Underwood

At one end of the South/Midland beach boardwalk on Staten Island there is a round plaza called Freedom Circle that has several flag poles flying various incarnations of the American flag and a large plaque detailing the evolution of said flag. It was built to “pay special tribute to the women and men who have fought to defend our freedom over the years” according to one borough website. The name “Freedom Circle” sounds vaguely Soviet to me, but maybe our BP was just trying to make the growing Russian population of Staten Island feel at home at our fine beaches.

In any event, the Mrs. and I were walking on the boardwalk the other night and as we approached that end of the boardwalk I noticed a flashing light, the sort that one sees on one of those red light cameras. We drew nearer and saw the source of the flashing was a box on one of the flagpoles. As we reached the plaza the box flashed again and a robot voice spoke to us.

“You are committing an illegal act. You are in a restricted area and your photograph has been taken and will be used to prosecute you. Leave the area immediately.”

Now the park wasn’t closed (actually that portion of the boardwalk never closes since the flag plaza is adjacent to the 835 foot long fishing pier which is open all night for the nocturnal sportspeople of our fair borough) and all we had done was walk. I shrugged and we headed a down the ramp to the parking lot. As we left we heard the robot speak several times as bicyclists, joggers and other walkers passed by the flags. I’m sure it was some kind of mechanical error, and yet it seemed to fit seamlessly in to our paranoid 21st century city especially because nobody seemed particularly bothered by it. Freedom is such a funny word that means different things to different people, isn’t it gang?

Of course I would never be one to stand in the way of progress as we move bravely forward into our algorithmed, plotted, calculated, machine-precise world of the future. Although even sitting here typing this reminds me of a simpler machine from a simpler time.

I miss my dad’s old Underwood manual typewriter.

Now most people my own age (early 40’s) and younger have probably never even seen a manual typer in person, never mind used one. Fortunately for me I was born of parents who were not what you would call your early adopter types. I was raised with a healthy skepticism regarding new technology, probably because my dad was a mechanic by trade who ran a maintenance shop in the military so he saw how easily and how frequently new devices broke. Therefore, he wouldn’t ever buy any newer inventions or technologies until they were on the market for years. For example, he never bought a car with power windows until he had no choice. For years he would tell me the story of someone he knew who bought a car with power windows when power windows were a new thing and how that person blew a fuse in the car and had to drive it to the shop in a torrential downpour with all the windows open. You get the picture here?

So my dad had this old typer, this manual beast like you see on the old cop shows. This was the device on which I learned to type. I have miserable handwriting so I was typing reports for school as early as the 5th grade. This old Underwood job didn’t even have one of those newfangled balls with all the letters on them. Those are for electric typewriters. No, each and every letter and punctuation key on the keyboard was attached to a lever that pushed up a thin piece of metal (damn, I wish I had a glossary for these parts because I bet they all have technical names that are already drifting into the mists of history). That piece of metal would have two versions of a letter or two punctuation markets and the metal would strike an ink-covered cloth ribbon making an imprint on the paper which was wrapped around a roller and held in place by a spring-loaded metal bar. Each keystroke would make a satisfying “thwack” against the paper and your fingers would get a workout because you weren’t just pushing buttons, you were actually physically moving a lever.

You know why your “Shift” key is called that? Because on the old manual typers you would press the “shift” lever down and it would shift the roller down so the capital version of the letter that was above the lower case letter on a given key would strike the ribbon instead. “Caps Lock” was often called “Shift Lock” on manual machines because it locked the roller in the lower position.

If you typed too fast sometimes the next key would come up before the first key had fallen back into place and they’d stick together. If you were bored you’d hit a bunch of keys at once to see which one “one” and what shape all the keys stuck together would make. Then you’d have to stick your fingers in the top of the typewriter and pull them all apart. And that ink ribbon, man the smell of those ink ribbons along with the smell of the alcohol in old mimeograph or rexograph machines are two smells that will always transport me back to my youth. It’s funny, there’s one scene in the ‘80s teen comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” that is completely lost to anyone under 35. A teacher hands out a test and in unison all the kids pick up the paper and take a deep sniff. You don’t get that from a modern photocopy machine gang, I’m sorry. That’s another moment long gone and buried.

Corrections on the old manual were not easily made and as a result I was a more accurate typist back then than I am now where I can just delete away my errors or even more insidiously have no idea I ever made them as the machine autocorrects a fair amount of my typos. With the manual you could just backspace and type XXXXXX over a word which was acceptable to most teachers in small amounts, or you could use liquid paper/white out though that was a drag because if you typed over it before it dried you’d get the stuff on the ribbon and the letter would look light gray on the paper or you could use my dad’s favorite which was correct-a-tape strips. Correct-a-tape strips were slips of plastic with while powder on one side that you would insert between the ribbon and the paper and hold with one hand while typing the letter you wanted to “delete” with the other. Clever, no? Of course flipping and turning the strips to use up as much of them as possible was an art form to be learned since my father was a child of the Great Depression who didn’t waste anything willingly. In fact he would never let me open a new ribbon until the letters on the page were virtually illegible and he also groused that nobody re-inked ribbons anymore. Let’s bear in mind that this is the early 1980s and most other kids had electric typewriters if not early word processors for their reports. I was incredibly grateful when I was granted the use of an electric typewriter in college; it was one that even had an erasing ribbon on it!

Still, today I miss that old manual machine. I remember adjusting the spacing lever on the roller and how different the rhythm of typing is when you have to reach up with your left hand and push the roller back from left to right using the lever that stuck out towards you to move the paper one space or two spaces depending on where you’d set the spacing lever (and I’m sure there’s some kind of jargon name for what I’m calling a “spacing lever” but I don’t know what it is). You could leave the cover over the ribbon spools off if you really wanted to make a racket with it. You could imagine it sounded like a TV newscast. Does any TV newscast even have the sound effects of a typewriter in their theme anymore? I don’t think so.

Ah, but progress is inevitable. It’s actually a whole lot easier to type this on a computer then it was to type stuff on the old manual. I’m really not as technophobic as I seem here. I just wonder if all of us as human beings have the common sense to know where the limits are for machine use. Will we know when to say when? Are the incredibly powerful machines the best and brightest are capable of building going to be our new deities? Don’t be so quick to say no, friends. Try spending some time without using the machines that say, even your grandparents lacked and you’ll see how addicted we’ve already become. Of course, things like refrigerators and telephones are things that improve our quality of life and in fact can and do save lives. But at what point do machines stop serving us and turn the tables and we begin serving them, knowingly or not? How much time do you spend watching TV? How much time do you spend on this here Internet? What could you be doing instead of looking at one of the many screens in your life? It’s not a problem? It can’t happen? We aren’t becoming machine-people? I hope not. If it happens, don't say I didn't warn you.