Aging My Way
I taught myself to type back in the late 1950s on an old Underwood Typewriter that I bought for $5 at a thrift store. I remembered this because I came across an ad this morning from someone wanting to sell an old Underwood for $475.
Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I still had that old typewriter lying about somewhere. But too many moves, and my habit of getting rid of everything I don’t use or love, reminded me that my old typewriter had long vanished from my belongings.
I taught myself how to type on that Underwood back in the 1950s because I thought it might make me employable as a clerk or secretary. I became just good enough that I got a job typing Western Union telegrams that people called in on the phone. It was a brief job, and my best memory of the time is that I took a telegram from Ernie Ford, a radio personality, singer and early-day television host.
I bet not too many of my readers out there will even remember him. Maybe not even telegrams.
I spent the next years after that job being a wife and changing diapers – five kids’ worth of them – before I once again entered the working world. The year was 1967, and typewriters like my old Underwood were being replaced with electric models, and shortly thereafter computers.
I was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when I was forced to use one of the new-fangled contractions for the first time. No way, I thought, would I ever be able to write on it. But two weeks later, typewriters became one of those non-useful things in my life that I would get rid of.
Meanwhile, I’ve become daily hooked to my computer. I use it to write, to learn from, and to communicate with. And I paid just about the same thing for the computer laptop I’m writing this blog on, as what someone now wants to get for an old Underwood Typewriter.
Life is strange.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
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