the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle by the time Armistead Maupin was writing “Tales of the City,” his\u00a0Quintessential San Francisco Novel \u2014 On a Newspaper Deadline<\/a> at a desk not far from mine. Armistead was given a fancy IBM Selectric typewriter to type his tales.<\/em><\/p>\n

More about the writing life at “Different From, Different Than — Which Is It?”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"my<\/a>
The Oakland Museum White Elephant<\/a> sale truck picked up lamps, clothes, books — and my old Royal typewriter. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"my<\/a><\/p>\n

It had been years since I last typed a story on my dear old manual typewriter. Its platen was cracked, its keys tangled. Time to say good-bye.\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48670,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,50],"tags":[2883,477,2906,2907,2908,2909,197,1272],"class_list":["post-42703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","category-on-writing-reading","tag-david-falconer","tag-freelance","tag-manhattan","tag-manual-typewriter","tag-royal-typewriter","tag-the-past","tag-the-writing-room-2","tag-white-elephant-sale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48673,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42703\/revisions\/48673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}