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The Hottest Typewriter in Football: The 'Drop Kick' Who Lived the American Dream

October 12, 2015, 4:21 pm
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Frank 'Tricky Dick' Hyland ...
*All-American football star*
*Olympic Games rugby champion*
*Called the "Babe Ruth of rugby"*
*Sub-even time 100-yards sprinter*
*Admired by peers from Damon Runyon to Jim Murray*
*Threatened with death by Brooklyn gang boss Little Augie Pisano*
*John Wayne's first technical director*
John Wayne
*Forced changes to the rules of American football*
*Ace angler, golfer, baseballer, you name it*
(He used to go fishing at Shasta Lake with California Governor Earl Warren)
*Singer, movie scenarist*
*Booze buddy to the stars*
*Husband of THREE Hollywood beauties*
*Dubbed by one "The Man Who Never Came Home for Dinner"*
*Another wife was "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter"*
*Father-in-law of Paul Gallico*
*Often mistaken for actor George Raft*
(Once signing a forced autograph, "George Raft per Richard Hyland")
George Raft
*US Marines lieutenant colonel*
*Highly fractious LA Times sports columnist*
(He wrote lines like, "Picture if you will a Fred Astaire dancing on a stage with a rival wearing fishing boots" and "Battering up the middle, driving off tackle, scooting around end, and tossing the ball for nine touchdowns here today, the Bruins of UCLA bettered point-a-minute football for the second straight game as they beat Oregon State, 61-0." )
*Author, broadcaster, literary agent, artist*
*Known to be "famously immodest"*
The "Tom" on a hot tin typewriter
What more could a man ask for?
Oakland Tribune, November 29, 1927, announcing Hyland's selection in the Pacific Coast All-Star American football team.
"Dick" Hyland was dubbed as hammering "the hottest typewriter in football" in an article by author Keith Monroe in The Saturday Evening Post of November 13, 1948. The line stuck for the rest of Hyland's life.
Covina Argus, September 19, 1952
Santa Ana Register Sun, Christmas Day, 1927
Actor John Gilbert (1896-1936)
He was an Olympic Games rugby union gold medallist (Paris, 1924) who more than just mingled with the stars - he regularly got drunk with close pal John Gilbert at Malibu, played beach ping-pong with Charlie Chaplin and Bebe Daniels,and married THREE Hollywood lookers (and had one other wife)!

Mrs Hyland No 1: Journalist, novelist and screenwriter Adela Nora Rogers St Johns (1894-1988).They had a son, Richard Rogers St Johns (1929-2006), who was educated through a $25,000 trust fund set aside for him in the $407,453 estate of actor John Gilbert, followed his father to Stanford, was a founder of SBS Broadcasting and in 1979 became president and chief executive officer of the film-making subsidiary of the Guinness Brewery. 
For a brief period in 1934, Dick Hyland was fellow sports writer Paul Gallico's (step?) father-in-law, as Gallico, at the age of 36, got a quickie divorce in Reno and married Adela's 17-year-old daughter Elaine St Jones. That marriage didn't last very long either.
"Son-in-law"Paul Gallico
When Dick Hyland's own marriage, to Adela, turned all pear-shaped and nasty in 1934, Adela's good pal, Brooklyn gang boss "Little Augie Pisano" (Anthony Carfano, 1895-1959) sent two hoods around, offering to "take care" of our hero, "Tricky Dick". Happily, Adela knocked back the offer.
Oakland Tribune, October 19, 1934
Mrs Hyland No 2 was Louise (Lou) Mathews Lansburgh (1913-1973), who Dick married in Queen Liliokalani's Gardens at Kahala, Oahu, Hawaii on July 22, 1937. They had a son, Lanric (Ricki) Hyland, born September 23, 1938, himself later a promising sportsman - he transferred from Honolulu and was a quarterback at Drake High in 1955. The marriage didn't last long. Lou continued to call herself Mrs Lou Hyland until 1954, when she married future California State Senator Alvin C. Weingand, also in Hawaii. 
Mrs Hyland No 3: Ann Staunton (real name Virginia Ann Koerlin, 1920-1994) is seen seated on her bottom. left, with the cittern (or is it a rebec?). This "Sexy Sextet" of starlets appeared as Lana Turner's handmaidens in Diane, "set in the 16th century" [!!!]. The others charmers are Ann Brendon, Fay Morley, Alicia Ibanez. Bunny Cooper and Barbara Darrow. Anne and Dick got engaged in May 1943, while Dick was with the Marines, and married soon after. Their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born on May 21, 1944. Anne and Dick soon separated and were divorced in 1946. In 1948 Ann was calling herself Virginia Ann Hyland and renting the Laurel Canyon house where Robert Mitchum was caught smoking dope. Interestingly enough, in 1922 Adela Rogers St Jones had dismissed stories of "hop and dope" parties in Hollywood as myths.
Mrs Hyland No 4, the glamorous Rochelle Elizabeth Hudson (1916-1972). "Tricky Dick" didn't find her attractive enough, however, and 18 months after the wedding, in late July 1950, Rochelle was to dub him "The Man Who Never Came Home For Dinner". So seldom was he home by bedtime, indeed, she kicked our Dick out altogether.
NOTE: You will find many claims online that Adela Rogers St Johns and Rochelle Hudson were married to and had children by movie writer and producer Richard Irving "Dick" Hyland(1906-1976). This is completely and utterly untrue. The two women married OUR Dick Hyland, not some other Dick. The other Dick was married to just one woman, she was called Janet Stein Hyland (1907-1963), and they had a daughter called Brooke Barbara (born July 17, 1944; later Barbara Hyland Horgan).
A Los Angeles Times sports columnist (his column was called "Hyland Fling") for almost 40 years from 1928, our Dick Hyland was a World War II US Marines captain with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, which contributed to 83 South Pacific combat operations in major battles or campaigns at Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Midway, Saipan, Tinian, Guam and Okinawa. The Battle of Okinawa included the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific War and was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific.
Described by US newspapers in the mid-1920s at the "world's  best rugby player", Hyland sparred with legendary gridiron coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner at Stanford, and in Paris in 1924 was compared to the world's greatest all-round athlete of all-time, Jim Thorpe.
"Thorpe never had my swerve," Hyland quickly responded. Warner said Hyland was as stubborn in not following coaching instructions as Thorpe had been at Carlisle. Warner in turn greatly annoyed Hyland by calling him "Frankie Merriwell" (Merriwell was the hero of dime novels of the day.)
1958
Dapper Frank "Dick" Hyland at Stanford
Because of his football field resilience, Frank Hyland was nicknamed "Tricky Dick" Hyland by St Ignatius Preparatory School classmates in the Sunset District of San Francisco in 1915. (It has often been suggested that he gained the nickname when he started playing American football in 1925, but he'd had it for 10 years by then.) The "rechristening" was in fact in honour of the hugely popular Californian lightweight and featherweight boxer of the day, "Fighting Dick Hyland" (aka "The Human Autograph"*, real name Willian Uren, 1885-1965), a world title contender pug who got his brain so badly scrambled in 86 pro fights over 18 years that he became permanently punch drunk (and drink drunk) and had to face the Californian lunacy commission. (*This "Dick Hyland" had 408 names and 15 images, many of opponents, tattooed on his chest. Hyland mixed it with the like of Battling Nelson, over a scheduled 45 rounds, Harlem Tommy Murphy, Kid Corbett and Cyclone Johnny Thompson. He was arrested more than 50 times for drunkenness.)
Punched to a pulp - the original "Dick Hyland", right. The second "Dick" Hyland would later do much the same to his typewriter. But, to be best of my knowledge, he never tattooed the machine.
According to syndicated columnist Gerald Raftery in 1972, "Tricky Dick" was a label Hyland handed on to President Richard M. Nixon.
All-round athlete "Tricky Dick" Hyland, aka "The Galloping Ghost", aka "The Line Smasher", allowed the world to think he had been christened Richard William Hyland or Richard Francis Hyland, but in fact his real name was and remained throughout his long life Francis William Hyland. In his early sporting career, newspapers put quotation marks around the "Dick", but in time these disappeared. Even his obituary in the Stanford Magazine listed him as "Richard Frank Hyland". But when it came to official business, such as passport applications and wedding certificates, he was always Frank William Hyland:
Frank "Dick" Hyland's 1924 passport photo
Frank Hyland was born at 102 Oak Street in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, on July 26, 1900, the son of New Jersey-born Frank William Hyland Sr (1875-1951), a solicitor for and later owner of a street construction company, and Ellen (also known as Helen and Emily) Loretta Swett Hyland (1872-1951), a Stanford-educated editor. In 1918 his father was a captain in the 23rd Engineers Battalion highway regiment, which served in France toward the end of World War I, when Frank Jr also signed up for service.
Dick Hyland's mother Helen at Stanford, where rugby union was introduced in 1905. She encouraged Dick to take up rugby union at Santa Clara.
After attending St Ignatius, in 1918 Frank Jr did his prep at Santa Clara University before entering Stanford. He worked his way through college as a surveyor for his father's company. It was at St Ignatius, aged 15 in 1915, that he started to play rugby union. At this time, rugby still held sway in Californian universities and schools. Frank's mother, who was involved at Stanford when rugby was introduced there in 1905, decided her son should play the 15-a-side game.
Frank Hyland wrote the Ignatian yearbook rugby and basketball notes.
Frank Hyland continued to play rugby for the next nine years, until early 1925, when he switched back to the American version. The conversion back to gridiron was not an easy one, and there are many parallels with this year's much-publicised bid by Australian rugby league player Jarryd Hayne to "make it" in the NFL with the San Francisco 49ers. (Hayne is not the first rugby player to join the 49ers, by the way - that was Matt Hazeltine, a 49er from 1955-68, whose father, Matt Sr, had played rugby with Frank Hyland). Like Hayne, Hyland had to learn not to carry the ball in front of him, and like Hayne, Hyland was renowned as a brilliant open field runner.
At Stanford University in 1923, Frank Hyland was tempted to return to gridiron, but in December of that year he joined the renowned Stanford rugby team and with Stanford's Olympic Games gold medallist sprinter from the 1920 Antwerp Games,  Morris Kirksey, nominated for trials to select the United States team to defend the Olympic rugby title at the 1924 Paris Games. (NOTE: Contrary to a widespread misconception, Kirksey DID NOT win a rugby gold medal in Antwerp.) One of the four men preparing the 1924 US Olympic Games rugby squad for its title defence was former New Zealand All Black Jim Wylie.
Hyland was one of nine Stanford players to make the team:
The French Press had dismissed the US team as nothing but “street fighters and saloon brawlers". But Frank Hyland so impressed his French rugby hosts at the 1924 Games (one reporter described his “disconcerting foot changes”) that they nicknamed him "Buck" and he was asked to stay on and coach and play for the famous Stade Français Club Athlétique des Sports Généraux in Paris. For reasons which remain unclear, the Fédération Française de Rugby found it necessary to issue Hyland with an "amateur licence". However, five months after the Olympic final, Hyland was accused of being a "slave driver" by his French charges, after leaving them "dead on their feet" at a training session. In the unexplained absence of its star Test winger Adolphe Jauréguy, Hyland had also been given the team's captaincy. On December 6, the Fédération Française de Rugby, following a long investigation, charged Hyland with being a professional. Stade Français' Paris rivals Racing Club de France claimed it had first approached Hyland after the Olympics in May, and he had asked for money to join Racing Club. With the publicity these accusations received back home in the Oakland Tribune, Hyland's father, Frank Sr, wired his son saying, "You come home and get back to college."
Hyland did just that, but by the time he returned, in January 1925, rugby union was already all but dead in the US. He decided to concentrate his future sporting efforts on the track and on the gridiron. For all his enormous successes in both arenas, however, Hyland's name was put forward to join a bid by the US to defend its Olympic Games rugby union title a second time - in Amsterdam, in 1928.
Harry Maloney
Henry Wilfred "Harry" Maloney (1876-1967), the Irish-born Stanford PE and military science teacher who had been largely responsible for organising the first two US Olympic Games rugby teams, proposed in January 1927 to send a third team to Europe. But Maloney was already aware the best that could be hoped for was to have rugby as an Amsterdam Olympics demonstration sport, which was proposed by the Delftsche Studenten Rugby Club. The Dutch Games organisers soon knocked back that idea, as rugby wasn't a Dutch sport. Following the appalling French crowd behaviour when the US beat France 17-3 in the 1924 final, the International Olympic Committee and the International Amateur Athletic Federation had voted, even before the Paris Games had ended, to exclude rugby from future Olympics, on the grounds that it attracted “limited interest and entries”. IOC meetings in Prague in May 1925 and in Lisbon in May 1926 confirmed there was no longer room for rugby at the Games. The US will finally get the chance to defend its rugby title in seven-a-side form in Rio de Janiero next year.
By the winter of 1925, Hyland had successfully made the conversion to American football, to the delight of Stanford's legendary coach "Pop" Warner ("Card", by the way, is short for Cardinals, as in Stanford University; there is reference to "using" interference, which is not allowed in rugby; as for holding the ball in front of him, see second image above):
Hyland went on to play left halfback for Stanford for three straight seasons, 1925-27. He was a member of the 1926 team that went undefeated and shared the national championship with Alabama after playing to a tie in the 1927 Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Hyland also played in the  1928 Rose Bowl Game, and was elected to the Stanford Hall of Fame in 1961.
On the track Hyland had sharpened his pace, running 9.9 seconds for the 100 yards against the great Olympic Games 100 metres champion Charley Paddock (while copying Paddock's famous leaping finish, which had won the American the 1920 gold medal in Antwerp):
 1925
 1926
 1927
1927
1927
As soon as his football career had ended, in May 1927 Hyland was co-opted by Oscar-nominated actor Richard Barthelmess to be technical director on a movie called The Drop Kick (it was called Glitter in Britain). Barthelmess, who produced the film - one of John Wayne's first movies (he was a player and a spectator) - worked closely with Adela Rogers St Johns, and it was while employed on the set of The Drop Kick that Hyland and Adela got together. Hyland's life would begin to change drastically after that. He was in amongst the money, the madness and the magic of Hollywood.
Barthelmess with Adela, right, on the set of The Patent Leather Kid in 1927.
Hyland joined the sports writing staff of the Los Angeles Times in September 1928. He also started radio work in 1932, the same year he published a book, The Diary of a Line Smasher. Ten years later he enlisted with the US Marines.
While still in the Marines, Hyland challenged 1920 Olympic Games 100 metres sprint champion Charley Paddock to a race between two 42-year-olds over 50-yards. A day later, on July 21, 1943,  Paddock died in a plane crash near Sitka, Alaska. It was claimed that in their sprinting heydays, Hyland regularly beat Paddock to 50 yards. Hyland thought he'd lost another sporting friend in September 1944:
After he had almost been scalped in a car accident in Ontario, California, in April 1942, Hyland declared he'd suffered worse injuries on football fields. He also probably felt safer on football fields and battlefields than he did in divorce court rooms. His bust-up with Adela Rogers St Johns had been a nasty affair. The pair exchanged unpleasantries as Hyland labelled Adela an "improper person" to care for his then six-year-old son Richard, as using "improper language" and destroying the love of Richard for his father. Eventually, in August 1936, Hyland won a $7335 settlement for money he claimed he was owed (Adela had tried to have his car seized) but not custody, not even over the movie scripts he said they'd written together. Using Adela's payout, Hyland quickly high-tailed it to Hawaii, to avoid any further flak, and decided older women were no longer for him. In Honolulu he met wife No 2, former Stanford student Lou Lansburgh, in October 1936. But Hyland had to depart Honolulu in 1937 after being exposed for alleged "spying" on Filipino workers on Maui for the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association.
Back in the US, Hyland started to hit the bottle and in September 1940 he and fellow Californian footballer and Olympic athlete Albert Bryan "Pesky" Sprott (1897-1951) were briefly jailed for disturbing the peace after abusing a police officer (for punching Hyland"in the brisket"). Upon his return from the Pacific Theatre of War, and back at his desk at the LA Times, Hyland married Ann Staunton. That didn't last any longer than his previous marriages and in October 1946 Hyland became embroiled in a greyhound racing scandal in Los Angeles. His divorce from Rochelle Hudson was much less messy than the Rogers St Johns break up, especially given Hyland was spending so such much time away from home and only returned to his wife "in the wee small hours". But when he drove home to West Hollywood in January 1955, Hyland had to use his old rugby skills to make a diving tackle on a gun-toting would-be robber. Hyland copped another bang on the head, this time from the .45 automatic. Later that year he started to get his life back on the rails, enrolling for disaster relief training.
As a sports columnist Hyland had consistently railed against racism in Californian sport, including in 1939 supporting a young Jackie Robinson and in 1955 Primo Villanueva, both as footballers at UCLA. After his sports writing career ended, in 1966, he moved to Palm Desert and became sports editor of the Palm Desert Post, as well as a literary agent. One of his clients was a San Diego schoolteacher called Geri Turner Davis, who wrote a hugely controversial play call A Cat Named Jesus, for which she received some vicious racial abuse. 
Geri Turner Davis and her black cat
Hyland remained active by playing golf off a 16 handicap into his old age. On July 16, 1981, 10 days shy of his 81st birthday, he was playing in a pro-am celebrity tournament at the Wawona Yosemite National Park course in California. He died of a heart attack in his sleep at the Wawona Hotel that night.  

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Photolith Typewriters

October 13, 2015, 4:25 am
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From The Stanford Daily, Volume 87, Issue 26, 17 April 1935.

From The Stanford Daily, Volume 86, Issue 66, 31 January 1935 

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Etaoin shrdlu, anyone?

October 14, 2015, 4:59 am
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Albert Einstein sets the first lines of a report for a new Jewish newspaper, printed in English, in New York on January 15, 1934.
At that time he was a professor at Princeton University.
The first known example of ETAOIN SHRDLU being published
in an Australian newspaper - 
the Launceston Examiner in Tasmania, 7 August 1896, page 6.
Holy carp!
I've made a mistake.
X over it?
No.
Tippex?
No.
Wite Out?
No.
Liquid paper?
No.
Oh, I know.
ETAOIN SHRDLU!
Daily News, Perth, Western Australia, 22 July 1898, page 3
When a Linotype operator made an error, he ran his fingers down two rows of keys to signify in hot metal that the line of type needed to be extracted from the body matter by the compositor during the page make-up process.
But sometimes - just occasionally - the proof-readers and the compositors missed it.
Topeka Daily Capital, Topeka, Kansas, 28 December 1895, page 3
And it finished up in print, in the newspaper, confusing the poor paying reader no end.
Etaoin shrdlu marked a bad slug, and an even worse oversight when published.
The Day Book, Chicago, Illinois, 18 July 18 1916, page 2
The New York Tribune was the first newspaper to use Mergenthaler Linotype machines, on July 3, 1886. Just eight years and 24 days later, up popped the first etaoin shrdlu, on page nine of The Daily Picayune in New Orleans, on 27 July, 1894.
I was reminded of this wonderfully intriguing newspaper gaffe last week by a post on the Kiwi Journalists' Association Facebook page. It reported Gary Law of the New Zealand Archeology Association as saying, "Linotype machines that set hot metal type and revolutionised newspaper and book production were once all pervasive, until replaced by computer technology. The first two columns on the Linotype keyboard read ETAOIN SHRDLU – in both the upper case and the lower case keyboard. Operators frustrated with their work were known to run their finger down the rows and the words would appear in the hot type and sometimes make it to the paper."
The earliest etaoin in New Zealand, above, appeared in the Auckland Star on 5 February 1898, a mere six months after the newspaper's owner, Henry Brett (1843-1927), had imported five machines, valued at £3546, in August 1897. There was much resistance from unions to their introduction and Brett went to court over stiff import duties. Brett had a history of innovation. He purchased a flock of pigeons to carry news from the Thames goldfields and elsewhere.
Henry Brett
Etaoin shrdlu is the approximate order of frequency of the 12 most commonly used letters in the English language, as the letters on Linotype machines were arranged by a perceived letter frequency. (The Linotype keyboard was almost right - the actual frequency of letters in the English language is apparently ETAONI RSHDLC, although this too is in dispute.)
Etaoin shrdlu appeared in print often enough to become part of newspaper lore and to be listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. A documentary about the last issue of The New York Times to be composed in the hot-metal printing process (2 July, 1978) was titled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu. See here.
SHRDLU was used in 1972 by Terry Winograd as the name for an early artificial-intelligence system in Lisp. Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine includes Shrdlu as a character. In 1942 Etaoin Shrdlu was the title of a short story by Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. (A sequel, Son of Etaoin Shrdlu: More Adventures in Typer and Space, was written by others in 1981.) It is the name of a science fiction fanzine edited by Sheldon Lee Glashow and Steven Weinberg. Three pieces published in The New Yorker magazine in 1925 appeared under the pen name Etain Shrdlu. At least one piece in The New Yorker has Etaoin Shrdlu in the title.
The Wichita Daily Eagle, Wichita, Kansas, 27 April 1895, page 1
The double whammy: 
Davenport Daily Republican , Davenport, Iowa, 14 November, 1895, page 1
My all-time favourite, the Linotype operator who completely lost his cool:
 Wagga Wagga Express, New South Wales, Australia, 4 February 1899, page 2
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Typewritten Letters: Papa, Scott, Albert and Woody

October 15, 2015, 4:28 am
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A fortnight ago in New York, Lion Heart Autographs auctioned typewritten letters which included missives from Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Einstein and Woody Guthrie. Einstein wrote to Fritz Tichauer about the difficulty of studying mathematics, Fitzgerald to his typist Isabel W. Owens about his financial destitution, and Hemingway to Peter Viertel and Bettina Graziani about marlin fishing and The Old Man and The Sea. Guthrie just wrote lyrics for Buckeye Jim.
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To Russia Without Love: Shirtfronting the Spammers

October 19, 2015, 4:45 am
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Back to the Future Day: October 21, 2015 - The Typewriter Revolution Arrives

October 21, 2015, 4:25 am
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Doc was just about to pack the Olympic SM3 portable typewriter into the DeLorean when Marty and Jennifer raced out to tell him his guide book for the future, The Typewriter Revolution by Richard Polt, had been delivered to 9303 Lyon Estates, Hill Valley - hot off the presses.
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The Mystery of Patrick Moore's Woodstock Typewriter

October 22, 2015, 9:51 pm
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Legendary eccentric English astronomer and cat lover Sir Patrick Moore (1923-2012) was the man who mapped the Moon before Man had even stepped foot on it. Indeed, his map helped Man step foot on it. Moore was also the only person to ever meet Orville Wright, Yuri GagarinandNeil Armstrong.
Moore famously despised computers and used an early Woodstock typewriter to write more than 100 books (he lost count of the precise number), articles, reports and letters until well into his late 70s. In was not until late 2001, when wartime injuries finally caught up with him one horrible morning, that he had to stop typing at the rate he had once managed.
Moore with his Moon atlas and Woodstock typewriter in 1965. Below, the same room in 2002:
This 9min 40sec video, featuring Moore at his Woodstock, was shot for Australian broadcaster the ABC at Moore's West Sussex home in England and screened by Journeyman Pictures in Britain in May 2001. It shows Moore still typing on his Woodstock, two-fingered, at up to 90 words a minute. (The interviewer is Jennifer Byrne, who claims the typewriter was made in 1908. One can only assume Byrne was misled on this by Moore, as the Woodstock could not have been older than a September 1914 model [Woodstock didn't start to export its typewriters until early 1917, with its model 5]. The video was actually shot in 2000 and first screened in Australia in October of that year, as "An Endangered Species" on the program Foreign Correspondent.) 
A week ago Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May announced on his blog that he planned to sell the charming thatched home of his late friend Moore. May said he was selling Farthings, in Selsey, after proposals to turn it into a Moore museum fell through.
Moore's Woodstock in April 2012, eight months before he died.
Profits from the sale of Farthings will go to the South Downs Planetarium in Chichester, which hopes to convert derelict buildings on its Kingsham Farm site to create a study centre using Moore’s books and observations, alongside a museum and astronomical garden. May bought Moore’s home in 2008, leasing it back to him for a peppercorn rent the same day, to provide financial security when the hugely popular - but by then largely incapacitated - The Sky at Night host fell on hard times. John Mason, principal lecturer and founding trustee of the planetarium, said the study centre would contain "the biggest astronomical library in private hands outside the Royal Astronomical Society in London", with "the ambiance of Sir Patrick’s library".
Whether Moore's Woodstock typewriter will help provide some of this ambiance is not yet clear. Indeed, the whereabouts of the Woodstock used by Moore for most of his life appears to be something of a mystery.
Earlier this month, Moore’s personal belongings fetched tens of thousands of pounds at a Chichester auction. These included what purported to be Moore's typewriter, an item which sold for £550. However, the typewriter which was sold was a Remington 8, a wide carriage version of the 7, and NOT Moore's Woodstock. Has someone been sold the wrong typewriter?
Last December, on the second anniversary of Moore's death, it was reported that the Science Museum in London had acquired a large collection of his objects and manuscripts and memorabilia, including The Sky at Night scripts, and about 70 of his observation books, stretching over more than 60 years, manuscripts for astronomy and fiction books, and a 12.5 inch reflecting telescope. It's possible the Woodstock typewriter may have been among that lot.
Mason at Moore's Woodstock in February this year.
But, on February 23 of this year, the South Downs Planetarium's John Mason was at Moore's house to record Moore's Woodstock typewriter for a BBC Radio 4 drama, "Far Side of the Moore". Mason said that even using 10 fingers, he could not type as hard or as fast as Moore could with two. The fact that Mason was able to type on the Woodstock at all is interesting, because on January 15, 2008, a plea had gone out to Britain's amateur astronomers from Chris Lintott, to "Save Patrick Moore’s Typewriter": "Patrick Moore’sWoodstock typewriter is broken and no one knows how to fix it. Do any of you know?".
Items sold by Henry Adams Auctions in Chichester earlier this month included Moore's xylophone, orreries (clockwork models of the solar system) and signed books. Auctioneer Andrew Swain reported, "There was also a lot of interest in Sir Patrick’s typewriter which sold for £550."
Moore died in Selsey on December 9, 2012, aged 89. By that time he hadn't set foot in his observatory for more than a decade. He couldn't get up the steps or walk across a room. Worst still, he told a reporter on March 4, 2011, on his 88th birthday, he couldn't "even bash out a letter on his typewriter or hold a pen". Some time in late 2001, he woke up one morning to find himself crippled by a spinal injury that had troubled him since World War II. The right side of his body was largely immobile. 
At the time of his 88th birthday, Moore said: "I can't use my dear old typewriter on which all my books have been written." 
Although the model number on the front of his Woodstock had long since worn off by 2008, when the photo above was taken, the first Woodstock did not reach the market until September 1914.
Eight months before he died, Moore published a book (Miaow! Cats Really are Nicer Than People!, interesting nine-minute video in which Moore talks about the book here) about his cats and donated the profits to Cats Protection - the full story can be read here. 
From It Came From Outer Space Wearing an RAF Blazer! A Fan's Biography of Sir Patrick Moore by Martin Mobberley.
 Moore with a different typewriter in 1982
Moore with a portable in 2000
 Moore at the Woodstock in 2008
Moore typing on the Woodstock in 2000
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Vale Maureen O'Hara (1920-2015)

October 25, 2015, 5:15 am
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Actress Maureen O'Hara has died in Boise, Idaho, aged 95. She was born Maureen FitzSimons on August 17, 1920, on Beechworth Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin.  She was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The caption for these 1942 images was:  “The stories they’ve told! Another load of RKO Radio typewriters is turned in to the government for war work. Somewhere in the lot is Maureen O’Hara’s personal typewriter, which she added to the pile before she would pose in the picture. The machines come from the script department, where each one has played its role in recording countless memorable scenes for screenplays. Taking time off between the shooting of scenes at the RKO Studios in Hollywood, Miss O’Hara helped collect more than 70  typewriters for future use by the Army, Navy, and Marines.” Americans were asked to donate 600,000 typewriters for use in World War II.
Below: "Send your typewriters to war. At Universal City, California, Maria Montez, glamorous Latin-American movie star, and Gloria Jean, typical of young America in Hollywood, helped collect more than 100 typewriters for the Army, Navy, and Marines. Only machines manufactured since January 1, 1935, were commandeered; no portables were wanted."
Above, Maureen O'Hara in 1940. She was born quite close to where I once lived in Dublin. Below at the Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney in 1951, while here to star in 20th Century Fox's film Kangaroo.
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Little Typists

October 29, 2015, 3:43 am
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Richard Polt has lot to say, around some fantastic photos, on the subject of "young insurgents" in a section called "Kids at the Keys" in his wonderful book The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century (pp242-255). As if any further evidence was needed of the way typewriters act as a magnet for children, an Olympia SM9 I was given on Wednesday has provided it. My daughter-in-law, Emily, has her two part-Lithuanian nieces staying with their grandparents in Canberra for the time being. With their parents, they have moved from London to start new lives in Australia. But, being in transit, they have a need for new things to occupy their time, new challenges to occupy their highly active young minds. This typewriter, now theirs, is helping fill that void. Four-year-old Lara, above, and Nikita, seven, below, had already shown how much typewriters appealed to them when they visited Emily and my son Danny, who have the pink "Golightly" Remington,  a "DanEm" Consul and a lovely pre-war Royal portable set up for use in their living room. Now the two girls have their own Olympia SM9, and they apparently love it.
Of course Lara and Nikita's cousin, my grand-daughter Elly, has also been given a typewriter - in fact, on the day she was born, August 26. And already, at age eight weeks, she has shown a deep fascination for stories about how Yost stitched up Sholes, Crandell locked up Densmore's daughter-in-law and Hammond got out of the lunatic asylum.
 "Tell me that one about Spiro again, grand-dad."
 "You're kidding me, a piece of wood and some tin?"
Emily and Danny celebrate their first wedding anniversary on Sunday. Gee, where has the past year gone? Somewhere in a flash ...
It was good to see the "Golightly" Remington getting some use again. Since Richard's book was published, with a little bit on input from me ("From Workhorse to Cookie Jar", pp299-300) on transforming typewriters, there has been a purely coincidental spike in interest in my January 2013 blog post on the "Polt-Righter" ("Right On! A Really Funky Remington Typewriter") (now owned by Terry Cooksley). I have no way of explaining why this is so, other than to imagine there must be a lot of people out there tackling the transformation process right now. Maybe it is because of Richard's book?
Danny shows Lara how to type
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On the Death of Grantland: US Sportswriters and their Typewriters

October 31, 2015, 2:06 am
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To mark the sad end of Grantland (named in honour of the great American typewriter-belting sports writer Grantland Rice), here's a look at 91 US sports writers and their typewriters from over the years. Grantland, the sports and pop-culture blog owned and operated by ESPN, was started in 2011 by veteran writer and sports journalist Bill Simmons (above), who remained as editor-in-chief until May this year. ESPN announced on Friday it was suspending the publication of Grantland.
This, seemingly, is how the modern-day sports writer desports her/himself. (It's Mexican Ines Sainz taking a break from the hard slog of sports reporting in 2010.) The image below is a lot more like I remember it, squashed up on unsteady benches, uncomfortable seats, sometimes no seats at all.
Or sometimes this, perhaps
Looking through these images, can you pick which brands were the indoor (offices, homes) and outdoor (ball park press boxes, press rooms) favourites of the sports writers? Indoors, I'd say it's a toss-up between Royal and Underwood, while outdoors, Remington on top, but the Hermes Baby seems to have done quite well. My favourite image is the one of Harry Grayson, followed by Stan Isaacs.
Al Stump
Al Thomy
Arthur Daley
Babe Young
Barney Kilgore
Barney Kremenko, centre
Bill Corum (with Joe Louis and an Underwood 5, right)
Bill Cunningham
Bill Driscoll
Bill Heinz
Bill Nicholls
Bill Saroyan
Bob Considine
Bud Shaver
Charles Beane
Charles Doyle
Charlie Roberts
Chet Smith
Chuck Heaton
Cullen Cain



Damon Runyon (my No 2 favourite)
Dan Daniel
Dan Parker
Dave Egan
Denman Thompson

Dick Young
Ed Bang
Ed Burns
Ed Danworth (with Furman Bisher)
Ed Pollock
Ed Wray
Eric Zale
Faye Lloyd
Frank Deford
Frank Graham
Fred Lieb
Furman Bisher
Gene Fowler
George Lederer
 
Gordon Cobbledick
Grantland Rice (all-time great No 2)
Gus Steiger
Hal Lebovitz
Harold Parrott
Harry Grayson
Harry Keck
Henry Newman
Henry Smith
Herb Wind
Heywood Broun
Hunter S. Thompson


Jack Kofoed
Jerry Izenberg
Jim Coleman
Jim Leonard
Jim Minter
Jimmy Breslin (right, with Red Smith)
Joe McGuff
 
Joe Williams
John Drebinger
John P. Carmichael (is it a Barr?)
John Lake
Johnny Kilbane
Ken Smith
Larry Robinson
Lou Effrat

Mary Garber
Max Kase
Melissa Ludtke
Mickey Walker (Woodstock)
Ned Cronin
Oscar Kahan


Paul Gallico
Paul Rickard
Philip Wylie
Quentin Reynolds, my idol in my teens





Red Smith (all-time great No 1)
Rex Edmonson
Ring Lardner (my No 2 favourite)
Robert Lipsyte
Royal Brougham
Sam Lacy
Sec Taylor
Shirley Povich
Stan Baumgartner
Stan Isaacs
Sydney James
Unnamed US sports writer at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games
Unnamed golf writer
Unnamed something (dog?) writer
Westbrook Pegler (another of my favourites)
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Portable Typewriters for The Lady in the Van

November 1, 2015, 3:58 am
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The Bradfordians will perform the stage play of Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van at St Margaret’s Hall in Bradford-on-Avon in west Wiltshire, England, this week, just as the movie of the same play reaches cinemas.
English actor Nigel Hawthorne (Yes, Minister; Yes, Prime Minister) once bemoaned the fact that playwright Alan Bennett used a disconcerting array of typewriters to write his scripts - often inserting additions to the script from different machines.
In keeping with the author's penchant, stage productions of Bennett's play The Lady in the Van have been performed throughout Britain in the past 16 years, and in each case it seems a different portable typewriter has been used. This week's Bradfordians' production, above, has gone a bit upmarket in using a nice cream Olympia Monica.
At least the Bradfordians are to be a little more accurate than some, as the portable typewriter the 81-year-old Bennett still actually uses is an AEG (Olympia) Traveller de Luxe S.
This is Typospherian Rob Bowker's AEG (Olympia) Traveller de Luxe S
The scenes in The Lady in the Van which require a portable typewriter as a prop depict Bennett himself typing.
In a feature article in The Guardian on the weekend, promoting the film version of The Lady in the Van, Charlotte Higgins wrote: "What dates Bennett is not his appearance or indeed his bookshelves, but his grasp of technology. His new film, The Lady In The Van, is about the extraordinary figure of Miss Shepherd, who for 15 years, from 1974-89, made her home in a van parked in the driveway of the house where he used to live, a few streets from his current home in Camden Town. Bennett himself is played by Alex Jennings, who is seen at various points stabbing ineffectually with two fingers at a manual typewriter.
"This, I assume, is a little cruel. 'No, no, it’s absolutely true,'Bennett says, in that blissfully mournful voice that could have been designed for voicing Eeyore (which, of course, he has done, reading the Winnie the Pooh books for BBC radio). The action of the film takes place in the 1970s and 80s, so I assume that he has long since moved on into the digital world. 'Well, we had a computer, but we were burgled and that was the one thing that was taken,' he says. 'I was relieved, really. There was nothing on it. I didn’t know how to put work on it.'
"Surely he at least uses an electric typewriter? 'Well, electric typewriters, they hum. They are waiting, you see, for the next note.' So an AEG Traveller de Luxe manual typewriter it is – lacking both expectant hum and flickering cursor."
Alan Bennett, above, was born on May 9, 1934 in Armley, Leeds, and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia and turned to writing full-time.
Maggie Smith, Kevin McNally, using an Olivetti Lettera 32, and Nicholas Farrell perform in the original stage version of The Lady in the Van at the Queen's Theatre in the West End of London in 1999.
The movie of The Lady in the Van has been adapted by Bennett from his 1999 hit West End play of the same name, which was nominated at the 2000 Olivier Awards for Play of the Year. The film version stars Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings. There's a character it in called Underwood. Smith has played Miss Shepherd twice before, in the original 1999 theatrical production, which scored her a Best Actress nomination at the 2000 Olivier Awards, and in a 2009 Radio 4 adaptation.
A scene from the movie
Scenes below include those from productions by the Little Theatre Company of Burton-upon-Trent in March 2008 (Smith-Corona Corsair), the Apollo Theatre in Newport, Isle of Wight, in February 2014 (cream Olympia Splendid), the Newport Playgoers Society at the Dolman Theatre in Newport, South Wales, in 2012 (blue Olympia Splendid), and the Hull Truck (Imperial 2002).
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Two Million Reasons to Keep ozTypewriter Going

November 3, 2015, 4:56 pm
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I'm experimenting with cleaning out the dirt from the paintwork. As yet, I haven't gone over the decal at the front (not ready to risk it), so it's easy to see the difference between the paintwork behind it and on the rest of the ribbon spools cover. It's an idea I picked up from someone on the Typosphere (sorry I can't recall now who suggested it, but thanks anyway). I am using a denture cleaning tablet, dissolved in hot water, and a toothbrush. It seems to be working a treat:
 Dirt comes off
Charlie the Typewriter Guard Cat watches the horses go around 
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The Hammond Typewriter Shuttle at the Bottom of Sydney Harbour

November 4, 2015, 8:16 pm
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A Hammond typewriter typeshuttle, a vital piece of evidence in an infamous Australian court case from 100 years ago, lies at the bottom of Sydney Harbour, near Luna Park and the Milson's Point ferry wharf.
It was thrown overboard from a Milson's Point ferry on December 26, 1914, by a journalist called Charles Adams Jeffries, at the insistence of notorious "versifier and swindler" Grant Madison Hervey (real name George Henry Cochrane). Hervey had used Jeffries'Hammond typewriter to forge a telegram, which resulted in Hervey being sentenced to two years' hard labour in jail.
"Grant Madison Hervey"
The typeshuttle was never found. However, it was announced this week that a team of hydrographic surveyors at Sydney Ports is producing 3D map images of the harbour floor, a new technology scanning process which is uncovering all sorts of weird and not so wonderful things dumped in the harbour over the past two centuries, including 105-year-old shipwrecks. Already exposed, 30m deep, is the intact wreck of the TSS Currajong, a collier that was sunk just off Bradleys Head near Mosman in 1910 after being hit by the SS Wyreema, a 6000-tonne passenger liner.
Sooner or later this $750,000 multi-beam echo sounding system, installed on the tri-hulled motor boat Port Explorer, might reveal Jeffries'Hammond typeshuttle.
The system fires 512 separate sonar rays to the bottom of the harbour to build up a digital map of its hidden depths. During their regular scanning runs crisscrossing the harbour’s shipping lanes, the surveyors have found a variety of furniture items, including tables and chairs, and a 15cm wide steel pipe, so there's no reason why they can't also find the shuttle.
Sydney Ports harbour master Captain Philip Halliday said “The harbour has a colourful history of debris and objects that have been found by our survey teams.” 
The view from my apartment at Milson's Point from 1969-72
If I had known the Hammond typeshuttle was there at the time, I'd have probably gone looking for it myself when I lived at Milson's Point more than 40 years ago. I had an apartment on East Crescent Street, overlooking the Milson's Point ferry wharf and Luna Park, from 1969-72, before the Sydney Opera House was completed. My view across Sydney Harbour was the one made famous by noted painter Brett Whiteley.
Charles Adams Jeffries
Charles Adams Jeffries was born in Bedminster, Bristol, England, on April 13, 1869, but raised in New Zealand, where his father, George Jeffries (1839-1903), was a farmer at Geraldine, South Canterbury. Charles joined New Zealand Railways as a cadet telegraphist and later surveyor. After becoming married in Dunedin, he moved to Australia in 1891, aged 22, and joined the Bulletin, becoming its lead sports writer and one of Australia's finest boxing writers. He had just left the Bulletin, in early November 1914, after 23 years' service, and was headed for the new World, a labour daily, when he became embroiled in the Hervey forgery case, through Hervey's use of his Hammond. The World job fell through because of Jeffries' damaged reputation. Jeffries went bankrupt.
In 1923 Jeffries was appointed chief leader writer for Sydney's Daily Commercial News and Shipping List, and remained there until he died, on April 17, 1931, four days after his 62nd birthday. He had also written on a variety of non-fiction subjects, including politics, agriculture, industry and labour for the Lone Hand.
Guy Hervey died from diabetes 2 1/2 years later, in Melbourne on November 6, 1933, three weeks short of his 53rd birthday. Said to have "turned out poetry by the square yard with mechanical regularity", the Sydney Mirror described Hervey thus: “He wrote some stirring verse, was a powerful speaker, and had a remarkable knowledge of world history. But he had an unfortunate kink in his make-up, and it brought him to ruin.”
His chequered career included, in 1905, an acquittal on a charge of attempted murder after the shooting of an actor whose wife Hervey was "escorting" down Bourke Street in Melbourne.
On November 2, 1914, Hervey typed a false telegram (written on Jeffries'Hammond) to be sent to the editor of the newspaper in Hervey's home town in Victoria, The Casterton News, Edward Daniel Gazzard, telling Gazzard that Hervey was bankrupt. The newspaper printed the information, after which Hervey took legal action against the proprietor for defamation. "He and his accomplices were caught out by diligent detective work," said one biographer. It is true that Hervey was imprisoned to hard labour, for two years, but Jeffries was never charged for his innocent part in the conspiracy.
John Norton
Hervey was found guilty of “forgery and uttering”, and was also jailed for another two years of hard labour for attempting to obtain money by false pretences from the newspaper proprietor John Norton (1858-1916), an English-born journalist, editor and member of the New South Wales Parliament who owned the Sydney newspaper the Truth. It was Norton who invented the Australian word "wowser", meaning one whose overdeveloped sense of morality drives them to deprive others of their pleasures; a person regarded as excessively puritanical; a killjoy. Norton was a chronic alcoholic and megalomaniac and arguably one of Australia's most controversial public figures ever, the father of the equally notorious newspaper owner Ezra Norton. Hervey had worked for John Norton, and knew his wife Ada. Hervey asked Norton for money to provide evidence in a divorce case against Ada regarding an alleged affair with Hervey. Instead John and Ada were judicially separated on November 9, 1915, on the grounds of John's drunkenness, cruelty and adultery.
Jack de Garis
In 1919, not long after his release from jail, Hervey fraudulently acted the part of an American journalist called Hervey Grant Madison in a campaign to open up a "Greater Mildura" area for large-scale development and create a new state in the region. He was exposed by businessman Clement John De Garis. In January 1921 Hervey became editor of the Mildura and Merbein Sun and used his position to undermine De Garis. This was at a time when De Garis was financing a large project for a settlement at Kendenup, in Western Australia; investors got cold feet and the De Garis empire collapsed. Mildura residents subsequently tarred and feathered Hervey (using kapok for feathers). The incident went to court and his assailants were convicted, but the judge condemned Hervey's "foul and filthy" journalism and branded his character as "despicable". De Garis, founder of the Sunraysia Daily, committed suicide in 1926.
In 1923 Hervey was yet again convicted of forgery and uttering, having forged a signature on two cheques. In 1929 he was joint editor of Beckett's Budget, a short-lived journal of sensation and salacity. In 1931 Hervey was charged with having forged someone else’s name on a telegram. 
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Is it Ever Right to Tell Big Fat Lies?: How Social Media can be so Malevolent

November 6, 2015, 6:22 pm
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Chris Groz's illustration which accompanied Shane Maloney's hugely inaccurate article in The Monthly in June 2012. The Maloney piece gave some people who should have known a lot better (or bothered to dig out the truth) all the wrong ideas.
'Mr Messenger should stick to collecting typewriters not writing on them.'
- Matt Norman
On Friday, the Australian Olympic Committee finally decided enough was enough, and issued a statement denying that it had ever shunned 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games 200 metres track silver medallist Peter Norman.
In part, the statement read: “There is a misleading and inaccurate report on social media that the Australian Olympic Committee shunned Peter Norman … It has been claimed that Norman was not picked for the next Olympics in [Munich in] 1972 because of the incident in 1968. This too is incorrect.”
The AOC’s reference to social media concerns an article published online last month by an Italian “journalist” called Riccardo Gazzaniga, who had just stumbled across a large number of stories from three years ago about an apology made to Norman by the Australian Parliament. Gazzaniga’s Facebook post went viral, and news organisations in this country and elsewhere in the world picked it up and republished it. Not one of them bothered to check the facts. Not one.
The Australian Parliament’s apology was orchestrated by a Canberra Labor MP called Andrew Leigh. Gazzaniga is 39 and Leigh 43. Neither was born when Norman ran in Mexico City and later stood stock still on the medal dais, head bowed, while Tommie Smith and John Carlos held gloved fists above their heads in a protest supporting the civil rights movement in the United States.
In March this year the apology was backed by the hanging of a painting “depicting the late sprinter Peter Norman's defiant moment in history” at Parliament House. Louise Maher on ABC Radio claimed Norman “was censured on his return to Australia for supporting a controversial civil rights protest … he wore a human rights badge and stood in solidarity with Smith and Carlos.” Maher went on to quote Justine van Mourik, manager of the Parliament House art collection, as saying, "When he returned to Australia he was ostracised for that stand."
Not one single word of what Gazzaniga, Maher or van Mourik have said on this matter is based on fact. Not one.
My reaction to the Australian Olympic Committee’s statement on Friday, clarifying the truth, was “Better late than never!” On August 21, 2012, Mike Tancred, media director of the AOC, wrote to The Canberra Times: “Peter Norman was not ‘overlooked’ for selection in the Australian Olympic team in 1972 because of the incident in Mexico City in 1968. He was not ‘blacklisted’ [and] he was not ‘punished’; he was not reprimanded over the incident in 1968. If Peter Norman had become persona non grata with the AOC, it is strange that he was selected to attend the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1970. Paul Jenes in his Fields of Green, Lanes of Gold: The Story of Athletics in Australiadoes not mention any controversy about Norman’s non-selection for Munich. A report says Norman was not invited to the Sydney 2000 Olympics. This is also incorrect. He was not shunned by the AOC. As to his non-selection in the 1972 Olympics, it had nothing to do with the incident in Mexico City four years earlier.”
         Unfortunately, Tancred’s letter was not published by The Canberra Times, and it has taken another three years for the AOC’s clarification of the facts to be publicly released. In the meantime, through social media and other online outlets, a terrible lie has come to be accepted as the truth.
         Each year in Australia, the nation celebrates the sacrifice of tens of thousands of young men and women in two world wars, all for the sake of what is often summed up as “freedom of speech”. Did they really die so that in the 21st century, “freedom of speech” could come to allow the promulgation of lies? To turn lies into “accepted wisdom”. To let what is regarded as “politically correct” overtake what is actually “correct”, politically or otherwise?
         Here is how the Norman lie came about:
         Following Norman’s death in 2006, a Melbourne biographer called Damian Johnstone set out to write a book about Norman (it was published in 2008 as A Race To Remember: The Peter Norman Story and credited to both Johnstone and Norman’s nephew, Matt Norman). In the preface, Johnstone explained that after a series of interviews, he discovered Matt Norman was making a movie called Salute. An agreement was reached between them, making Matt Norman co-author of Johnstone’s book. Matt Norman was allowed access to Johnstone’s research and Johnstone allowed access to Matt Norman’s interviews with Peter Norman, carried out mostly in 2004. Johnstone’s objective was to tell Peter Norman’s life story in a well-balanced and honest way, based on interviews with friends and family and well-researched details about his athletic career.
         The book addressed the issue of Peter Norman’s omission from the 1972 Munich Olympics team, using interviews with people involved at the time,  and came to the conclusion that Norman was not overlooked because of anything he did in Mexico in 1968.
However, Matt Norman’s 2008 movie Salute presented a different take. Peter Norman told his nephew in 2004 that “in that Olympic year [1972] I qualified for the 200 metres 13 times and the 100 metres five times and was ranked No 5 in the world.”
Not a word of this is true. Norman did not legitimately qualify once for Munich, let alone 18 times, over either distance. In the 200 metres, he ran a wind-assisted 20.5 seconds at an interclub meeting at Olympic Park in Melbourne in February 12, 1972. His 100 metres time of 10.2 seconds on February 5 was also wind-assisted.
Lists compiled by leading US track and field statistician Michael Rabinovich confirm the details which were outlined by Johnstone. Norman had actually retired from athletics at the end of 1970, following his appearance at the 1970 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, and did not return to the track until November 1971. At the time he was ranked 19th equal fastest in the world over 200 metres, not fifth. The next season he was not ranked in the Top 100. His best legitimate time was 21.1 seconds, in the Victorian championships on February 19, 1972, 0.2 seconds outside the Australian qualifying time. His next best time, set before the Christmas break in 1971, was 21.4 seconds.
         Johnstone revealed that after being placed second in the Victorian 100 metres championship at Olympic Park in Melbourne on February 27, 1972, Norman threw his second-place medal in the face of chief track judge Jack Nixon, telling Nixon, “You couldn’t judge an egg and spoon race.”  Norman also refused to take his place on the dais after the race. This from a man we are now being "reliably informed" was a fine example of sportsmanship.
         Johnstone’s book also quoted Ken Steward, head coach of the 1972 Australian Olympic Games track and field team, as saying, “On performances in the nationals [Australian championships in Perth] no male sprinter deserved to go ...” Jim Webster of  The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: “Norman failed in the Australian championships in Perth ... this has cost him the trip [to Munich].” Pole vaulter Ray Boyd said: “[The Victorian 100 metres championship] didn’t help. [Norman] would have upset a few officials by throwing the medal in that guy’s lap.” Bob Gardner, son of 1972 Olympic Games team selector Bert Gardiner, added, “I don’t recall any discussion about whether Peter [Norman] was ostracised because of Mexico ...” Paul Jenes, Australian track statistician and later Australian team selector, confirmed: “There’s no way [selector Graeme Briggs] would have held something like that [Mexico] against Peter [Norman] ... I don’t think [selector Harold Ralph] would have either. I don’t think it had anything to do with Mexico. This is my educated guess.” And believe me, on Australian track and field matters, Jenes is highly educated. Norman’s coach Neville Sillitoe said: “I don’t honestly believe that Peter [Norman] was punished for Mexico.” And Australian Olympic Games official Judy Patching “refuted any suggestion of a conspiracy against Norman. He denied emphatically that Norman missed selection because of his support of Smith and Carlos ...”
           These are the facts, the truth.
The avalanche of lies began with the June 2012 publication of The Monthly, in which Shane Maloney wrote the clinching clanger, “Australian Olympic bosses made sure [Norman] never ran for his country again, despite repeatedly qualifying for Munich ... He was effectively written out of Australian history.” The truth Maloney chose to ignore was that Norman ran for Australia at the 1969 Pacific Conference Games in Tokyo and the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. Hardly a blacklisting!
Still, Leigh took up the cudgels, incorrectly asserting it was “clear” that Norman ”consistently ran qualifying times” over 100m and 200m before the Munich Games. He did not. Yet Leigh wrote to a voter in his electorate, “Mr Messenger’s recollections and commentary are imperfect.”
So I thought it was time some truth was told. I wrote in my column in The Canberra Times: “The bronze medal in the 100 metres at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games was won by American, Charlie Greene, one of the first three men to break 10 seconds for the distance. Greene always ran wearing sunglasses, and when asked by Sports Illustrated in 1967 why he did so, Greene replied, ‘Man, they're not shades. They're my re-entry shields.’ I have no idea what sort of blinkers Canberra MP Andrew Leigh had on when he sprinted headlong into a campaign to have Federal Parliament apologise to Peter Norman … whatever they were they blurred his wider vision of this issue. Quite what inspired this outburst of righteousness, with no connection to any topical debate, is beyond me. Why was Norman singled out at this time, with words like symbolic and vindication? Symbolic of what? Vindication for what? One tiny gesture in a worldwide sea of protest?” I quoted Sydney athletics writer Mike Hurst, someone who knew Norman well, as writing at the time of Norman’s death, “He is also remembered for taking a supportive, although not overt, position in the so-called Black Power medal ceremony.”
One sportsperson I praised for his stand against racism in sport was former Australian rugby union player Tony Abrahams. As a result, Abrahams strangely chose to turn on me, conveniently forgetting what he had told me in 2004. I had interviewed Abrahams at the time Stuart MacGill stood down from the Australian cricket team to tour Zimbabwe. Claiming to lead the “first group of sports figures to take a major stand,” Abrahams referred to Smith and Carlos and made absolutely no mention whatsoever of Norman. Yet eight years later, he claimed Norman was an inspiration.
Following publication of my column, Matt Norman issued a media statement in which, among the more mild things he said about me (we’ve never met), he suggested, "To be honest I believe Mr Messenger should stick to collecting typewriters not writing on them.” More outrageous things (“Does Mr Messenger remember 1968 at all or was he dropping too much acid at the time”) led to Matt Norman being sued by me for defamation, and in December 2013 to me winning $120,000 in damages ($20,000 of it for punitive damages). The National Australia Bank, however, had had Norman declared bankrupt, and we are still waiting for our money. When last heard of, Matt Norman was planning another movie, called 1968. If it gets to the cinemas, as Salute did, the NAB and I will be at the head of the queue. (*Copies of the full court transcript are available from me on request.)
In his infamous media statement, Matt Norman wrote, and I quote verbatim, “1968 was a time that saw the KKK in full flight, roping negro's [sic] for walking on the wrong side of the street.” Just to give you an idea about Matt Norman. 
Another former Wallaby second-rower- noted journalist and author Peter FitzSimons, wrote a book called Everyone And Phar Lap (1999), in which there is a chapter on Norman based on an interview FitzSimons did with Norman. No mention is made of Norman being left out of the Munich team, for whatever reason. There is no mention of Norman being badly treated by anyone at anytime in his lifetime. 
In a column in the Los Angeles Times, written from Sydney during the 2000 Olympics, Randy Harvey wrote, “The third man on the medals stand that night in Mexico City, the second finisher behind Smith in the race, was Peter Norman, a white Australian who had finished second. He knew nothing of the demonstration until he reached the athletes' lounge with Smith and Carlos to await the medals ceremony. When Norman, a Salvation Army officer, heard them discussing their plans, he asked how he could lend his support. Carlos gave him a badge - ‘Olympic Project for Human Rights’ - that all three wore on the stand. ‘… My attitude was they'd earned the right to do what they thought they had to do with their one-square meter of Olympic dais,’ Norman said in [FitzSimons’ book]. ‘… I was glad they were doing it, and I was glad I was with them.’ Norman was asked during a news conference in Mexico City what right he had to represent Black Power when his own country, with its ‘White Australia Policy’, had such an abysmal record in its treatment of Aborigines. Only one year before had they been granted the right to vote in Australia. He gave a good answer – ‘Smith is too good a bloke to blame me for whatever policy my government might have on colored people.’"
That’s what Peter Norman should be remembered for: the truth. Is the truth not enough? Why make up a pack of lies to further sully his true story? Why try to further a stuttering political career by drumming up a fairy tale? These are indeed sad times of inaccuracy and deceit, for which the Internet has a lot to answer.
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Vicesimus Lush: The Ghost Who Stole the Blickensderfer Typewriter from a Haunted Auckland House

November 7, 2015, 9:51 pm
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Vicesimus Lush: sounds like a drunken debauchee rather than an Anglican archdeacon. But a man of the cloth he was, no doubt named after the English essayist and minister Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821). Lush is best known in New Zealand today as the man who built a now famous haunted house - called Ewelme Cottage - at 14 Ayr Street in Parnell, Auckland (one of two haunted houses on that same street!).
Vicesimus Lush
What I want to know is what happened to the Blickensderfer 7 typewriter which was once in Lush's study at Ewelme. Sounds like a task for Auckland typewriter technician and collector David Lawrence to check out.
Between 1981-85, Governors Bay, Canterbury, photographer Warren Victor Jacobs travelled the length of breadth of New Zealand taking colour photographs for a book, The Birth of New Zealand: A Nation's Heritage.
During his travels he visited Ewelme - which had remained virtually unaltered since the 1880s - and took the image at the top of this post. I bought a copy of this large, hefty tome for a princely $5 at a Canberra Historical Society book sale in Curtin on Friday, and my eagle eye (for a typewriter) immediately spotted the Blick 7 on page 67 (of 207).
Sir Alf Reed at a Blick 5
The Blick 7, of course, did not appear on the market until 1897 and Thomas George DeRenzy didn't start importing Blickensderfers for Alfred Hamish Reed to sell through the New Zealand Typewriter Company until later that same year. By which time Lush was well dead - he died in Hamilton in the Waikato on July 11, 1882. But his widow Blanche Hawkins Lush had the cottage enlarged and lived there until she died in September 1912. Ewelme remained in Lush family hands until 1967, 22 years after the first sign that the cottage was haunted. It was bought by the Auckland City Council and leased to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.
Ewelme is said to be regularly haunted by a number of ghosts, but particularly by a young girl who appears by an oak tree in Ewelme's garden.
New Zealander Anna Paquin in The Piano
Since 1969, Ewelme has been preserved as a house museum by the NZHPT, just as the Lushes had left it, with about 800 books, hundreds of pages of sheet music, original artworks and a vast array of everyday objects from their time period. But no longer a Blick! NZMuseums do not show a Blick among the objects still held at Ewelme. 
As I looked into the life of Lush and the story behind Ewelme, I found that the Blick had - at some time between when Jacobs took his photograph in the early 80s and April 2012 - disappeared from Lush's study. In the meantime, in 1992, the drawing room, veranda and garden of Ewelme were used in the production of the triple Oscar-winning film The Piano, starring Harvey Keitel and Holly Hunter and directed by Jane Campion.
This 2012 photograph were taken during an investigation into paranormal activity at Ewelme:
During a second session, Haunted Auckland (Paranormal New Zealand) reported that "One of our 'sensitives' felt that there was something (a male) in the downstairs office." Investigators, led by Matthew Tyler, used cameras, digital recorders, static video cameras, a TrapCamera and Tri-Field Meter. One team member was trialling the M2 Ghosthunter App on her cell phone in a few places and received the words in the Reverend Lush’s study "Florida" and "dreaming". I can understand dreaming about the missing Blick 7, but Florida?
Vicesimus Lush was born in Shoreditch in the East End of London, England, on August 27, 1817. He was admitted to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University in 1838 and gained a BA in 1842 and an MA in 1847. He was ordained a deacon at Chester in 1842 and a priest in 1843, while attached to the Church of Over Darwen in Lancashire. In 1844 he moved to the Church of Faringdon in Berkshire and in 1849 to the Church of St John's at Hoxton, Middlesex, where he remained until he was sent to New Zealand in 1850. He served at Howick until 1868, then on the Thames Goldfields. and was vicar of St Peter's, Hamilton, and Archdeacon of Waikato until his death, aged 64. 
Lush had Ewelme built of kauri timber in 1863, on the same street as another now haunted dwelling, Kinder House. In 2011 The New Zealand Herald suggested Ewelme is possibly the most important of Auckland's historic properties, despite being the smallest. How much more important would it be if it had its Blick back? 
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The Typewriter, Considered as a Bee-Trap: The Fated Johnstons

November 8, 2015, 1:40 pm
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Poet and author Martin Johnston's parents, Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Clift at her Remington portable typewriter, in London, early 1950s.
From the poetry collection
The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap,
by Martin Johnston (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1984)
"... a daydream of writerly faith. The kind of poem that can only result if you let go and see where the bees’ flightpaths may lead your fingers as your digits themselves hover above the keys. On a honey-sticky, warm summer’s evening, when all things are allowed ... Semi-aleatory. Perhaps, outside of the depth-charged inner channels of his difficult life, he could rest to pluck up stray shards to examine them, glittering in the sun."
- W.H. Chong, Crikey
Martin Johnston with his parents, Mosman, Sydney, 1967
Martin Johnston was born in Sydney on November 12, 1947, the eldest child of Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift. When he was three, the family moved to England, where Johnston and Clift worked as journalists. In 1954, his parents left England to write in Greece. They lived first on the island of Kálimnos and then on Hydra (Ídhra), where among many other things they aided and abetted Leonard Cohen and Marianne Jensen.
George Johnston, foreground, and Charmian Clift, on her Remington portable typewriter, in Kálimnos in 1955.
After George Johnston’s autobiographical novel, Miles Franklin Award-winner My Brother Jack, became a success in 1964, the family returned to Australia and Martin completed his secondary education at North Sydney Boys' High School and matriculated to the University of Sydney in 1966, enrolling in an Arts degree majoring in English.

He dropped out of university in 1968 to become a cadet reporter with The Sydney Morning Herald and in 1970 became a freelance writer. On July 8, 1969, Martin’s mother, Charmian Clift, while considerably affected by alcohol, took a fatal overdose of sleeping tablets at her Mosman home. She was just 45. Martin's younger sister, Shane, with whom he had grown up in Greece, committed suicide in 1974.
In 1984, Martin published his fourth poetry collection, The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap. Through the late 1980s, his dependence on alcohol worsened. The premature death of another family member – his half-sister Gae (from George's first marriage) died of a drug overdose in late 1988 – affected him badly. After a collapse he fell into a coma, and died on June 21, 1990, aged just 42.  
Chairman Clift, with Remington portable typewriter, Hydra, Greece, 1958

Charmian Clift was born on August 30, 1923 at Kiama, South Coast, New South Wales. During World War II she edited an army magazine in Melbourne and began to write and publish short stories. In 1946 she joined the Argus and met the war correspondent George Johnston. Their employers disapproved of their relationship and both were summarily dismissed. Clift and Johnston left for Sydney and, following his divorce, were married on August 7, 1947, at the Manly courthouse. Martin was born three months later.
George Johnston and Charmian Clift with their Remington portable typewriters, Bondi, Sydney, 1948
Charmian Clift with Leonard Cohen, Hydra, 1960. Clift and GeorgeJohnston proved very helpful to Cohen and Marianne Jensen at this time. Below, Johnston and Clift on the right, Cohen and Jensen on the left.
George Henry Johnston was born in Caulfield, Melbourne, on July 20, 1912, and spent his childhood in Elsternwick. He attended Brighton Technical School from 1922 and was apprenticed to a lithographer with the art printers Troedel & Cooper. At 16 he had an article on local shipwrecks accepted by the Argus. In 1933 he was taken on to that paper as a cadet reporter, with responsibility for the shipping round. In 1941 Johnston was accredited as No 1 Australian war correspondent. He worked in New Guinea (1942), Britain and the United States (1943), India, China and Burma (1944), Italy (1944) and in Burma once more (1945); he also witnessed the Japanese surrender on board USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945. Johnston returned in October 1945 to find himself famous and favoured, especially by the Argus's managing director Sir Errol Knox, who nicknamed him "Golden Boy" and appointed him first editor of the Australasian Post. Early in 1948 Johnston was given a feature-writing role on the Sydney Sun. In 1951 Johnston was appointed to head the London office of Associated Newspapers Services and, when Associated Newspapers was taken over by the Fairfax family in 1953, he started to consider writing full time. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis on July 22, 1970, at his Mosman, Sydney, home, two days after his 58th birthday.
Charmian Clift uses her Remington portable typewriter to work on adapting George Johnston's My Brother Jack for ABC TV in 1965.
 Above and below, George Johnston with the Remington portable typewriter,
Hydra, 1960
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Little Lords and Ladies of the Flies

November 9, 2015, 4:26 pm
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Richard Polt's wonderful, thought-provoking post on "On Objectification" yesterday led me to The Philosophy Teacher's Typicalytyping blog and in due course to his/her insightful The Typosphere Rumbles post. Ever get the feeling that someone's been reading your mail? The Philosophy Teacher wrote:
I wish I still had a proper lawn. Nonetheless, this comment gave me the excuse I'd been seeking for a long while - to go back to a time when I did have one. That is, to a column I wrote for The Canberra Times on January 11, 2008, one that surprisingly drew an inordinate amount of consistently positive and supportive responses from Times readers. (I was concerned it might confirm their worst suspicions about me, now apparently shared by The Philosophy Teacher.)
It is my misfortune – and I use that word self-advisedly – to live cheek-by-jowl with a day care centre. This could not even be described as an occasionally entertaining experience, as most often I’m afraid to go out my back door for fear of a gobful of abuse across the back fence from pre-schoolers. Believe me, there is nothing more humiliating.

I had often thought of writing a column about what it’s like to live in such close proximity to a day care centre, but resisted for fear of seeming to be a Grumpy Old Man, which I am but care not to generally concede. However, an Australian study late last year [2007] came up with such outlandish claims that I am finally moved to write out, as it were. The thing is, one cannot stand in one’s own backyard arguing the toss over the fence with four-year-old kids, it’s just too unseemly altogether, even for the privacy of one’s own patch. Thus I express my frustrations here.
Let me start with this plea: Mothers, please don’t send your toddlers to day care. If, as modern society demands, you have to work, and need someone to look after your children while you slave for the mighty dollar, try Count Dracula. My understanding is that he still lives somewhere in darkest Transylvania, sustained by the blood of heartless parents (blood of the heartless, an oxymoron perhaps?) and ever willing to take under his cape their seriously neglected off-spring.

I shall illustrate with the following true story: The least offensive behaviour of the banes of my life, those part-time residents of next-door’s property, is to throw plastic hammers, soft toy animals and sundry sun hats across the boundary.

One Saturday morning I was visited by the innocently naïve mother of one of the de-toppered cherubs, this poor dear mum wondering whether she could enter my side of the Garden of Hades to retrieve her son’s bonnet. Naturally I acceded, but in doing so failed to resist the temptation to say something about all this careless cavorting with caps. “Oh,” the lady said, “the children were just having a bit of non-confrontational fun and my boy’s beret just happened to get accidentally flung from the climbing tower.” “Fun?” I said. “You call that carry on fun?” A look of absolute shock and horror crossed the saintly matron’s dial. I could tell in an instant that all her worst fears, her deepest apprehensions, her profound guilt about leaving her child in the care of virtual strangers for a day, were rapidly surfacing. Yet I couldn’t stop myself. “You ought to stand on my side of the fence some time, if you think that’s fun.”

Mater snatched the said fez from that unkempt piece of land that used to pass as my back lawn and hurriedly existed left, my dire warnings about ,”If you saw and heard what I see and hear every day, you’d never bring your bub to this joint …” ringing in her hitherto coolish ears. She did not depart, however, before leaving me the very distinct impression that junior was about to be withdrawn from the Terror Squad at No 35.
Please let me hasten to add, lest I am giving entirely the wrong idea about the people who run this oversized den of demons, that I’m sure they do their level best to contain the natural exuberance of what usually seems – and constantly sounds - like an army of wild, uninhibited banshees screaming down a hillside on a hot summer’s evening in Donegal. A little bit more supervision might well be in order occasionally – no, I jest, always – but doubtless the powers that be (Urban Services, methinks) just don’t allocate sufficient funds for a staff to control what must be a tribe of four score and fifty Lords and Ladies of the Flies.

No, I know it’s the littlies that one has to really worry about. From over there, as I stand shaking in my shoes at my kitchen window, I can hear all too clearly the future John Howards of this nation, as they start to stake their claims to the top spots on the pecking order, to exercise their innate qualities of leadership, to hone their voices of authority, bossing others unmercifully around. “I didn’t say YOU could join in. You stand over there, you’re not one of us … ”

When I do summons the courage to venture out into the hinder regions of my supposed domain, I am subjected to a barrage of Big Brother interrogation. “Hey, Mr Mister … ”. I deliberately ignore the inquisition. But that only makes matters worse. From the unanswered questions, the real heat goes on. “Hey, Mr Pooface” … “Hey Mr Peepants”. I just don’t know where these tots get it from.

Anyway, the supervisors and the parents apparently hear none of it. The study I mentioned says that working parents need have no guilt about leaving their children in child-care all day. It claims day care can actually help the children's social development. It has a “positive effect on children's social and emotional well-being”. “The results differ from similar large-scale studies conducted in the United States and Britain, but the researchers think the difference could be due to consistently higher standards of care offered locally.”
Charles Sturt University early childhood education researcher Linda Harrison says, “Children who attended more hours in centre-based child care were more socially competent and children who received more hours in home-based child care had fewer behaviour problems … Australia's national system of quality assurance monitors levels of quality in all child-care centres and family day care homes.''   
I’m inviting Linda round home, any day of the working week, any hour of the working day.  She can go out into my backyard. I’m too scared to.

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The Prince of London: What a Guy!

November 11, 2015, 1:34 am
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This cat on the card is Arnold, painted by Carol Biss in 2010. He looks a tiny bit like one of Richard Polt's new cats.

We have a prince from London visiting New Zealand and Australia right now. He's a Charlie, but not Charlie the Prince of Typewriter Guard Cats; rather, Charlie the Prince of W(h)ales.
Typospherians will know, of course that the real Prince of London is still back in England - the one and only Piotr Trumpiel, of b4cksp4ce fame.
He hasn't posted on his blog for a while, but just to let us know he's alive and well, Piotr sent me a card (above) to congratulate ozTypewriter on two million page views.
I wonder if Piotr knew what would be postmarked on the envelope? If he did, he's even more clever than I had previously thought.
Thank you, Piotr! A most unusual souvenir ...
Yeah!
PS: Still recovering from the celebrations!
PPS: To my surprise, I found Piotr now lives not very far from where the British Oliver Typewriter Company once was:
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The Legendary, Intrepid Californian War Correspondent Tom Treanor and his Typewriter

November 15, 2015, 6:36 am
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From Doral Cheonweth's tributes to war correspondents killed in World War II
and Larry Harnisch's The Daily Mirror
When it came to getting accredited to cover battles in World War II, he was seeded by US Army authorities 140th out of 140. But of those 140, and the many hundreds of other war correspondents who covered the war, young Californian Thomas Stanly Coghill Treanor was unquestionably the smartest. None other than Damon Runyon rated him "one of the four best reporters developed in this war." So how come we know so little about him?
[Coghill was his mother's maiden name and Stanly, not Stanley, was her mother's maiden name.] 
Tom Treanor was smart not so much because he was the first Allied correspondent to land at Anzio in January 1944, the only one to step foot on Monte Cassino the next month, or the first to file a detailed account from Utah Beach at Normandy on D-Day on June 6 that year, or because:
(Treanor typed his story of the bombing raid on Rome while seated on a stool in the radio compartment of a B-25. No worries about using a typewriter on an aeroplane back then.)
But because he:
1. For the best part of four years in all, from June 1940 and again two years later, he travelled more than 20,000 miles across the world - by airplane, steamship, automobile and railroad - reaching, as so few others did, to the outer fringes of the two major theatres of war, Europe and the Pacific. He was in Egypt, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Malta, Italy and France. He even got to Burma, China (he hitchhiked from Chongqing [then Chungking] back to Gibraltar!) and to India, notably to what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh.
2. He travelled light, carrying just a portable typewriter, a bed roll and a zipper bag. He often slept rough.
3. He travelled quick, jumping at any given opportunity into Army jeeps, LSTs, supply trucks, borrowed cars and air force planes, sometimes not knowing quite where they were taking him, just knowing he was headed to his next big story.
4. He scorned protocol, never stopping to worry about authorisation, to be accredited or to be escorted to landings or the battlefront. He just kept telling people, "I'm the only correspondent from west of the Mississippi."
Travelling light: Tom Treanor on the Normandy Front, July, 1944.
5. But perhaps most importantly, he had the blessing of the Los Angeles Times to not bother wiring back heavily censored copy. Instead, Treanor used his typewriter everywhere he went - sometimes typing under fire - then mailed every one of the 1000 words a day he had typed (almost 600,000 in all). Nevertheless, United Press syndicated his reports once they had reached LA, and his articles turned up in such publications as the Washington Post and Vogue. One historian wrote, "Many times [he] actually wrote his stories on a portable right under the light of battle. This method of production was not common to field correspondents, since most of them waited until they returned to the safety and comfort of a theatre headquarters or neutral city."
6. And Treanor wrote bright, enlightened stories, not just about the battles but also about the men and women who fought and the ordinary, innocent people caught up in conflict. Some of Treanor's stories are considered among the finest examples of reporting during the war. ("That old dash has gone from the battle. No longer are there those mad, gallant, exciting races back and forth across the desert with no one getting killed but soldiers. No women, no babies, no old men. These fought-over towns in Sicily and Italy are depressing.")
And this guy isn't even mentioned on Wikipedia, not even among the war correspondents who were killed in action!
Sadly, by a stroke of grave misfortune, Treanor didn't live to read the published version of his best-seller. He died in France, exactly 10 days after it was first reviewed stateside - a review which rated it way above all other war books to that time. One reason: "The author isn't so damn sure about everything!" Please read One Damn Thing after Another here. It's brilliant.
Treanor had returned to the US to write One Damn Thing After Another on March 20, 1944, but then went back to the front in Europe in mid-May, this time working for the National Broadcasting Company as well as the LA Times. Below is a 28-minute November 1944 NBC radio dramatisation by actor William Janney, adapted by writer Gerald Holland from sections of Treanor's book, Words at War: One Damn Thing After Another.
It's well worth the listen to hear Treanor's descriptions of typewriter use and the value of mailing his copy.
Ironically, just a fortnight before his death, at age 35, Treanor was the only one of 21 correspondents polled who predicted the war would drag on into 1945 - the meagre $210 proceeds of his "pool" win were sent back to his widow, Eleanor Stimson Treanor, and their children Tom, 10, John, 9, and Cordelia, 6, in California.
At 6.30 on the evening of August 18, 1944, Treanor was rushing ahead of the US Third Army to get to a Paris radio station to break the news of Patton's push through Brittany to the Seine, when the jeep he was sitting in tried to overtake a column of Sherman tanks east of Chartres. One veered left at the crossroads and collided with the jeep, overturning it. Treanor suffered scalp and internal injuries and a crushed foot. Ten pints of blood were pumped into him at roadside, and more plasma through the night in a frontline hospital. But he died on the operating table, 10 hours after the crash, at 4.30am on the 19th. He was the 19th of 54 US correspondents to be killed in World War II. Treanor was buried later that day at an Army cemetery south-west at Le Mans, and later re-interned at the Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial at Saint-James, near St-Malo. Associated Press obituaries which appeared in newspapers across the US opened with the words that Treanor was "an almost legendary journalistic figure of this war".
Even as he lay dying in the ditch outside Chartres, Treanor was instructing fellow correspondent, the CBS's Charles Shaw (who was sitting in the back of the jeep, having swapped seats with Treanor so he could stretch his legs) to let the LA Times know it needed to send a "temporary" replacement. The third passenger in the jeep was International News Pictures photographer Sonnee Gottlieb, who was asked by the bloodied Treanor, "Did you get a picture of me under that tank? This is a hell of a thing to happen to me just before we get to Paris." Medical Captain William Werner was the first to offer assistance, telling Treanor he was also from Los Angeles. "Did you hear that?" asked Treanor. "Get his name for my newspaper." But both Shaw and Gottlieb were beyond taking notes - they too were seriously injured, though they both survived the crash.
As the morphine started to take effect, Treanor murmured, "Well I guess I'm lucky to be alive." These were to be the last words he ever spoke.
Two weeks after his death, Dick Mack had written the tribute song Headlines From the Frontlines, sung on his radio show by Kenny Baker.
The AP's Hal Boyle paid tribute to Treanor for his "clean and well-earned news break" at Cassino, "one of many similar exploits", recalled how he slept on a couch in the AP villa in Algiers, and said he had never meet a more daring, nor an "abler, harder working reporter and writer". "He had a knack of catching the emotional flavour of the fighting ... He was always pretty much of a lone wolf." Peter Whitney wrote on the San  Francisco Chronicle : "He was universally respected as one of the finest newspapermen covering this war.” 
Above, Hal Boyle, left, with Ernie Pyle; below Boyle carries his typewriter, and below that Boyle using his typewriter.
Treanor's LA Times editor Loyal Durant "L.D." Hotchkiss said Treanor was "an editor's dream come true - and also a nightmare. You could always depend on him to cover his battle from Row A, Centre - the front lines - but you never are sure he won't grab Montgomery's beret or Patton's pearl-handled revolvers and start leading the fireworks himself." Virgil Pinkley of United Press wrote, "Treanor ... everlastingly was thinking about the [LA] Times and its readers. He was a real soldier of the press, willing to go anywhere, anytime, regardless of danger or hardships." Treanor's NBC colleague John MacVane said:
Tom Treanor was born in Los Angeles on November 8, 1908. He studied at Stanford for two years before graduating in 1927, and then went to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was a member of Zeta Psi fraternity. In 1944, he was elected to Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism society (a journalism scholarship was established in his name at UCLA). He married Eleanor Stimson on May 11, 1932. They had three children, Thomas Gordon (b1934), John Marshall (b1935) and Cordelia (b1938). 
Treanor started his journalism career on the Los Angeles Evening Express and Herald-Express in 1930, then moved to report for the Oakland Post-Enquirer in 1932 and the Wisconsin News in Milwaukee, before returning to California to join the Los Angeles Examiner and finally the Los Angeles Times from November 26, 1934, as a reporter, society editor and associate editor on the Times Sunday Magazine. He started his daily column for the Times in 1940. Treanor ended One Damn Thing After Another by saying the book might have been titled, "You, too, can become a war correspondent ... I used to be a society editor for the Los Angeles Times. What did you used to be?"
Under the headline "Self-Made Correspondent", TIME published this article on June 21, 1943:
"Most of the 50,000 US newsmen drudge along in their 40-hour-a-week (usually) jobs, pushing pencils, punching typewriters, interviewing small fry, reporting the drab doings of civic characters. Tom Treanor was one such unglamourous unfortunate. But last week Tom Treanor was in Chungking. Tom Treanor is a columnist-correspondent, of the same general school as Ernie Pyle. His cosy, comfortable, popular column, paradoxically called 'The Home Front', appears daily in the Los Angeles Times. His airmailed articles (to save cable tolls) are angled for publication six weeks after writing. They are bright vignettes - a picture of the five Italian bootleggers who supply the US Army in Ethiopia; American soldiers borrowing the instruments of a Calcutta dance band and giving Calcuttans a taste of boogie-woogie. Tall, handsome Thomas Stanly Treanor is 35-years-old, with a mop of jet-black hair and a shy face. He started out in routine fashion, reporting for Hearst papers in Los Angeles (his home). Later he joined the Los Angeles Times as woman's-page editor, in 1940 got his 'Home Front' column to write. In April 1942, he was on a tour of defence plants when he decided to be a war correspondent. He wired the Times [and] asked if it would pay his daily living expenses if he could get a free bomber ride to the Middle East. The Times wired him $1500 and its blessing. Treanor invested $1250 in a Pan American Airways ticket, arrived in Cairo as Nazi Marshal Rommel approached Alexandria. No insignia. The British refused to accredit him. His claim that he was the only correspondent from a paper west of the Mississippi failed to impress them. Why, they said, we've got plenty of correspondents from west of the Mississippi - five from Chicago, for instance. Tom Treanor was not permitted to go near the front. He went anyway. For 70¢ he bought a pair of correspondents' shoulder insignia. He borrowed a British military truck, got to the lines, got back to Cairo before the British public relations officers knew he was gone. He sent letters to the Times telling all. The British stripped him of his illegal insignia. Then he nosed around a rear RAF base, finally wangled a free bomber ride to Malta, then to Gibraltar. On the way back to Egypt, he saw the bombing of Navarino Bay. The British PROs were furious, forbade him to ride in combat planes. No trouble. Undaunted, correspondent Treanor sidled up to some New Zealanders [and] was taken along into the Battle of El Alamein. Treanor went with them into enemy gunfire [and] saw five days of the battle before the British discovered him. This time they complained to the US Army. Treanor was ordered by his paper to leave the Near East, fast. The first plane out was one bound for India. Treanor hopped [on] it. In India, he was finally accredited. He saw jungle fighting, in his spare time interviewed maharajas. He went along when US bombers plastered Rangoon, finally went across the Himalayas into China. As far as the Times is concerned, he can go on being a foreign correspondent forever. Probably no paper ever got war coverage as cheaply. Paid an estimated $125 a week, Treanor gets along on $10 a day expense money, even in expensive Cairo, where it costs most correspondents three times as much."
You can hear Treanor's own voice describing his Normandy landing here. Note how assiduously he follows the cardinal rule about names and home towns.
February 1944
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Tom Treanor's Kiwi Mate, Shepheard's Bar and the Doomed Court-Martial

November 16, 2015, 6:02 am
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These photographs were taken by New Zealand World War II cameraman Mervyn Daniel Elias toward the end of the Battle of Tunisia in May 1943. They show so-called tirailleurs sénégalais fighting against the invading armies of fascist Germany and Italy, on the side of the Free France Forces in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country. The tirailleurs sénégalais are also mainly Sunni Muslim. As well as in North Africa, the Senegalese fought for France and for freedom in Europe. During the Battle of France, the Senegalese and other African tirailleur units served with distinction at Gien, Bourges and Buzancais. The Senegalese saw extensive service in Italy and Corsica during 1944, as well as in the liberation of southern France. The world has been turned on its head since then.
Elias also took this photograph of New Zealand war correspondent Graham Evenson Beamish (1906-1975) typing his story from the Libyan desert in early December 1941.
Drawing of Merv Elias by fellow New Zealander, 
Dunedin-born war artist Peter McIntyre (1910-1995). 
McIntyre served as a gunner in Egypt before being commissioned
Official War Artist, and in this capacity he served
in Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy.
My post yesterday on "legendary" Californian war correspondent Tom Treanor (thanks Richard P, Bill M and Joe V for the positive comments) grew out of a plea for help last week for information about a New Zealand war photographer and movie cameraman called Mervyn Daniel Elias.
Merv Elias
I posted first on Treanor because, having stumbled across him during my research into Elias, I was astounded by how little was known about this great American journalist. There's acres out there about the like of Ernie Pyle (justifiably), yet not much about so many other "soldiers of the press". It seems Treanor was "legendary" at the time he died, aged 35 in August 1944, but the legend obviously didn't last very long. By one of those weird coincidences which, happily, seem to happen to me regularly, I was equally surprised to find after posting on Treanor yesterday that a book, Dying for the News: Honoring Tom Treanor and Other Reporters Killed Covering World War II, by Washington DC author and former TIME-LIFE Middle East and Europe reporter Gary G. Yerkey, was published just a month ago. Great minds, as they say ...
Anyway, what led me to Treanor in the first place - on the 97th anniversary of Remembrance Day, November 11 - was the online scan of his own wonderful book, One Damned Thing After Another.
Treanor's introduction to One Damn Thing starts with the American correspondent paying a glowing tribute to Merv Elias. What does appear elsewhere online about Treanor in some cases refers to the assistance he received in Egypt from New Zealanders, but none of it specifically identifies Elias. Treanor himself made no secret of his indebtedness to Elias. What made his story all the more appealing to me was Treanor's regaling of Elias' experiences in the bar of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. Since this is a bar in which I too have had a beer or two (indeed, at Christmas 1978 I drank the place dry of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout - all I had to show for it was a sore head and this label off one of the bottles), it naturally struck a chord with me:
These are the excerpts from Treanor's book:
INTRODUCTION
I SUPPOSE it's usual in a preface to thank persons who gave literary aid and advice, read manuscript, and so forth. But I am under heavier obligation in this book to people like Merv Elias, of the New Zealand Public Relations, who got me to the front when I wasn't supposed to be at the front. I owe a real debt to Merv. He was kept in confinement for a time because of his activities in my behalf. He was threatened with dishonourable discharge from the New Zealand Army and was faced with being sent home in disgrace. Meanwhile I couldn't do anything for him, as I was in the process of being expelled from the Middle East.
Fortunately, all ended well. When Merv's court-martial came to a boil, it had to be called off. It was discovered Merv wasn't in the New Zealand Army after all. He had some kind of queer and unsuspected civilian status. He was merely attached to Public Relations as a newsreel cameraman. This confused the issue until the whole business was dropped. Besides, they decided they didn't want to send Merv home because there was no other newsreel cameraman in the New Zealand forces. That's the way things often go. So it's people like Merv whom I must thank.
CHAPTER VII
Before the Battle
The colonel afterwards insisted that with lures and wiles and sorcery I mesmerised the New Zealand Public Relations into taking me to the front illegally. "You knew you were doing wrong, Treanor,'' he said. No such thing. Everything was done above board through Merv Elias, the New Zealand motion picture cameraman [seen below right, on the Italian front]. Merv had previously received permission to take up [Bob] Landry, of LIFE, who was equally unaccredited, and 11 pages of Landry's pictures had subsequently been published. No secrecy about it.
Merv arranged for me to go with the New Zealanders on a similar basis. Naturally, I said nothing about this to the colonel, since I already knew he wouldn't give me the sweat off his brow. As I told him later, I didn't consult him or ask his permission because my object was to get to the front, not to not get to the front. He tried to play this up as a confession of guilt but there was no guilt whatever. Merv and I were blameless. We were two woolly lambs.
Merv picked me up at Shepheard's on a brilliant October morning, a week before the Eighth Army launched its attack on El Alamein. He was tired and distracted and said he had lost his hat the night before in the bar. I was nervous to get off before something interfered, but Merv insisted on finding the hat and spinning a long yarn about an odd sawed-off character with whom he had been having some whiskies when he last saw the hat. 
"He stood about five foot three," said Merv, "but he didn't look small because he was so powerful. If you took a rock and bashed a couple of eyes in it, you'd have his face, into which was stuck a black pipe. He wore white trousers, a long black coat and a black hat like Anthony Eden's which he never took off." According to Merv, this character approached the bar in a dignified and resolute manner and spoke in a voice that could be heard in tempest: "Make it a beer." It wasn't a rude voice. It was the kind of voice that would necessarily go with a human barrel. He lifted his glass to himself in the mirror, according to Merv, and drank himself a bottoms-up toast. "Make it a beer," he thundered again. Merv took a stroll alongside to get a better look and the sawed-off dynamo turned on him, exposing some jagged, tobacco-stained teeth. "Can I shout you a drink, son?" he roared. Anyone can shout a New Zealander a drink any time of the day. Merv reckoned he'd have a gentle whisky and the sawed-off gent shattered the cool tranquillity of Shepheard's bar with "Make it a whisky." Then he told Merv (and the rest of the bar for that matter) his story. For 30 years he had been shipping out all over the world, and for all 30 years he had nursed an ambition to have a drink in the Shepheard's bar. Not once in 30 years, however, had a ship of his touched Egypt until the day before, when he had put in at Suez. So here he was at last in the Shepheard's bar, which is not so wonderful as to be worth 30 years of anticipation, but on the other hand it's not bad.
In these war times it's fairly colourful with uniforms of historic  regiments, and until Rommel was knocked out of Africa it was redolent of desert talk. Military secrecy never benefited by the Shepheard's bar but for the morale it did a great deal. One of the greatest sights in Egypt was watching an officer come directly in from the desert, brick-red from the sun, in sun-faded uniform, his hair stiff with sand, and call for a beer. The curious expression that would live on his face while he handled the cool glass before raising it to his lips was worth a Picture of the Week in LIFE Magazine. I don't know why Landry never got it. The Shepheard's bar is all right. It has that cool feel and musty smell of an old dignified bar made of heavy, polished dark woods - a look and smell that the chromium and red leather cocktail lounges will never achieve.
Many a hat has been lost there besides Merv Elias.
Merv had no conclusion to his story about the sailorman. The last he remembered, the fellow was in a thundering conversation, right in his element, talking first to a Scotchman [sic] in kilts on his left, and then to a pukka hussar in cherry-red pants on his right. Some time after that Merv lost his hat. We eventually found the hat in a heap of lost hats that Shepheard's maintains behind the desk. Anyone can shuffle through this pile until he finds his lost hat. It's honour system. The clerk never asks any questions unless you start trying on hats to find one that fits you.
By this time the noon drinking period had rolled around and we had a gentle whisky or two to get Merv back into shape and then we climbed into the back of our truck, spread our sleeping bags on the floor, and dropped off into a siesta, rolling past the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and finally on to the desert road which leads to the Mediterranean and then up to EI Alamein.
Merv Elias working at Monte Cassino, where Tom Treanor
had been the first Allied war correspondent to step foot.
Mervyn Daniel Elias was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on January 30, 1914. He worked as a cinematographer in Wellington and in 1940 wrote a book about a New Zealand boy teaching his fellow students the finer points of rugby union football at an English private school.
On January 27, 1941, the New Zealand Government approved a war Cinema Unit and appointed Elias and Ron McIntyre as operators attached to the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. They arrived in Cairo on March 28 and set up a base at Maadi Camp. One of their first projects was a National Film Unit newsreel showing the aftermath of the Battle for Crete (scene below). 
Elias returned to New Zealand, but beyond 1954 nothing is known of his subsequent life. He may have settled in the US.
 Elias, right, with Italian women, and below filming from on top of a van in the Egyptian desert
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