About a year ago, I reconnected with my stepsister — the only daughter of my father’s second wife. I had not seen or heard from her in many years. She somehow found me through a search process, which I think was rather difficult since I don’t have a Facebook account or post on any other social media platforms. (The only thing I do on the Internet is write this blog a few times a month when something strikes my interest.)
To make a long story short, her mother had died fairly recently and my stepsister was checking to see if I wanted some of my father’s old things that she had kept. She delivered them on a trip to visit friends in El Paso last spring. Among them were some old Ruidoso News issues that were published in the 1960s when my father owned that publication. There were also some of his drawings and paintings, a personal note from Charles M. Schulz of “Peanuts” fame and an old clunky typewriter that I didn’t remember my father owning. I mentioned some of these in previous blogs, but I didn’t know much about the typewriter, a very old Oliver No. 9, often playfully referred to as the “batwing” model because of its unusual design.
Last week, my wife found a newspaper article about old typewriters being used by two local writers in what they call an “act of public typing” at a local coffee shop. They use the typewriters to pound out stories or letters with a simple mechanical device that is not connected to any electronic network. According to one of the writers, the simplicity of the machine allowed him “to get away from all of the distractions and just be present with my own thoughts.”
That piqued my interest in the old Oliver typewriter that had been largely ignored and gathering dust in my office. (I even found a couple of tiny dead spiders underneath the keyboard.)
I checked the internet for information about the typewriter and found that certain models of this device can fetch more than $1,000 if in good condition. I also looked at the history of the brand and discovered that it was invented by a pastor, Thomas Oliver, who wanted to make sure the sermons he was writing were more legible when he read them to his congregation. The design was patented in 1892 and production began in 1894. The company was based in Woodstock, Illinois, near Chicago. The typewriters were produced until 1928, when an English company bought the brand.
The design was unique at the time because writers could actually see what they had typed on the paper. Most of the earlier models were in a heavy cast metal base painted dark green — an “olive” color in honor of the inventor’s last name.
The typewriters are very heavy. My particular model has two two-inch curved protrusions on each side to allow a person to lift the device more easily and hopefully avoid a back sprain.
The type fonts swoop down onto the roller holding paper from U-shaped arms, one on each side with a satisfying clacking sound to form the letters. The keyboard is a standard “qwerty” design in three rows.
I have not been able to determine what year my model No. 9 is. The plate which I think had that information printed on it has been smoothed over during the years. The best I can guess is that it was made about 1917 because of a list of patent renewal dates listed on two separate plates at the back of the machine. The most recent date of the patent renewals is 1917.
Now that I know a bit more about the machine, I plan to clean it up and maybe start using it on occasion. It appears to still be in working order and I will abide by the instructions on its front which urge me to “Keep Machine cleaned and oiled.”
Of course, if you want to see what I wrote on it, I’ll have to scan it on my printer/fax machine, send it to my laptop, then convert it to a PDF file, save it to my photos file or the Cloud, then convert that to a jpg file, then insert it into my blog using the complicated “WordPress” program. That kind of defeats the goal of keeping things simple by using a typewriter.
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