Quantcast
Channel: oz.Typewriter
Viewing all 1889 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

The Mystery of Sam Mitchell’s forged Victoria Cross

November 29, 2017, 4:10 pm
$
0
0
One of the Victoria Crosses awarded to Sam Mitchell for gallantry in the Tauranga Campaign of New Zealand's Māori Wars is in the West Coast Historical Museum in Hokitika; the other was last known to be in the hands of an Auckland collector. But this is no VC and Bar story. Sam Mitchell was awarded one VC (the first ever presented in Australia, the 300thawarded anywhere), for his actions in the British humiliation at the Battle of Gate Pā on April 29, 1864. So one of the two VCs in existence is a forgery, and although the one in Hokitika seems most likely to be the Real McCoy, there can be no absolute certainty on this matter.
A painting of Sam Mitchell wearing his New Zealand Medal.
The confidence West Coasters may feel about the Mitchell VC in Hokitika being the genuine article is perhaps in large part based on a letter Sam Mitchell’s daughter, Edith Mitchell, received in Mikonui, south of Hokitika, in 1957, from Captain Peter Wyatt, commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s School of Aircraft Direction and Meteorology at Kete in Pembrokeshire. This school was the latter-day HMS Harrier, bearing the same name as the sloop-of-war upon which Sam Mitchell had served in New Zealand in 1864.
Soon after taking up his position at Kete, Wyatt (left) had been approached by the Canadian family of a 12-year-old boy, Wayne Burton, who had found the second Mitchell VC buried in sand and driftwood under a wharf at Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, in August 1956. The family had sent Wyatt photographs of this Mitchell VC, hoping to get it authenticated. Wyatt, in turn, had immediately offered to buy this second Mitchell VC from the Burtons.
Before the transaction took place, however, Wyatt also received a letter from Edith Mitchell, who had read Canadian Press stories about the Burton find. Edith also sent Wyatt photographs of the Hokitika VC. Wyatt took both sets of photos to a Mr Dawes at Hancocks of London, casters of the VC (“probably the most knowledgeable man on the subject alive today”). The two VCs are identically inscribed, but based on photographic evidence alone, Dawes told Wyatt the Hokitika VC was the “true one” and the Canadian VC was a counterfeit. The two VCs have never been compared in reality, but the Canadian version has been described as more worn.
Could it be that the original VC finished up in Vancouver BC, where the man who bought it at auction in 1909 had his will resealed in 1938? Or that the VC sold to Mitchell's daughter in 1928 by this owner's son was a forgery? We shall never know.
Both VCs were eventually recovered from overseas and reached New Zealand - the one in Hokitika was bought by Edith Mitchell for £70 from British diplomat Alvary Trench-Gascoigne, the son of a wealthy English collector who had bought it at auction in London in 1909, the other in 1995 by the Auckland collector, who had bought the Canadian VC at auction in London.
A drawing of Mitchell as a young man.
Mitchell, born at Apsley Guise, Woburn in Bedfordshire on September 8, 1841, drowned in the Mikonui River, close to his farm south of Ross, on March 16, 1894, aged 52, still wondering what had happened to his original VC. He had returned to Sydney from England in 1865 and left the VC with other belongings at a boarding house in Sydney, when he went on to New Zealand in late 1868 to decide whether to settle there. Mitchell did opt to spend the rest of his life on the West Coast, and sent word to a couple believed to be called Goodman, owners of the boarding house, asking them to send his sea chest, including the VC, to New Zealand. He heard nothing back, and contacted police. He was told the Goodmans had returned to England. The prevailing presumption is that they took Mitchell’s VC with them, and sold it to a collector.
Agnes Mitchell
Mitchell's VC was next heard of in early January 1909, when New Zealand newspapers reported that it had been sold at auction for £50 by Glendining’s Galleries in London. Sam's widow, Agnes, contacted Walter Dinnie, the then Commissioner of Police in Wellington, who advised that the VC had been sold to colliery owner Colonel Frederick Trench-Gascoigne DSO of Lotherton Hall, Aberford, just east of Leeds, Yorkshire. Glendining’s had got it from the executors of the estate of a collector in Bradford.
 Frederick Trench-Gascoigne, above, and Lotherton Hall below.
Agnes maintained her efforts to have the VC returned, and after she died in 1918 her daughter Edith took up the cause. Between them they wrote to MPs, Government Ministers, Governors-General, High Commissioners, Returned Servicemen’s Associations, the British Empire Service League in London and British Freemasons. All to no avail, until on March 11, 1927, when the Duke of York (the future King George VI) visited the West Coast and Westland MP Tom Seddon (with whom the duke stayed in Greymouth) pressed the royal to intercede on the Mitchell family’s behalf.
Sir Alvary Trench-Gascoigne at Lotherton Hall.
Duly, in June 1928, Edith Mitchell wrote to Colonel Trench-Gascoigne, who said he had sold the Mitchell VC to his son, Alvary (later Sir Alvary Trench-Gascoigne), a diplomat who lived in Barkston Ash, West Yorkshire. Through public subscription, Edith raised the asking price of £70, forwarded it to the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, Sir James Parr, and in August 1928 the VC finally reached Mikonui. When Edith died in 1963, the VC was gifted in trust to the Hokitika Museum.
The Trench-Gascoignes hardly needed Hokitika's £70 - when Frederick died in June 1937, he left £688,976 12 shillings and 2 pence to Alvary and his widow. Intriguingly, his will was resealed in Vancouver, British Columbia, in April 1938. We know not why. But does that explain how the other Mitchell VC turned up in Vancouver, one must wonder?
Wayne Burton in 1992
The existence of the second Mitchell VC came to light while Edith was still alive, in August 1956. Canadian Press reported that 12-year-old Wayne Burton, of Nanaimo, had found it while hiding from friends under a wharf at Kitsilano Beach. The second of two Canadian Press stories on the find, in March 1957, mentioned Captain Wyatt and his offer to buy this VC, presumably for HMS Harrier. Edith wrote to Wyatt about this story, and in a reply in October 1957 was told “Mr Dawes [stated] with more decision than I expected from such wary people that yours was the true one, and that found in Vancouver a certain counterfeit.”
Nanaimo Daily News, British Columbia, August 30, 1956, and March 15, 1957.
The story can’t end there, of course. Dawes’ certainty was formed from viewing photographs, nothing more. The more than 40-year gap between the discovery of the loss of the VC in Sydney in 1868 to its auction in London in 1909 leaves far too many unanswerable questions– not to mention the gap from 1868 to 1956! The unsealing of Frederick Trench-Gascoigne's will in Vancouver in 1938 adds yet another twist. No information about the Goodmans and their movements can be found. Perhaps it’s time to bring the Hokitika and Auckland Mitchell VCs together, in an effort to ascertain some absolute truth in the matter. But the mystery of the Mitchell VC found in Vancouver in 1956 will no doubt tantalise military historians forever.
↧
Search

Lola Ridge, Genius Poet and Typist

December 18, 2017, 9:06 pm
$
0
0
Lola Ridge at her typewriter. Below, her typescript of "Firehead".
The West Coast, my home district in New Zealand, was where the great American anarcho-feminist poet, writer and artist Rose Emily “Lola” Ridge nurtured her astonishing range of skills. Ridge, born at Dolphin’s Barn in Dublin, Ireland, on this day (December 19) in 1873, spent 27 of the first 30 years of her life on the goldfields of the West Coast, having arrived there with her mother Emma Ridge as a three-year-old. She moved to Sydney with Emma in November 1903 and, after her mother’s death, to San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York in 1907. From 1918 until her death from pulmonary tuberculosis in Brooklyn on May 19, 1941, Lola Ridge was one of America’s best known and most critically acclaimed poets.
The New York Times, 1941
New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, March 1903
After marrying an alcoholic West Coast gold miner and having two sons, the first of whom died in infancy, Lola Ridge turned her attentions to writing and illustrating at the age of 27. Her first published short story, “The Trial of Ruth”, appeared in the August 1903 edition of The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine. Lola also provided the finely detailed drawings which accompanied the story.
“The Trial of Ruth” is a thinly-disguised autobiographical piece, about an educated, refined woman called Ruth Dove who marries a drunkard, a “common digger” and “fourteen stone of irresponsibility”. Lola described Ruth as “small, and pale, and quiet”, with “smooth dark brown hair brushed straight back”. A portrait of Lola, taken by Greymouth photographer James Ring, had appeared in the March edition of Illustrated Magazine, accompanying a brief profile of Ridge (“now preparing some short stories and also a volume of verses for publication in book form”). The gravure image clearly shows a woman identical to the word picture Ridge later drew of Ruth Dove. Ruth was married to Paul Sullivan, who in real life was Ridge’s wine-sodden, “common digger” husband, Hau Hau-born Peter Sanderson Webster (1870-1946). “The Trial of Ruth” is set in Kitonga Valley and Jacob’s Flat, fictional place names which represent Hokitika and Kanieri Forks.
Lola had Ruth as a favourite with the “swearing sex” and was cutting about her being surrounded by settlers’ daughters, the other “society ladies” of Kitonga Valley – one was described as “a wide mass of girl, with a ridiculous post of a nose sunk in a paddock of face”. Lola’s story comes across as a cry for escape from the social confines of Hokitika.
No “settler” herself, Emily Ridge was a single mother, listing herself as a widow, when she arrived in Hokitika from Dublin. Three years later, in 1880, she married a Scottish miner, Donald McFarlane. In 1895 her then 21-year-old daughter, calling herself Rosalie Ridge and listing her occupation as painter, married Webster. The young couple settled in a two-room hut at Kanieri Forks, where Webster was a shareholder in the Lemain and Party sluicing claim. A son, Paul, was born a year later, but died at 12 days of bronchitis. Lola’s second son, Keith, was born in 1900. Between the two births, Lola continued her Trinity College (London) musical studies at St Columbkille’s Sisters of Mercy Convent in Hokitika, gaining intermediate honours in 1898. Below, the convent in 1900:
But writing and drawing gradually took precedence, and in 1901 the first of more than 30 of Lola’s poems to appear in The Bulletin in Sydney was published. “A Deserted Diggings, Maoriland” was signed simply “Lola” – it was her first use of this pen name. It ended:
Where are ye now, old comrades?
Past alarms,
Past lust of gold or gilt!
The sinews of a nation
In your arms,
Out of your strength and folly
A Nation ye have built!

The next year Lola had her first poems published in New Zealand, by the Otago Witness and by the Illustrated Magazine. The second of these is titled “Lake Kanieri” and began:
Blue veined and dimpling, dappled in the sun
Lies Lake Kanieri, like a timid child
Wide eyed, close clinging to the spacious skirts
Of old Tuhua, that big, brawny nurse,
On whose broad lap I lie. No need to serve,
Or suffer, or regret: it seems life holds
No future and no past for me but this
Sun-lighted mountain and the brooding bush;
Nor art, nor history, nor written page
Could touch me now. It is enough to be,
And feel the slow and rhythmic pulse of Earth
Beat under me; and see the low, red sun
Lean on the massive shoulders of the range.
0 lone, heroic, melancholy Hills!
A photo the English crime writer Agatha Christie took of Lake Kanieri in July 1922. Christie described it as “one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen … mountains all around it and the dense bush down to the water’s edge.” It was a claim Christie was to repeat in an autobiography written toward the end of her life (she died in 1976).
Although “The Trail of Ruth” ends on a positive note, with Ruth Dove rejecting the advances of Paul Sullivan’s partner Harry Dunn, saving her husband from being killed by Dunn and setting out to restore their marriage, less than three months after the story’s publication Lola left Webster, and Hokitika, for good. She and her mother (who left her husband in the Seaview mental hospital), along with the three-year-old Keith Webster, settled in North Sydney. As well as continuing to write poetry (insisting that her married name of Webster not be used), Lola was studying art and paying for her lessons by working at the Julian Ashton Art School at The Rocks. Julian Rossi Ashton (1851-1942) was an English-born artist and teacher who emigrated to Melbourne in 1878 under contract to David Syme's Illustrated Australian News, before moving to Sydney. He established the Art School in 1890 and its selection committee included Norman Lindsay.
The New York Times, 1927
Emma Ridge died, aged 74, of acute gastroenteritis and cardiac failure at Ellis’ Coffee Palace on King Street in Sydney on August 2, 1907, freeing her daughter to travel further afield with her son. By the following March Lola was contributing to Overland Monthly in San Francisco, while still sending poems back to Australia and New Zealand. It was her first contribution to the New Republic, “The Ghetto” in 1918, an imagist sequence about the Hester Street Jewish community of the Lower East Side of New York, that established Lola’s reputation as one of the leading American poets. During a lecture tour of the Midwest in 1919, she spoke in Chicago on “Woman and the Creative Will”, rejecting arguments of biological essentialism and exposing how socially constructed gender roles hinder female development. “Woman is not and never has been man’s natural inferior,” Ridge said. Later that year, Lola, aged 46, married a second time, although she was never divorced from Webster. This time she took on a kindred spirit, Scottish-born engineer, writer and radical David Lawson (born Charles Whipple, 1886-1980). Lola was almost 12½ years his senior, but was soon bringing her birth date forward, taking eight years off her age in a 1924 US passport application made with Lawson.
The 1924 passport photo of Lola and Lawson.
Lola Ridge’s high US reputation has been largely restored in the 21st Century, with biographies and other books published extolling her genius, her ground-breaking poetry and her consistent stand on major issues of equality and justice. Most of these works, however, have offered only passing (and often very inaccurate) references to her many years in Hokitika and Sydney. Academics and biographers have also, in the main, seen these as times of deprivation and hardship, and as Lola living an early life which honed her later deep empathy for the poor, disadvantaged and underprivileged of America. Such comments reflect a gross ignorance of life in urban Australian and country New Zealand at the turn of the last century. Lola’s years in Kanieri and Hokitika were doubtless often tough and quite lonely, but would not have been without some comfort and rewards. These included, in time, opportunities and outlets for her to express her artistic abilities. In Sydney, what’s more, she attended an art school of the very highest standard, hardly a sign of her own deprivation. Wherever she lived, Lola Ridge always found a way to support herself, to travel freely and be independent and independently-minded. This enabled her to express herself fully, mostly in poetry that was, even in the first half of the 20th Century, regarded as being well ahead of its time.

↧
↧

Your Holiday Typewriter Crossword

January 4, 2018, 8:54 pm
$
0
0
CLUES
ACROSS:
6. These wonderful little portable typewriters were made in Groton, New York (plural, 6 letters).
7. French typewriters, featured in the movie Populaire (plural, 5 letters).
9. A typeslug is attached to the end of it, a type... (3 letters).
10. Earliest typewriter company, once owned by Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (9 letters).
12. ETCetera magazine has, since October 1987, - - - of typewriter collectors worldwide (3 words, 3, 3, 5 letters).
15. and 19. Considered the first portable typewriter, a single type element machine which was decades ahead of its time (14 letters, 11 and 3).
17. If the word average of speed typists was judged according to five-stroke words, what did one letter constitute? (2 words, 3 and 6 letters).
21. During World War II, German typewriter designers were designated as this by the US Patent Office (5 letters).
22. Fastest typist in the pre-war era, using Underwood and Royal standard-size manual typewriters, Albert - (7 letters).
DOWN:
1. Typewriter company founded by Ed Hess and Lewis Myers in Brooklyn in 1904 (5 letters).
2. In the days when newspaper reporters used typewriters, their copy was set in - type (3 letters).
3. What you carry your typewriter in, its - (4 letters).
4. Typewriters create difficulties when it comes to shipping them, because they are a - - (2 words, 5 and 4 letters).
5. Underwood 5s and Olivetti Lettera 22s are - in terms of typewriter quality and design (7 letters).
8. Shift 6 on your typewriter keyboard provided you with under... (plural, 6 letters)
11. The home city, in England's East Midlands, of the Imperial Typewriter Company (9 letters).
13. There are a great many of these when it comes to the origin of the QWERTY keyboard configuration (singular, 6 letters).
14. In the earliest days of typing, you did this when using a machine with the carriage placed over the top of the circular typebasket, type - (7 letters).
16. What Richard Polt still does for a Sphinx typewriter (it remains at the top of his wish list, http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/tw-10mw.html) (5 letters).
18. The book cover features a typewriter and it's called "Great Men Die Twice: A Fitting Tribute to Mark - " (4 letters).
20. Ted Munk's exhaustive and authoritative Typewriter Database provides, through serial numbers, an accurate guide to the - of your typewriter (3 letters).
SOLUTION:
↧

70 Things To Do in My 70th Year

January 7, 2018, 7:54 pm
$
0
0
I turn 70 this year and between January 1 and December 31, intend to achieve 70 things I’ve never done before. The list has only 24 items on it so far, meaning I’m only about a quarter of the way toward completing it. So I’d welcome any suggestions or challenges. But there’ll be nothing involving great heights: I don’t plan to bungee jump, skydive or hang glide. With the possible exception of a hot air balloon ride – notwithstanding what has happened in my old stamping ground of Luxor - I won’t be risking life and limb at the end of a bit of rubber, some nylon, aluminium alloy or synthetic sailcloth.
Some of these events may seem a little trite, trivial and insignificant, but they each will have their place in helping me round out my life. Here is what is on the list so far:
1.    Go to Araluen, bushranger country outside Canberra.
2.    Listen to Steve Earle sing Copperhead Roadon a jukebox in the pub at Araluen.
3.    Teach my partner Harriet to jive, and jive with her (but not at Araluen).
4.    Watch a Super Bowl on TV in its entirety (I did watch one in 1968, 50 years ago, but that was in black and white on film).
5.    Spend Easter in Christchurch, New Zealand, which is about as easterly as I plan to travel this year.
6.    Attend a school reunion in Christchurch. Yes, that’s a “first” of sorts.
7.    Celebrate a senior milestone birthday in my native New Zealand (my 70th in Queenstown on April 5).
8.     Attend the Anzac Day Dawn Service in Canberra.
9.    Travel to Warren in New South Wales in search of Ponty Reid’s All Black rugby jersey on Dubbo Street.
10.                       Travel to Grenfell in search of Lawson Oval, named after the great Australian writer Henry Lawson, who was born there. I know it’s on the corner of Henry Lawson Way and Stan McCabe Drive and I might get there for the Henry Lawson Festival on the June long weekend.
11.                       Eat something that has tentacles. Calamari maybe?
12.                       Publish a novel.
13.                       Run in a road race.
14.                       Acquire an Underwood 5 typewriter in good working condition.
15.                       Try to match Eric the Eel’s time by breaking one minute swimming 50 metres.
16.                       Meet a tiger at the National Zoo and Aquarium in Canberra.
17.                       Eat King George whiting in South Australia.
18.                       Get to see Uluru and the Alice in Central Australia
19.                       Take a steam train trip in New South Wales, or in Canberra if they can find the bits of train stolen over Christmas.
20.                       Go on a hot air balloon ride in Canberra
21.                       Work on a year-long project to transform our garage, inside and out, making it possum-proof  and poisonous redback spider-free and getting rid of all other beastly creatures.
22.                       Get to own my own laptop.
23.                       Watch Paris, Texas in its entirety (and maybe even Kramer v Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice).
24.                       Go to Maryborough in Victoria to find Princes Park, where the locals beat the British rugby team on June 27, 1888.


Please comment with any more suggestions.
↧

2018: Year of the Typing Dog

February 22, 2018, 12:13 am
$
0
0
“What did you do on such a wet and miserable weekend?” asked a friend the other night. “What’s your latest project?” Her query, as always, managed to convey the impression of sincere interest. “I’ve started researching for a paper about Snoopy being the best-known typist of the last quarter of the 20th century,” I said, in all seriousness. Her eyes lit up. “Oh, yes,” she said, as she scrunched her fingers together, turned them down and began making a two-paw typing action. “I remember Snoopy sitting on top of his dogbox using a typewriter.” And, talking of wet and miserable weekends, did she also recall the opening line of the novel Snoopy never got to finish? “It was a dark and stormy night … ”
Time didn’t allow me to explain that this was not actually a Snoopy original. The celebrated incipit was dognapped by Snoopy’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, from Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton (above), a mid-19th century English novelist, poet, playwright and politician who also coined phrases such as “the great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”.
Generally speaking, Schulz was anything but a plagiarist. He was very much a God-fearing Christian who didn't covet other men’s sayings. Yet since Schulz’s death in 2000, biographers have analysed him as a man who used his famous Peanuts comic strip to get square with people against whom he had long-held grudges. Some might have been bullies from his school days, for whom a bit of comeuppance through a cartoon might seem only fair and reasonable. But others were girlfriends who ditched “Sparky” Schultz for other more desirable suitors, and a lifelong bitterness over this does not perhaps reflect well on a man who made us all laugh out loud when our raw nerves were tickled at one time or another from the early 1960s on into the 21st century.
So, apparently, Lord Lytton’s line about the pen being mightier than the sword came to represent a sentiment in which both Schulz and Snoopy, each of them ultimately vengeful above all else, truly believed. Still, it was on a “dark and stormy night” that Snoopy got stuck for evermore, never to advance in writing The Great American Novel. Lytton had used it in the opening of his 1830 work Paul Clifford, but managed to get past it : “… the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets …”. In spite of many attempts, Snoopy failed to make anything really work beyond the first seven words. He was doomed to eternal writers’ block, washed up on the rocks of that dark and stormy night.
In a 2000 book called Charles M. Schulz: Conversations, edited by M. Thomas Inge, Schulz said the Lytton quotation came to him first, the idea of a dog typing on top of his box after that. “ … each theme that you think of seems to serve its purpose by giving you an outlet for all the ideas that come to you. Now some of the ideas for puns that Snoopy writes could never be used in this strip itself; they are simply too corny. But when Snoopy writes them, and writes them with sincerity, then they are funny. You don’t think that Snoopy is being stupid or anything like that. You like him for his naïveté because he innocently thinks he has done something great, and that makes it acceptable.”
For all that, the naïveté of Snoopy and of other Peanuts characters, notably Charlie Brown, may well have shrouded something a little more sinister, an underlying aversion to life and the people Schulz found in it. Peanuts was first published under syndication in 1950, with a title which Schulz absolutely despised. David Michaelis’s 2007 book Schulz and Peanuts says:
 “In the end, the strip itself would be acclaimed an epic cycle. Cultural historians would describe the saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus as arguably the longest story told by a single artist in human history and as a whole different way of telling a story. But for all the will to see it as a continuum of melancholy sweetness, it began with a precise declaration of feeling, shocking in its candour for a children’s strip … ‘Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown,’ says Shermy, the straight man … who is sitting on a curb as his friend passes by: ‘Good ol’ Charlie Brown … How I hate him!’ ”
Naturally, Charles Schulz’s son Monte disliked Michaelis’s book, saying he wanted to tell newspapers he thought it was stupid. But most reviewers raved about the book, praising Michaelis for highlighting Schulz’s ability to rise, as so many great funny men have done, above his own depression, in order to entertain the world.  Peanuts ultimately ran in 2400 newspapers in 68 countries and in 21 languages. This ensured that Snoopy, while never actually a sergeant-major in the Foreign Legion or a World War I air ace flying a Sopwith Camel, or a golf pro or an astronaut or Joe Cool, was in all reality the world’s best known typist in the last quarter of the 20th century. No other typist came near him.
A great typist? Yes. A great writer? Maybe. Snoopy was unquestionably a comical extension of the truly serious writer Schulz deep down always wanted to be - a confession he apparently made only to the truest, albeit passing, love of his life. Seemingly, Lucy represented the woman Schulz did marry.
For all those aspiring authors out there who dream of writing the Great Australian (or American) Novel, take heart from one of my favourite strips. Lucy tells Snoopy, “You should write a book that is powerful, yet heartwarming!” Snoopy thinks, “I'm having trouble with the first sentence ...’’
(First published on this blog, March 1, 2011)
↧
↧

The Finest American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of

March 7, 2018, 12:12 am
$
0
0

Ten years ago, Oregon journalist Marcus Covert, in an article on Peace Corps authors, said Moritz Thomsen“could well be the finest American writer you’ve never heard of”. A decade on, I might well have been able to shamelessly admit I was that “you”. But then the November issue of Literary Review turned up, and it in was an essay by British travel author and biographer Sara Wheeler about Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure: AJourney on Two Rivers, published in 1990, a year before the chain-smoking Thomsen’s death from cholera, three weeks after his 76th birthday, in his apartment in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Wheeler holds a similar opinion to Covert. “But what a writer he is,” she said. “He taught me the value – no, the vital importance – of specificity.” Among others who don’t qualify as “you” are Paul Theroux and the typewriter-wielding Larry McMurtry. They've not only heard of Thomsen, but they rate him very highly too.
Thomsen wrote four books in his lifetime: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle (1969), The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), The Saddest Pleasure and My Two Wars (published posthumously in 1996). His notable essay “The Bombardier’s Handbook” was published in 2013. A fifth manuscript, Bad News from a Black Coast, is still to be published.Thomsen with his B-17 crew
Thomsen was born Martin Moritz Thomsen Titus into a wealthy business family in Hollywood on August 3, 1915. In 1937 he was a freshman student at the University of Oregon, Eugene. In World War II Thomsen served as a B-17 Flying Fortress bombardier in the Eighth Air Force. After going broke raising pigs at Vina in California in 1959, he joined the Peace Corps and in 1964 moved to Rioverde in Ecuador as one of the first of the Corps volunteers. He was to stay in South America for the next 35 years, much of his last years on his farm just across the Esmeraldas River. Visiting writers were greeted by the sight of a tree outside his window festooned with spent typewriter ribbons. In later life in Guayaquil, an industrial metropolis he hated, his advice to another writer, Patrick Joseph, was twofold: “First, write every day. Every day, without fail. And secondly, find a mentor, some old man to idolize and then tear down. Old men are easily seduced.”

Joseph went on to write the introduction to “The Bombardier’s Handbook”. “Moritz Thomsen kept the journal of his war years in a set of old composition notebooks that, by the time I first handled them, were coming apart at the spines and bound together with string. The excerpts that follow are taken from the third volume of those diaries”. Thomsen logged the missions he flew by date and target  -  Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Reims, Brunswick, Oldenburg, Schweinfurt, Berlin  - 27 in all, flown between March 27 and August 25, 1944.
The opening paragraphs of “The Bombardier’s Handbook” capture the first phases of the flight across the Atlantic. “The trip from Nebraska to Maine was a great and stupendous farewell; of the millions of men who are fighting now there must be few who were allowed, before leaving, to cross their country from the flat prairie desolation of the West to the very tip of Maine, to sail above the Mississippi, the Lincoln Highway, the stone farm houses of Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls, and the thickening industrialization of New York. We were in the air some seven hours, eating sandwiches just abeam of Chicago and rinsing them down with coffee a few minutes later someplace in the heart of Indiana. Chicago was a great lake of lights just beginning to draw in color from the east, but it seemed as isolated, as deserted, as lonely as any of the nameless towns we had passed before.
“Chicago belonged to [E.A.] Earl, [L.G.] Johnson, and Moe [Gerald R. Moburg]; they gathered in the nose and watched their city pass behind them. When we flew over Winslow,
Maine, the hometown of [Fernand] Savasuk, our radio operator, he came up in the nose and we dove on his house from 7000 feet, and Bob [co-pilot Robert S. Wylie] shoved it in low pitch and we went screaming over the town in a wide circle, over the river and the freeway, the main street, and the neat rowed houses in the outside circle. Savasuk sat there entranced, looking first to see if his mother was in the yard and then toward the factory where he knew his father must be at that moment. That was his farewell and ours, too.”

↧

Typewriters in the Movies, 2017

March 8, 2018, 10:39 pm
$
0
0

The Christmas-New Year period provided a veritable feast of typewriter-laden good movies. One, Darkest Hour, deservedly won for Gary Oldham the best actor Oscar, but my annual Oscar for Best Typewriter Movie goes to The Post. In making this decision, I am unreservedly showing the bias of an old hot type, type-and-print-on-paper newspaperman. Watching copy typewritten, briskly but accurately sub-edited, expertly typeset on Linotype machines, hammered into formes on the stone, turned in flongs and clapped on to the presses was all too much for me. I wept buckets, not out of a sense of nostalgia, but from sheer bitter sadness for the sequence of lost art forms. The people who performed these cherished skills have been been discarded from the newspaper industry. As so many journos commented after seeing The Post, that’s how it was done when newspapers were the Real McCoy, when journalism was real, and that’s how we’ll never see it done again. While most ex-journalists were left pining for the production values and could smell printer's ink in the theatre air, I was, strange as it may seem, reminded of Hemingway. The Hemingway, that is, writing to his father from Toronto, describing quadruple checking of the spelling of a man’s name, typing it, having a copyboy stand at his shoulder waiting for each paragraph to be completed, the copy kid running to the subs desk page in hand. And when it was done, Hemingway going out on to the street for a breather, and seeing newspaper sellers heading off with papers that had his story in it. Computerised newspapers can never, ever, come within a bull’s roar of capturing that thrill, that excitement. Tom Hanks and his reporting crew were all superb in The Post, of course, as was Meryl Streep. One small doozie: no press machinist ever stood on the press deck shouting reminders about what time the newspaper trucks left the loading bay. But cinematic effect, I suppose …      
 Above, Bob Odenkirk as Ben Bagdikian in The Post.
      I also came out of The Post thinking of it as a sort of prequel to All the President's Men, except for capturing the atmosphere of a typically busy newsroom, and for the choice of a range of typewriters, The Post was far better - perhaps Hanks had something to do with that? Still, ATPM would have won my 1976 Oscar for Best Typewriter Movie.
      The directors didn’t need to strive for cinematic effect in Darkest Hour. Someone warned me in advance, “We all know the story, yet the tension builds enormously.” And so it proved. I did have to wonder, however, whether the Imperial War Museum, which according to the credits loaned the typewriters to the film makers, had got it wrong with the choice of an American-made Remington Noiseless, when George VI’s dad had insisted, a mere eight years earlier, that only British-made Imperials could be used in British government offices. Richard Polt has been to the Churchill Museum in the underground Cabinet War Rooms, and has photographed a Noiseless there, so he has an advantage over me in this regard. Still, the movie’s typewriters didn’t come from the war rooms. It’s been suggested Churchill demanded quiet typing, and Elizabeth Nel’s obituary in the London Daily Telegraph in November 2007 said she had used a “specially adapted silent typewriter”. Whether this was indeed a Noiseless, and calling it “specially adapted” merely exposed the ignorance of a once highly-esteemed and accurate British daily, we may never know. Pounding a Noiseless in Darkest Hour, as well as a nosiy Imperialanda portable, was Lily James, playing Elizabeth Layton (later Mrs Nel), who started as personal secretary to Churchill in late May 1941, more than a year after the events portrayed in the movie (she wrote Mr Churchill's Secretary in 1958). James said she took a six-week typing class to be able to keep up with Oldman's speeches. “I got really good," she said. “And I enjoyed feeling like I'm able to access Elizabeth Layton through something so technical.”

There was certainly a Remington Noiseless on Churchill’s desk when he made his VE Day broadcast to the British public from the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street on May 8, 1945. In an earlier 2017 movie, Churchill, based on the hours leading up to D-Day in 1945, Ella Purnell plays a fictional Helen Garrett, and also uses a Noiseless.
Real-life Churchill secretaries included Joy Hunter and Myra Collyer, who later recalled each using Imperials, as well as Hunter (below) a Royal and Collyer (second image below) an electric typewriter “provided by the Americans”.
Lily James has since Darkest Hour been able to put her typing skills to further use, in the much-anticipated The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The film is set in early 1946, following the five-year German occupation of the channel islands, Guernsey and Jersey. The script is based on the 2008 novel of the same name and written by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This time James has the lead role, as Juliet Ashton. I can't be certain, but the portable typewriter Ashton takes to Guernsey looks suspiciously to me like a German model, which I would have thought highly unlikely in the circumstances.
Among the more enjoyable movies of 2017, and another one set during the Second World War, was Their Finest, based on the 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half  by Lissa Evans. Typewriter use in this was as extensive as in The Post and Darkest Hour, and like Darkest Hour, it was an adept female typist who starred. Gemma Arterton played Catrin Cole, a scriptwriter who worked with a British Ministry of Information team making a morale-boosting film about the Dunkirk evacuation.
As for the movie Dunkirk itself, I saw no trace of a war correspondent’s portable typewriter, nor any typewriters in The Greatest Showman. But as we all know, James Gordon Bennett barred typewriters from The New York Herald, so I guess that was to be expected.
↧

The Silver-Seiko Silverette Portable Typewriter and Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady

March 10, 2018, 2:11 am
$
0
0
I knew the Silver-Seiko Silverette portable typewriter would be useful for something artistic one day! Watch Italian one-man-band and self-proclaimed “Trash n’ Roll” artist Porcapizza nail it. The typewriter is outfitted with aluminum potato crisps cans and the sound is run through an effects processor which serves as the percussion, assisted with a looper. A telephone receiver acts as the vocal mic, while kitchen butter knives fashioned as a mbira add a metallic bassline. The song truly comes together when Porcapizza picks up his homemade four-string guitar, fashioned from a yellow construction hard hat, an old wooden tennis racket and a bunch of black zip-ties, all assisted by reverb, vocal filter and a looping system. 

↧
Search

All the 3s

March 11, 2018, 10:49 pm
$
0
0
Some respite at the end of a traumatic and tiring week came on Sunday at 11.27pm, when this blog's page view meter clicked over to 3.333333 million. Such have been the travails of the past two months, I even neglected to mention the blog's seventh anniversary at the end of February. Still, the meter just keeps on turning over, by 1000-1200 a day, often much more, mostly as typewriter enthusiasts look to find a way to reattach a drawband. I've also been partially converted to Instagram in the last nine months - it's far more about mere glancing than learning anything (indeed, I hardly ever read any of the captions or exchanges), yet it does offer some interesting insights - one being that the typewriter world, at least for me, seems to be rapidly expanding by the day. Where once the Typosphere offered an accurate gauge on the growing passion for typewriter use, now Instagram provides at look at other aspects of the demand for typewriters. I'm often left feeling I'm now a little out of touch.
The last year has been, for me, the very best of times and the very worse of times. On our first anniversary, my partner found she had ovarian cancer. It turned our tiny world upside down, and of course completely demolished any grand plans I had for my 70th year, including a trip to New Zealand. The main thing for me now is to help her as much as I possibly can to get well again - everything else, typewriters included, pales into utter insignificance compared to that goal.
My new life, as of March 2017, will explain why this blog's posts declined to 41 last year compared to 145 in 2016 and 248 in 2015, and between 400-500 posts in the previous four years. But let me stress that I have in no way lost my love for typewriters and their history. In the past week or so my blogging input has started to lift again, and in some small way I can thank Instagram for a renewal of enthusiasm of blogging. Time, and certainly not a lack of material, remains the greatest deterrent to putting posts together, but I do hope to be more a regular contributor to typewriter lore in the months ahead. Some of the posts may relate to many typewriter-related events that occurred last year, but so be it.
My partner and I are both being super positive in these unfortunate circumstances. Our longer-term aim is to get to England next year, to catch up with Richard Polt, if he visits there, as well as meet Piotr Trumpiel, Rob Bowker, the Chapmans and others in the British typewriting scene. So our catchcry is "onward and upward", and certainly having typewriters as an obsession helps provide a pleasant, if only occasional, diversion in these trying times.  
↧
↧

Never Laugh at a Kangaroo - And Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Typewriters Out Among the Gumtrees

March 13, 2018, 4:12 pm
$
0
0
What was once a weekly flood a free typewriters has turned into a tiny occasional trickle these past few years. All the more reason to be all the more appreciative of the few offers that still come my way. A week or two ago I was contacted out of the blue by a woman called Jo Walker, who said she had four typewriters to give me. As it turned out, she had gone to extraordinary lengths to track me down. And it turned out I had to go to some lengths to find her, and her typewriters.
Ms Walker lives on a dirt track off Poppet Road, Wamboin, on the edge of the Kowen Forest. I had no idea where this sparsely populated rural settlement was, although it is a mere 10 miles from Canberra. Wamboin is possibly derived from Wiradjuri wambuuwayn, meaning "large grey kangaroo", although I didn't know that before I set out for Ms Walker's home. When I did find it, after a pleasant midday drive through the forest, on a bright, sunny Friday, the first thing I noticed was the sign, "Wildlife Sanctuary" (Ms Walker also deals in native plants and seeds). Then to my astonishment I found Ms Walker's home completely surrounded by kangaroos. Typically the males among the great eastern grey (or forester) kangaroos mass around 10 stone and stand almost 6ft 7in tall, and have the scientific name Macropus giganteus ("gigantic large-foot"). In the wild, the sight of them can be pretty intimidating.
These two massive big bruisers kept a close eye on me all the way.
Once the four typewriters had been safely moved to my car, Ms Walker took me to meet some of the somewhat friendlier (and much smaller) members of her roo family. One of them tried to snatch my phone from my hands, and I let out a nervous laugh. "Never, ever laugh at kangaroos," Ms Walker warned. "It's a sound they don't recognise, and it startles and unnerves them. Their communication is all in grunts and growls." Ms Walker went on to say that she has seen kookaburras gather in the gumtrees around her house and start laughing just to see how the kangaroos react. This was all new and quite fascinating for me. Native birds aside, I'm just not a wildlife sort of guy.
But the typewriters ... well there were two wedges, but I did appreciate the two Adler Gabrieles - although one, the electric 2000, has a motor which weighs 5½ pounds, more than the entire weight of a real portable, like a Blick or a Standard Folding:
↧

Instagram and The Typewriter Revolution

March 16, 2018, 5:12 am
$
0
0
In a comment to a post on this blog two or three days ago, Richard Polt flagged an announcement he was about to make regarding Instagram. I'm sure I was like anyone else who read the comment: deeply curious. In my post I mentioned that I had joined Instagram about nine months ago, and wasn't all that impressed by it. Richard's announcement duly came on his The Typewriter Revolution blog at midnight my time last night. What I wasn't expecting was that, after 1000 Instagram posts, Richard has decided to bow out of that particular branch of social media - well, not entirely, but almost.
At the time of his announcement, Richard had a staggering 4323 followers (and was following 1189 others, including myself). In a post on February 16, 2016, he revealed he had 1600 followers, so the rapid growth in the popularity of his Instagram posts is quite evident - a lift of 2700 in a little more than two years. My own figures are paltry by comparison (440 posts, a mere 178 followers). Still, these figures aren't all that relevant. It's keeping up with the posts of 1189 others that I find mindboggling. I follow 148 grammers, and that's time-consuming enough. Just when you think you've caught up, you have to keep scrolling down, because Instagram has rudely snuck in five or six more ads for you to delete, additionally demanding to know why you've deleted them. And being one of 4.5 million grammers following Tom Hanks (who only follows Rita Wilson anyway) is just a silly waste of time. So, too, I suppose, is following as many typewriter sellers as I do, since I'm no longer in the market to buy them.
At first I didn't find the typewriter community on Instagram as friendly and happy as Richard did. Richard very kindly reposted a post of mine about offloading typewriters, and I found myself being called a philistine and the entire nation of Australia being insulted (this from a country which has Donald Trump as its president!).
But as time went by, this wasn't what bugged me about Instagram most. I kept seeing images from this blog appearing without any credit given, most especially by the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.
A few years ago, I took an image of a young lady in Christmas garb and superimposed on to it a photo of one of my own typewriters, a Corona four-bank:
On July 30 last, the Boston Typewriter Orchestra used the image I'd worked on without so much as a word about where it came from. I pointed this out in a comment on the post, but there was no response, so I gave up bothering. In fact, the uncredited lifting of images from this blog just increased. I'm pretty much free and easy when it comes to using images, but I try to ensure that if I take one from the Internet, I mention its origin. I expect others to do the same.
My use of Instagram is, I suspect, somewhat different to Richard's, who initially set out to promote his book The Typewriter Revolution on various forms of social media. My Instagram posts include a whole range of things - typewriters just happen to among them. Instagram helps me keep abreast of my other great passion (apart from my partner), which is rugby. I also found it useful for getting back in touch people with whom I'd lost contact, like Piotr Trumpiel and Adwoa Bart-Plange, both of whom used to have such wonderful typewriter blogs, as well as following the Chapmans in England. Instagram is also probably as good as Facebook for finding out what close friends and family (now much extended, thanks to my partner) are up to.
In strictly typewriter terms, however, I feel I'm a little like Richard in becoming increasingly disillusioned with the sheer superficiality of Instagram posts. Initially I was amazed that so many people I'd never heard of were doing so much with typewriters. After a while, however, as wonderful as the typewriter images are, one is left craving for more depth to the posts.
↧

Scrabble and the Typewriter

March 17, 2018, 8:49 pm
$
0
0
Al and Nina Butts test the game at home.
 Alfred Mosher "Buttsie" Butts (1899-1993) in his University of Pennsylvania Yearbook in 1924 and in January 1954.
Butts's friend James Thompson Brunot (1902-84) in 1953. Brunot gave the game its name, Scrabble, and from 1949 made and marketed the earliest sets in an old schoolhouse building in Newtown, Connecticut. He's seen here amidst some of the 150,000 letters his small team manufactured each day. Butts received royalties on each set sold.
Above, US advertising at Christmas 1955, and below, the first ads in Australia at that same time:
How LIFE magazine launched Scrabble at Christmas 1953:
Clare Potter and Peter Pagan in Vogue in 1953 and, below, Anne Gunning Parker in 1954:
An American living-room game, 1952:


↧

Orinoco Flow with a Smith-Corona Skyriter

March 20, 2018, 11:37 pm
$
0
0
A 1950s Grumman canoe built in Marathon, NY
Alan Seaver's Smith-Corona Skyriter
Henry Whiting Ferris Jr 
Almost four years ago I posted about George Ely Russell, who in May 1919 set off from Seattle in an 18-foot long, canvas-covered Peterborough canoe to paddle 1000 miles to Juneau, Alaska. Russell took with him a Corona 3 folding portable typewriter (serial number 84165) he had used on the battlefronts of France in World War I. About one third of the way into his epic voyage, while approaching the Heiltsuk First Nation Reserve village of Bella Bella on the east coast of Campbell Island in British Columbia, 98 nautical miles north of Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, Russell dropped his typewriter into seven feet of water. Unable to fetch the Corona 3 off the bay floor with a salmon hook, Russell stripped off, dived in and rescued the portable from a salty grave. He wiped it off with an old rag, dried it in front of his night fire ... and went on to write one quarter of a million words with it! These were incorporated into a book called Eighty Days in the Wilderness: Seattle to Alaska by Canoe. 
Russell's great and justified faith in his Corona 3 was replicated 36 years later, when two young American ex-servicemen, the 5ft 8in, 10st 5lb Henry Whiting Ferris Jr (1931-) and John Alexander Thomson (1928-, not Thompson or Thomason, as often reported) took a 9lb Smith-Corona Skyriter with them on a trailblazing, year-long 7000-mile journey canoeing from Venezuela through Brazil and Paraguay to Uruguay and Argentina via those three mighty South American river systems, the Orinoco, the Amazon and the Plate. Later hailed by his local newspaper, the Ithaca Journal, as a modern-day Ulysses,"Whitey" Ferris was a 1952 Yale graduate in psychology and sociology and Thomson a 1954 UCLA arts (geography) graduate, although Thomson gave his home town as Portsmouth, Ohio. The pair bought the $69.50 portable typewriter, the sturdiest lightweight machine they could find, at Rudolph's in Ithaca just before departing for Philadelphia and on to Venezuela. Ferris and Thomson had a similar experience to Russell's, in that they lost one of two 16mm movie cameras and both of their 35mm still cameras when tides swamped their canoes in the early part of the adventure. The cameras were sent back to Caracas for repair. But, as with Russell, the Corona portable survived unscathed - only to be left behind in Buenos Aires in late October 1956. 
The Orinoco is the fourth largest river in the world by discharge volume of water. and the river and its tributaries are the major transportation system for eastern and interior Venezuela and the llanos of Colombia. Its source, 3455 feet above sea level near the Venezuelan–Brazilian border, at the Cerro Delgado-Chalbaud in the Parima Range, was not explored until 1951. Three hundred and fifty-six years earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh had sailed down part of the river in search of the fabled city of El Dorado.
Ferris was the grandson of Dr Harry Burr Ferris (1865-1940), professor of anatomy at Yale from 1895-1933 and a pioneer in the study of cancer, and the son of New York pathologist and director of the Tompkins County laboratory Henry Whiting Ferris Sr (1895-1985), a US Navy captain in World War II. Henry Jr served as a field medical aid with the Second Infantry Division and as a psychologist with the Eight Army Psychiatric Department in the Korean War. Thomson served in Japan and Korea in a fleet squadron and on escort carriers as a US Navy pilot after World War II.
Ferris and Thomson had been tutored at the American Institute for Foreign Trade (now the Thunderbird School of Global Management) in Phoenix, Arizona, by economic historian Professor William Lytle Schurz (right, 1886-1962), the institute's president from 1950 and its director of Latin American studies. The two young men, attending AIFT on the GI Bill, were fascinated by Schurz's assertion that the Orinoco journey was feasible. Schulz, in the immediate aftermath of the conquest of Everest, called the South American canoe venture, "One of the few feats requiring comparable courage and stamina remaining on the globe". Schurz had spent many years in Central and South America with the US Department of State, and he helped Ferris and Thomson plan their trip. Schurz taught at a number of academic institutions, including the University of California, of Wyoming and of Michigan and was US commercial attaché to Brazil during the Hoover administration. In 1922 he coined the phrase "The Spanish Lake" and his The Manila Gallion (1939) was a landmark study on the Spanish empire’s trans-Pacific commerce between 1561 and 1815.
Ferris and Thomson began preparations in June 1955, including making a sail out of an old army parachute, and left on a Swedish oil carrier from Morrisville, Pennsylvania, on October 1. Twenty-five days later, at 2am, their joined 59lb, 17-foot Marathon NY-made Grumman aluminium canoes were lowered into the waters at the mouth of the Orinoco in Venezuela. One year and one day later they arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After some weeks of paddling, they branched off on to the Casiquiare, a distributary of the upper Orinoco flowing southward into the Rio Negro, in Venezuela. This forms a unique natural canal between the Orinoco and Amazon river systems. It is the world's largest river of the kind that links two major river systems, a so-called bifurcation. The area forms a water divide, more dramatically at regional flood stage. From the Casiquiare the pair traversed the Negro, Amazon, Tapajós and Juruena rivers, followed by 20 miles by truck and a final 2000-mile stretch of canoeing down the Cuiabá, San Lorenzo and Paraguay rivers to the Plate. 
Having achieved the longest inland water journey on record, at least from north to south in South America, Ferris and Thomson crossed the Plate to Montevideo and made their way back to Florida by train to Brazil (where they had their canoes sent from Buenos Aires to be swapped for parcels of land) and plane to Bolivia, Peru and the US. There had been a contract with New York publishers E.P. Dutton for an illustrated book but, perhaps because of the damage to the cameras, it does not appear to have seen the light of day. Instead, Ferris and Thomson gave talks about the trip to various groups back in the US, as well as in Paraguay.
↧
↧

The Typewriting Poet Presidential Candidate

March 24, 2018, 12:43 am
$
0
0
At a time when typewriting poets seem to be proliferating by the day, particularly in a country where the prevailing President wouldn't know a poem from a poke in the eye with a burnt stick, it's interesting to recall that 50 years ago a US Presidential candidate was a typewriting poet.
We visited the National Library of Australia in Canberra today, where the library's golden jubilee is being celebrated with an exhibition of all things 1968. Afterwards, discussing many of the tumultuous events which occurred that unforgettable year, the name of Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy came into the conversation. By sheer chance, later in the day, I came across this article (I was looking for something else entirely) from LIFE magazine on April 12, 1968:
When Eugene Joseph McCarthy died in Washington DC on December 10, 2005, aged 89, his obituary described him as "one of the most intelligent and witty American politicians of the post-war period, and the leader of the Democratic revolt against the Vietnam War which forced the withdrawal of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To hardened observers it seemed extraordinary that so fastidious a man - a poet who described himself as 'mired in complexity', an intellectual who recoiled from the crude slogans of electioneering - should have proved such a force. 'How is the Senator this morning?' someone asked McCarthy's daughter Mary in 1968. 'Oh! Alienated as usual,' she replied.
"But McCarthy's willingness to stick his neck out, and to oppose the Vietnam War, in defiance of both the Democratic Party machine and of the notoriously vindictive President Johnson, bestowed a powerful romantic aura. His stand was in contrast to that of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who felt that it would be unwise to oppose the President in a year when he himself was up for re-election as Senator. Likewise, Senator Robert Kennedy refused at first to prejudice his presidential ambitions by striking at the crown too early. For McCarthy the die was cast when the Attorney-General declared that the President need not necessarily obtain the consent of Congress before declaring war. 'There's nothing left but to take it to the people,' McCarthy declared, in announcing his candidacy."
He was certainly very different. He preferred to confer with the poet Robert Lowell than with the pundit James Reston. "I've grown a little disturbed," he told an assembly of agriculturists, "that almost everything the Church tried to give up at the Vatican Council has been picked up by the Defence Department - the idea of grace in office, a little hint of infallibility, a kind of revival of the ideas of heresy and of holy wars, the Inquisition, a kind of index on publications. The Pentagon is even beginning to talk Latin, and has given a contract to a Californian company for a study entitled Pax Americana." When a voter lamented having to choose between Johnson and Richard Nixon, McCarthy readily sympathised. "I know," he said. "That's like choosing between vulgarity and obscenity, isn't it?" He inflicted the first electoral defeat any of the Kennedy brothers in 28 elections. But when the inevitable end to his candidature came - the Democrats heavies hated him - McCarthy turned to sports writing (what else?) and covered the World Baseball Series for LIFE (which patently loved him). (McCarthy had been a very handy baseball player himself, at St John's Catholic College, Minnesota.) As his obituary (obviously written pre-Trump) said about his 1968 exit, "It was a sour, but characteristic end to the most extraordinary campaign in modern American politics."
After entering federal politics in 1949, McCarthy became the ringleader of a group of young liberals, mostly from the Mid-West, known as McCarthy's Marauders. He was also an early opponent of Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunting, and in a memorable television debate in 1952 parodied Joe McCarthy's selective way of using of facts to "prove" that General Douglas MacArthur was a Communist pawn in Asia. He once said, "I'm twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey, twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington, and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy." In 1967 he also took up writing poetry, and was a million times the poet Donald Trump is:
In 1997 McCarthy published a collection of poetry entitled Cool Reflections: Poetry For The Who, What, When, Where and Especially Why of It All. 
↧

Typewriter On The Tracks: The Way We Were (II)

March 24, 2018, 6:23 pm
$
0
0
It's a quarter past 8 on the morning of Monday, June 7, 1948, and the Presidential train Ferdinand Magellan is about to pull out of Pocatello, Idaho, after the latest halt on Truman's Whistle-Stop Campaign. Harry and Bess Truman are watching the crowds starting to turn and leave while their daughter Margaret is offering one last wave to the stragglers. There is steam coming from somewhere, or is it just cigarette smoke from the young reporter bending and reading his notes to the wire man banging out that afternoon's front page lead on his Remington portable typewriter?
Um? No Twittering? Just typing real news!
Truman's typewritten schedule
Merriman Smith, circled, among the reporters interviewing
Margaret Truman on board the Ferdinand Magellan in 1948. Below, the Press at work on the Truman Whistle-Stop Campaign train in 1948. Smith can be seen, centre, with his back half turned.
I can't identify the Jimmy Olsen in this extraordinary photo, but the United Press wire service journalist is Albert Merriman Smith (1913-70) and the photographer for LIFE magazine was Thomas Dowell McAvoy (1905-66, below). I wrote a post about Smith. "On the Other End of the Line, with Typewriter", which can be seen here. Also covering the Truman Whistle-Stop in Pocatello for the wires was Joseph Perry Swisher (1923-2012).
Merriman Smith in Denver in 1955.
Thomas McAvoy
"Pace was so fast that reporter still typed as the train was about to leave," read the caption in LIFE magazine's issue of November 15, 1948, which devoted many pages to Truman's stunning triumph in the Presidential election. This spread also included, of course, the far more famous photograph of Truman taken from the back of the Ferdinand Magellan, the "Dewey Defeats Truman-Chicago Daily Tribune" shot captured during a stop at St Louis Union Station on November 4, 1948, while Truman was returning to Washington DC from his home in Independence, Missouri.
The Tribune's catastrophic 150,000-copy blunder came about  because Linotype operators were on strike in protest against the Taft–Hartley Act, and copy was composed on Varityper typewriters, photographed and then engraved on to printing plates, a far slower process than using hot metal. The photo LIFE used was taken by William Eugene Smith (1918-78, left), but the one above, taken from a slightly different angle, was by Frank Edward Cancellare (1910-1985, right). Yet another version was taken by English-born St Louis snapper Louis Leonard Phillips (1906-91, left). Below, the President's train, the Ferdinand Magellan, also used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and later by Ronald Reagan.
A typical back-of-the-train gathering on Truman's Whistle-Stop Campaign, this one at Baltimore, with plenty of reporters and photographers ready to gather that day's real news. No reliance on Twitter here!
Margaret Truman
Reporters and photographers covering Margaret Truman's wedding to New York Times reporter Elbert Clifton Daniel Jr (1912-2000) in Independence, Missouri, on April 21, 1956. Daniel later became managing editor of the New York Times (1964-69), after having been the paper's London and Moscow bureau chief. In the photo by Sammie G. Feeback above are Sheldon Hereschoron at the typewriter, Jerry McNeill with camera and at the rear Ed Hoffman.
Rose Conway, personal secretary for Truman, is seen here at her desk in another McAvoy LIFE shot.
A McAvoy photo of the Truman's dog Feller.
↧
Search

Flash Typewriters, Flash Cars: 1928-1968

March 25, 2018, 7:49 pm
$
0
0
Aside from whiskey distilleries and cigarette manufacturers, some of the most regular and eye-catching full-page (and usually full-colour) advertisements which appeared in LIFE magazine over the years came from typewriter companies and especially automobile conglomerates. While specifically looking for typewriter ads, I must admit to often being almost equally impressed by the car spreads. So I've decided to put together a selection of both, covering the 40 years from 1928 (when the magazine was still owned by Clair Maxwell) to 1968.
1928 - 90 Years Ago
1938 - 80 Years Ago
1948 - 70 Years Ago
1958 - 60 Years Ago
1968 - 50 Years Ago
That's all folks ... !
↧

How a Hermes 2000 Typewriter Foiled the Copybook Le Crime à l’Américaine

March 30, 2018, 4:24 pm
$
0
0

Larry McMurtry once publicly praised the Hermes 3000 for winning him a Golden Globe. But that was nothing compared to one of the earlier Swiss models, a Hermes 2000 semi-portable typewriter, which French gendarmes were toasting in Paris in March 1961, after the Hermes had been dredged from the murky bottom of the Seine and had nailed the kidnappers of the heir to the Peugeot billions.
         Jean Elie Yves Verdier (1915-74) was at the time of the kidnapping the director-general of the Sûreté Nationale Française (French National Security) and had been instructed by the French Government to personally supervise the investigation. Verdier accepted a wager from FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover that the culprits would never be caught. Thanks to the Hermes 2000, they were. 
The rescued Eric Peugeot with his mother Colette, right,
and father Roland with Eric's brother Jean-Philippe.
The rescued Hermes had solved France’s first child kidnapping case for ransom. At the time, with no phrase for the outrage of their own, the French referred to it as le crime à l’Américaine. The Hermes 2000 had been thrown off the Pont d'Iéna ("Jena Bridge") spanning the Seine and linking the Eiffel Tower on the Left Bank to the district of Trocadéro on the Right Bank.
A Swiss newspaper's coverage.
The Hermes 2000 belonged to actress Ginette Rolland (left, 1925-), the former wife of one of the kidnappers, Brittany-born Raymond Rolland (1936-), who in early April 1961 had borrowed it from Ginette to type (wearing gloves) the ransom note with red ribbon on cheap paper bought at Monoprix SA. The note was a copy of one which had appeared in Lionel White’s 1953 book The Snatchers(published in French as Rapt = Abduction), which Rolland’s accomplice Pierre-Marie Larcher (1923-) had read some years earlier, while on the run. In 1936 Larcher had himself been headlined in Paris Soir as a kidnap victim, but as a 13-year-old had merely escaped from an evil step-father to live in Paris. In the Peugeot case, the victim was chosen by Rolland and Larcher from the social register, La Composition Sociologique du Bottin Mondain. White (1905-78), by the way, was an American crime reporter who wrote suspenseful thrillers and was an inspiration for Reservoir Dogs.

Within 56 hours of their snatch, Rolland and Larcher had picked up the ransom and dropped off the kidnapped child, Eric Peugeot, grandson of the car company’s founder Jean-Pierre Peugeot and son of Roland Peugeot. Two days later, on April 17, investigators revealed their search for the typewriter which had been used for the ransom note and two letters later sent to Roland Peugeot. But it took the gendarmes almost 11 months, until March 5, 1961, to arrest Rolland and Larcher, who had gone on a massive spending spree with the ₣50,000,000Peugeot francs (then worth more than $US100,000). The long arm of the law reached them at an 11-room chalet (called, ironically, Les Six Enfants) they were renting at Megève in the Haute-Savoie department of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, a ski resort near Mont-Blanc in the French Alps. Amazingly, the Peugeot family, including little Eric, were staying in an adjoining chalet at the same resort at the same time.
What really sealed the case, however, was when an informant identified only as "X" told gendarmes and Interpol that while Rolland’s ex-wife was still waiting for her Hermes 2000 to be returned, she had kept her typed notes. Investigators agreed this was the "key" clue. After Rolland was nabbed, he eventually broke down and confessed to tossing the Hermes in the Parisian river. Once frogmen had fished up the machine, after almost two weeks of searching, on March 21, it produced typing which was forensically tested to match the Peugeot ransom note. In a first-person article he wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in May 1961, Larcher lamented that Rolland had only told him he had borrowed the Hermes 2000“from a friend. “I did not ask any questions,” Larcher wrote, “But today I can only say, ‘If only I had known …”
The kidnapping occurred in the late afternoon of April 12, 1960, when Jean-Pierre Peugeot was golfing at Saint-Cloud and his two grandsons, Jean-Philippe, 7, and Eric, 4, were in a nearby playground in the care of nanny Janine Germanio. With Janine and chauffeur Georges Parelli momentarily distracted, Eric was playing with Thierry Tetraz in a sandpit when Rolland lured him away, leaving behind the typed ransom note and, with Larcher at the wheel, speeding off in … Yes, you guessed it, a stolen black Peugeot 403! (The four-year-old later told police he recognised the model as a 403.)
The kidnappers took Eric to a rented hideway at Grisy-les-Plâtres, a village in the Val d'Oise, where Larcher’s 19-year-old girlfriend, mannequin Rolande Niemezyk (right) helped care for him,before collecting the ransom money on Passage Doisy near the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile (the code phrase was “gardez la clef”) and leaving Eric to be rescued a few hours later in the Le Brazza Cafe off Avenue Raymond Poincare.
The ₣50,000,000 proved far too hot for the kidnappers’ hands. They hit the nightclubs, casinos and ski resorts, scorching across western Europe in luxury and conspicuous American cars with beauty queens and good-time girls on their arms. Pretty soon ₣43,000,000 was gone (a little more than one-tenth of the ransom, ₣70,000, or 14%, was later found in Larcher’s care). And although Rolland was calling himself de Beaufort and Larcher Beau Serge, the money trail was still much too obvious for Interpol to miss. The more so given the kidnappers were mere jobless petty crims - Larcher, a convicted car thief and smuggler, was ostensibly by day a slot machine operator and Rolland a money launderer cum cabaret acrobat.
Rolland and Bodin at Megève.

Two ladies in particular caught their fancy – striptease artist Maryse Guy (left,1943-95), also known as Mitsouko, and blonde fashion model Ingelise Bodin (right, 1941-), 1960’s Miss Denmark in the Miss World contest. Both were detained along with Rolland and Larcher, as well as Niemezyk, but Guy was soon released while Bodin was taken into custody in Paris and held for four months. She was actually in Denmark when the kidnapping occurred, as she explained to a Danish newspaper in 2015. Ironically, in 1965 Guy played a French secret service agent (Mademoiselle La Porte) in the James Bond movie Thunderball.
Bodin with Larcher
Bodin with Rolland
Guy with Rolland
A stunned Guy is released by gendarmes,
The trial of Rolland and Larcher was heard before the Assize Court of Versailles in October 1961 and both men were sentenced to 20 years’ jail. Rolland served 12 years and Larcher 14, and the pair emerged new men, Rolland as an expert in law and Larcher as a publisher. Twenty years after Larcher was released, Guy committed suicide in Paris. Bodin married a childhood friend called Fred Schäfer, who preferred to shoot buffalo in Australia than imprison little boys. The couple moved to California and opened a pioneer takeout restaurant.
 Bodin tries to hide her face as Rolland is brought in for questioning.
A happier Bodin leaves court.
Bodin in Hove, Denmark, in 2015.
↧
↧

The Rootin’, Tootin’, Shootin’ Outlaw Daughter of Oz: The Australian Femme Fatale Who Scandalised America’s Wild West

April 2, 2018, 12:10 am
$
0
0
As the Nevada State Journal, in June 1951, imagined Susie Raper and Robert Payne. 
Born SUSAN WARFIELD in New South Wales, Australia, September 11, 1844; died of cancer, Los Angeles, October 12, 1900, aged 56.

Also Known As –
·Susie Raper, Rapier, Rayner, Booth, Yonkers, Dawson and Black.
· The Wickest Woman in the West
·Bronco Sue
·Six-Shooter Sue
· The Pistol-Packing Mama
·Buckskin Sue
·The Female Buccaneer of the Sagebrush
·The Lady Gay Spanker on the Pacific
(Lady Gay Spanker, a “horse-riding virago", was a character in the 1841 comedy London Assurance [originally Out of Town], written by Dion Boucicault.)
· The Lucrezia Borgia of the West
(Lucrezia Borgia, the oft-married daughter of Pope Alexander VI, is regarded as the ultimate femme fatale.)
· The Mazeppa of the Humboldt
(A Mazeppa is the rider of a wild horse. It originates from Ivan Stepanovyč Mazepa, the Ukrainian Cossack leader. Humboldt is a county in Nevada.)

Australia has historically been proud of its criminal past, celebrating its convict heritage and lionising its bushranger heroes, like Ned Kelly. But not so much its female outlaws. And no Australian newspaper, writer or historian has hitherto mentioned one of this country’s most notorious murderers, Susie Raper. The Kelly Gang collectively killed four men – Susie Raper alone shot at least three, and is considered New Mexico’s first serial man killer.

For 14 years to 1884, Australian-born Susie Raper and her “coquettish swagger”, “winning ways” and foul mouth had reporters spraying purple ink around newspaper offices across the United States, from California to Tennessee and on to Vermont. Trigger-happy Susie’s legend was launched on March 12, 1870, in just such one of those colourful rags, the Sacramento Independent, in what’s now a ghost town in Colorado. It would soon spread nationwide, with papers in all corners of the country picking up and republishing the Independent’s prurient story. And the legend survived well into the latter part of the 20th Century, revived in 1953 by yarns about her “comb stick-up” of 1869, when she convinced sheriffs she was holding a pistol at their heads. Susie was also remembered by the Nevada State Journal in May 1976 as “the brassiest, lovingest castle rustler in the West”  - comparable with Butch Cassidy, the Daltons and the James Brothers - and as a “comely cattle rustler” by the Reno Gazette-Journal in September 1998. She was indeed brassy and comely. In one of her earliest escapades, she – with “a string of curses on her lips” - stole back her confiscated horse “Humboldt” and in doing so gave, according to the Indianapolis News in June 1870, “a liberal exhibition of her well-molded extremities to the greedy street gazers in her Mencken ride through [Mineral Hill, another Nevada ghost town]”. (Actress Adah Isaacs Menken was best known for her performance in the melodrama Mazeppa, with a climax that featured her apparently nude and riding a horse on stage.)
The Hartford Courant, July 1953
Calling her “The Lady Gay Spanker on the Pacific”, the SacramentoIndependent’s evidently enamoured editor wrote that Susie was “rather prepossessing in appearance, has a passable face, a graceful and well-rounded form and good carriage.” As a coquette, she had run many of the leading citizens of Elko, Humboldt County, Nevada, “a merry string”, driving them “spoony” and vulnerable to the badger game. “Smart, bold, and of winning ways, she seldom missed her mark. She can shoot a pistol like a sportsman; ride a mustang with all the grace and dash of a vaquero, drive a bull team equal to any Missourian, and in the parlour or ball room ‘get away’ with most women of style.”
         In almost the same breath, the writer added that in trying to escape custody in Austin, Lander County, Nevada, on January 18, 1870, Susie had shown “fight, nerve and skill in the handling of a six-shooter”. In court, “she acted as if it was fun”. But on being taken into jail, she had given “vent to a tirade of abuse upon the heads of those who had deserted her”. Naturally enough, clearly not wanting to be subjected to similar treatment, the all-male jury found her not guilty of grand larceny (for stealing a herd of cattle from the Mound Valley ranch of Nevada’s future governor, Major Lewis Rice “Broadhorns” Bradley). Susie gave the prosecutor a kiss on his cheek, threw back her head and laughed, and walked out with chin held high. It was a case of one down, one to go for Susie. A week later she faced another grand larceny charge, for stealing jewellery and gold coins worth $713 from a former employer, Carrie M. Taylor. Again she was found not guilty. One more week and a second not guilty finding for rustling. And this was pretty much to be the pattern of Susie’s outrageous ways until 1884.
         That’s when the Chicago Tribune reported that “the wilful lady is now cultivating a flower garden in Texas”. Sure enough, Susie hadheaded south. In the meantime, from New Mexico she had joined forces with New Yorker Captain Robert Payne to move to Wyoming and then head south to invade the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) of the Choctaw and Cherokee nations, which the United States Government had promised would be free of white settlement. This agreement was soon defied and violated (with Susie “making Payne stand guard over the wickiup with a shotgun”) and impunity awarded to Susie and Payne to advertise and sell Indian Territory land under the supervision of a US Marshal. Unhappy with this more regulated arrangement, Susie abandoned Payne to his wits and took a raft down the Red River and Rio Grande to Texas.
          Winnemucca’s Silver State newspaper, moved seven years earlier from Unionville, knew Susie’s form well. In early 1881 it gleefully quoted the Virginia Enterprise as claiming “All that is necessary is to arrest or kill Payne and capture Susie and put her in woman’s clothes, and provide her with a civilised good-looking man to occupy her time in courting her and giving her mustangs to ride. This accomplished and Susie Raper Payne may be tamed, and the incipient rebellion she and her Cher ami are endeavouring to inaugurate will be crushed out.”
Susie and Tom Raper, as the Nevada State Journal imaged them in 1951.
We’ll get back to the duplicitous Payne later … Suffice to say here that the ChicagoTribune’s Nevada correspondent weighed in by reminding readers of Susie’s “antics” – her “marvellous feats of horsemanship [sic], coupled with a keen appreciation of the value of other people’s cows and calves”. Her “brilliant, erratic career” had “carried her through a series of adventures and escapades that made her the special wonder and admiration of the Elko press … and which, if properly written up in the form of a two-shilling novel, would have made their fortunes.”
Nothing is known of Susie’s early life in Australia, but she probably grew up in either the Campbelltown or Windsor areas outside Sydney. She and her brother Joe Warfield first appeared in the US in Forest City, Sierra County, California. There were Warfields with Indiana links digging for gold in Sierra at the time, but it is unclear whether they were related. One different kind of gold digger, however, soon met another and in Forest City on March 6, 1860, the 15½-year-old Susie married Thomas Davison Raper from Davis County, Indiana, a veteran of the 1846-48 Mexican War. Raper was almost 16 years Susie’s senior, and it wasn’t to be a marriage made in heaven. Indeed, this was to be merely the first of at least five or six marriages Susie would go through in the next 15 years, although none of these would appear to have been entirely legal (she was still calling herself Mrs Susie Raper in 1899 and was awarded a widow’s war pension in Raper’s name in 1900). Susie and Raper did, nonetheless, have three boys - Joseph was born in California in 1861, Robert in Paradise Valley, Humboldt County, Nevada, in 1863 and William, also in Paradise Valley, in 1865. In April 1865 Paiutes Native Americans attacked settlers in Paradise Valley and on July 26, Susie’s brother Joe Warfield was killed in a clash at Willow Point. At Gueno Valley the following March 7, Raper accidentally shot himself in the arm while defending the family farm from another raid, leaving him disabled throughout the rest of his life. (Raper later lived in Montana and Arizona and died, aged 70, in November 1898, having become a deacon in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Santa Maria, California.)
At Gueno Valley Susie strapped her wounded husband to a horse, killed two of the attackers and took Raper 60 miles south to Camp Dun Glen. From there the couple moved to Unionville, where Raper was treated and Susie found a teamster willing to take the family back to California.  By the time they had reached the West Coast, Susie owned the team and the teamster still owed her money. Susie left her husband in Santa Barbara and returned to Humboldt County, where, dressed as male, she lassoed a deputy sheriff and was a suspected of stage robbery.
After appearing as the “Wickest Woman of the West” in a Winnemucca theatre, in 1869 she settled in Carlin, Elko County, and was convinced by Payne that he was a kindred spirit and would make a good fellow traveller. They contracted a Morganite marriage and planned the Native American land thieving partnership of Payne& Raper. The next year Susie declared herself a dressmaker in the US census. By then she had left the overtly respectable employ of Carrie Taylor to become an out-and-out outlaw.
The Indianapolis Newssuggested the good citizens of Elko would miss her. “Every now and then [they were] treated to a little fun by the fair damsel. Susie has no superior in boldness, dash and intrigue – if any equals. No yellow-covered book ever pictured her equal, if all accounts are true. Susie is as gay and festive as any female troubadour who ever trod the mountains under the blue sky of Italy. Possessing a natural and graceful appearance, a keen eye, a quick intellect, a tongue that swings on a pivot, she can make up to represent any character, and has ability enough to execute any deep laid scheme. Mazzepa chief of a gang of land pirates, she boasts of her power to command, at a moment’s warning, their assistance to execute her wishes, however unlawful or diabolical they may be. The experience of the dungeon taught her no lesson, as it was hoped it would have done by her lovers”.
After ditching Payne, Susie went through three more mock marriages. The first of these was to Frenchman Jacob “Jake” Youncker, who was struck down by smallpox. A Scotsman called Robert S. Black helped Susie bury Youncker, and then became Susie’s “husband” No 4. In 1884 Susie and Black fell out over property and Black attacked our heroine with an axe – only to be shot and killed by Susie’s .44 revolver. Susie pleaded self-defence and no charges were laid (at least for the time being, until she was dobbed in by her own son). Susie next married stockman Charles Dawson, but after further family feuding Dawson too was gunned down – though not this time by Susie herself.
Detroit Free Press, March 1870
In the midst of all this, Susie’s eldest and youngest sons, no doubt led by example, turned bad, and the middle son died young. As the Yerrington Times, Nevada, said of Joe Raper in August 1875, “Susie brought her children up in the way they should go and this one seems to be going it.” Still, Susie needed the signature of the youngest, Bill Raper, in order to acquire Tom Raper’s estate “of real and personal property”, after Raper died at La Graciosa, Santa Barbara, California, in November 1898. Susie was also living in Santa Barbara at the time, and two months after Tom’s death appealed to newspaper readers in Arizona to help her track Bill down. What she failed to mention was that 11 years earlier, Bill had scarpered with $1000 worth of Susie’s jewellery.
In February 1900, Susie was one of a handful of Californians to be granted pensions, in her case a princely $8 as a Mexican War widow. But she didn’t have long to enjoy it. Eight months later she was dead. Previously, all books and articles in which Susie’s life has been mentioned have speculated that in all probability she would meet a grisly end. None of the authors imaged that she would survive until one month after her 56thbirthday, or that she would die of cancer in her own bed, alone. But she did. And even more remarkably, this notorious killer did so having spent only four months in jail in her entire life – back in 1869!
↧

Buzzby Babes

April 3, 2018, 2:13 pm
$
0
0
Buzz cuts before H's second full day of treatment tomorrow. I'll be spending my 70th birthday in the chemo ward with an absolute angel!
↧

50 Hours at an Underwood Typewriter: The 1924 Rhode Island Senate Filibusters

April 9, 2018, 1:50 am
$
0
0

There's been many a post on this blog about the sprinters in typewriting history - the men and women who won world speed typing championships from the 1880s until the early 1940s. That these speedsters could maintain their impressive rates for up to an hour at a time was testament to their lasting power.  But when it came to out-and-out endurance typewriting, Anna Tague (1891-) of Providence, Rhode Island, had them all beaten into a cocked hat. As assistant secretary to Rhode Island Governor William Smith Flynn (1885-1966), Anna, above, was caught up in the Democrats' succession of filibusters in the Rhode Island State Senate in 1923-24. On one occasion, in June 1924, the filibuster lasted 42 hours, until a bromine gas bomb thrown into the chamber briefly interrupted the imbroglio. As the dust settled and the air cleared, Anna completed her record with a breathtaking 50 hours straight behind her Underwood typewriter. An earlier filibuster, in March, involved Democrat senators reading aloud Shakespearean plays and the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover.
Anna was the second daughter of John and Bessie Bridget Tague (the correct spelling of the family name is actually Teague), who settled on Olney Street in Providence after arriving in Boston on the Catalonia in 1890 from Liverpool in England. The family home is at Muckros (one 's') near Ballinamore in County Leitrim in Ireland. Anna began working at 18 as a bookkeeper and later became a stenographer for the Vermont Manufacturing Company's Fancy Butterine and Cocolat store in Providence. (Butterine is artificial butter made partly from milk; cocolat is another word for chocolate). The fact that Anna was the niece of Massachusetts Congressman Peter Francis Tague (1871-1941) probably helped get her the job in Flynn's office. Peter Tague was a Democrat member of the United States House of Representatives from Boston, serving from 1919 to 1925. Both he and Flynn opposed the powerful influence of the Ku Klux Klan.
The term of Flynn, a progressive Democrat, was marked by the extreme partisan conflict within the senate, which was controlled by a Republican majority. A group of young Democratic legislators including Lieutenant Governor Felix A. Toupin and future Governor Robert E. Quinn staged filibusters for much of 1923-1924, attempting to get older Republicans to pass a resolution putting a constitutional convention up to a popular vote. Flynn refused to call the National Guard to restore order, saying that the executive branch should not interfere with legislative matters.
The story of the Rhode Island senate filibusters is best told here and here.
Briefly, trouble started with the 1923 election cycle, which ushered in a crop of enthusiastic and stubborn Democrats, though they remained five members shy of a majority. Rhode Island voting regulations excluded citizens who did not own property from voting in city council elections. The Republican majority allowed a vote on suffrage rights in 1923 but promptly defeated it. In 1924, Democrats wanted to get the Republicans to vote in favour of the voting amendment and have it brought to the public for approval.
The filibusters failed to have the desired effect, tensions mounted and tempers flared, and finally a fist fight was followed by the gas bomb. The chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, William C. Pelkey, was indicted on charges of conspiracy for hiring a 34-year-old Boston thug - William “Toots” Murray - to throw bromine gas into the chamber. The gas bomb was the mob’s second option - their first being to have Toots shut off the lights and shoot a few rounds of a gun into the ceiling. But at the end of the day, the Democrats were the big losers, in the ballot boxes.
↧
Viewing all 1889 articles
Browse latest View live
Search