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Proper Post Posture with Remington Portable Typewriter
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How Paddy Chayefsky Learned to Type Playscripts
The passion had been born in him in 1945 when Chayefsky, recovering in an Army Hospital at Cirencester, 80 miles outside London, after an encounter with a land mine at Aachen in Germany, wrote the book and lyrics to a musical comedy, No T.O. for Love. The work, produced by the Special Services Unit, opened at the Scala Theatre in the West End of London. This led to Chayefsky befriending Garson Kanin (1912-1999), already a very well established writer and director of plays and films, who invited Chayefsky to collaborate with him on a documentary of the Allied invasion, The True Glory.
Chayefsky's release from military duty coincided with Kanin's play Born Yesterday opening on Broadway, beginning a run there which would extend to the end of 1948. Back in New York City later in 1946, Chayefsky happened to bump into Kanin and his wife, Ruth Gordon (1896-1985), a screenwriter and playwright as well as a renowned film and stage actress. The couple, impressed by Chayefsky's single-mindedness and enthusiasm, gave the budding playwright $500 to make his start and write his first full-length play, the never-to-be-produced Put Them All Together (aka M is for Mother).
This photograph of Paddy Chayefsky at a typewriter in a garment factory was taken by Michael Rougier for a June 6, 1955, LIFE magazine spread titled "Bride in the Bronx: Chayefsky builds his new play on wedding plans", which began by describing Chayefsky as "the most celebrated of the young TV playwrights". In the event, the photo was cropped to a thumbnail, with the typewriter only just visible.
How did Chayefsky go about learning to type plays? Well, in the words of Marc Norman in What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, "To learn drama's rhythm, Paddy typed out [Lillian] Hellman's The Children's Hour word for word." This 1934 drama is set in an all-girls boarding school and is based on a false accusation that two headmistresses are having a lesbian affair.
Lillian Hellman
Norman goes on to write that Chayefsky, in order to "learn comedy", then proceeded to type out the full script of The Front Page. This, of course, was a hit Broadway comedy about tabloid newspaper reporters on the police beat, written by two former Chicago journalists, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and first produced in 1928.
Charles MacArthur at his typewriter
Osgood Perkins and Lee Tracey in the play The Front Page
Chayefsky was born Sidney Aaron Chayefsky in The Bronx on January 29, 1923. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (the other three-time winners, Francis Ford Coppola, Charles Brackett, Woody Allen, and Billy Wilder, have all shared their awards with co-writers). Chayefsky's Oscars were for Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976).
Chayefsky in 1957, the year he wrote The Great American Hoax
Chayefsky died of cancer in New York City on August 1, 1981, aged 58.
Chayefsky in 1976, the year he wrote Network.
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RIP Philip Roth (1933-2018)
Roth's first gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, and he went on to be one of the most awarded American writers of his generation.
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Reflections in a Crappy Eye
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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Groma Kolibri
Petrushevskaya is both a novelist and playwright who has been compared in style to Anton Chekhov and in influence to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Her novels include The Time: Night (1992) and notable among collections of short stories is There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, which was published in the US by Penguin Books in 2009 and became a New York Times Book Review bestseller. The New York Times pronounced her "a contemporary Edgar Allan Poe'. Another collection followed in 2013, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself. Last year she published a memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel.
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Karl Marx and Typewriters
So why, then, is this German woman using a Triumph Norm-6 portable typewriter to write text about Marx at an exhibition exploring his works and life at his birth house in Trier? (It's now a museum, by the way, called Karl Marx House).
The exhibition opened a month ago, to mark Marx's 200th birthday (he was born on May 5, 1818, to be precise). The organisers might just as well have supplied (along with a Chinese-made statue of Marx) a Chinese typewriter, like a Flying Fish. The whole shebang is being paid for by the Chinese Government, leaders among those who still cling to Marxist ideals. But of course Marx didn't use a typewriter, though his handwriting was certainly bad enough to warrant one:
The home town of the legendary philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist sits on the banks of the Moselle, in a valley between low vine-covered hills of red sandstone in the west of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, near the border with Luxembourg. During the festivities, Moselle wine is being served under the label “Das Kapital”. I kid you not.
Perhaps the closest Marx came to typewriters was 70 years after his death, when in 1953 Saxony city Chemnitz became known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, and stayed that way until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chemnitz was the home of one of the massive Robotron factories (VEB Robotron-Buchungsmaschinenwerk) - though the Robotron plant that spewed out typewriters in their tens of thousands was in Dresden. (The machines being assembled below, in November 1971, are teleprinters and tape-point transmitters for the Soviet Union.)
In the absence of such manufacturers, and in the post-Cold War era, the Chinese have capitalised by, among other things, continuing to make typewriters. But in Beijing, Chinese president Xi Jinping used Marx's birthday to reinforce Marxist ideals. Sidney Rittenberg, a journalist who joined Mao Zedong’s revolution and served for years as his translator, said, “Xi is depending on restoring the theoretical soul of the Chinese people. They built a better life and made money, but they lost their soul and I think he's trying to restore that.” Xi told a Politburo session in late April that officials need to “grasp the power of the truth of Marxism” and view the Chinese Communist Party as the heir of the “spirit of the Communist Manifesto” [which was first published 170 years ago].
Back in Trier, however, a city spokesperson told the Xinhua news agency that townsfolk “have long been a bit ashamed about Marx”. And that might have something to do with the Berlin Wall, too.Maybe, amid all these confused loyalities. the festival organisers were thrown by the portable typewriter below, though I don't think that's another member of the Marx family, Groucho, with Greta Garbo as Nina Ivanovna Yakushova in Ninotachka (in fact it's Felix Bressart.)![]()
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As for me, my only connection with Marx and typewriters is yet another relation, Louis Marx:
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The Typewriter Art of Janet Hill
Like many people, it seems, I came across Janet Hill's art serendipitously. In my case it was while sitting in a hospital ward the other day, reading Frankie magazine to while away the time. I could see instantly that Ms Hill likes her typewriters. Janet lives in a 151-year-old home in Stratford, Ontario, 80 miles south-west of typewriter city Toronto, where Martin Howard lives. The Hill cottage was built in 1867 for men working on a hotel at a time when the town was receiving an influx of visitors through a then new railway link. Thomas Edison, at age 16, worked as a telegraph operator for the Grand Trunk Railway at Stratford's railway station in 1863. Since then much less talented people, like Justin Bieber, have lived there.
Hill is a painter and author of children's books and with her husband, John Woodward, manager of the Fanfare Books bookstore in Stratford, operates Janet Hill Studio. Most of the images on this post can be found on Etsy.
At the Ursula Academy for the Supernaturally Gifted
The-Elephant and the Dancing Girl
A Melodrama
Reading, Writing, Crumpets and Tea
Black Coffee and a Blueberry Muffin
Still Life
Janet Hill in here home
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Makeover for an Underwood 5 Typewriter
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Who Links the First Typewriter to Fly, Alexander Graham Bell, the Eastman Kodak Developing Machine and Sydney Airport? Annie Lepley, That's Who
The front page picture story in The Washington Times of May 3, 1911, sadly records Annie Lepley's name incorrectly as "Sepley", no doubt helping to condemn this pioneering typist to a life of relative obscurity.
Annie Bertrand Lepley was a 26-year-old stenographer in her home city of Washington DC when, on April 30, 1911, she got the idea to take a typewriter where no person had taken one before - and to type in the sky. She was working for Albert Francis Zahm (1862-1954), an early aeronautical experimenter and then secretary of the Washington Aero Club, at a time when Glenn Hammond Curtiss (1878-1930) was taking his Flying Circus across the country and was due to appear at Benning, Washington, on May 5-7. Zahm, who was at the time testifying on behalf of Curtiss in the patent lawsuits brought by his former friends the Wright brothers, agreed to put Annie's plan to Curtiss in New York and the aviation ace was happy to oblige. Sadly, history does not record what model typewriter Annie took with her (it was her "favourite"), nor do we know what model aeroplane she flew in (likely to have been a Curtiss Bi-plane). But we do know who flew it. The honour of taking Annie up in the air with her typewriter didn't fall to Curtiss, nor his Canadian offsider John Alexander Douglas McCurdy (1886-1961), but to McCurdy's younger brother Arthur Lucian Salisbury McCurdy (1888-1957).
Lucian McCurdy can be seen centre foreground helping prepare
his brother's biplane in Toronto in August 1911.
The younger McCurdy was himself a pioneering pilot, though at the time of his flight with Annie was not one of the Curtiss performers, but business manager of the Flying Circus. History has also been unkind to Lucian, whose exploits don't rate even a passing mention in the many tributes to his brother Douglas or their father Arthur.
Douglas McCurdy in his AEA Silver Dart.
Douglas McCurdy, later Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, joined Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association in 1907. The AEA was a research group for heavier-than-air flight experimentation, founded by Bell at Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, which Curtis joined in 1908. That year Douglas McCurdy and Curtiss set up the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company. There are claims that in 1909 McCurdy became the first British subject to fly an aircraft in the British Empire when he piloted the Aerial Experiment Association's Silver Dart off the ice of Bras d'Or Lake in Nova Scotia (above). However, New Zealander Richard William Pearse (1877-1953) flew several hundred yards and landed a powered heavier-than-air machine on March 31, 1903, almost nine months before the Wright brothers flew their aircraft.
From George Eastman: Founder of Kodak and the Photography Business,
by Carl W. Ackerman
Lucian McCurdy, born in Baddeck on March 8, 1888, died in Toronto on January 12, 1957, aged 68.
Finally, back to Annie Lepley. She was born in Washington DC on October 9, 1884, the daughter of a career librarian. Annie went on to become a stenographer in a law office in 1906. She died in Washington DC on July 21, 1936, aged 51, her typewriting milestone long since forgotten, and is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery.
Washington Post, May 4, 1911
Washington Times, May 3, 1911
On September 7, 1912, 16 months after her historic flight-with-typewriter, Annie married attorney Webster Spates (left, 1884-1956), a Georgetown University graduate. From 1913 Spates was engaged in special work with the Department of Justice. After a brief stint in Alabama in 1916, and a few days before America declared war on Germany in April 1917, he was recalled to Washington and reengaged in the Department of Justice for war services, headquartered in Philadelphia. His assignments involved important matters connected with the national defence and involved investigating notorious war fraud cases (he arrested Detroit manufacturer and army officer Charles A. Ritzman, who was found guilty of accepting a bribe in connection with his official duties). In 1918 Spates was appointed special assistant to the attorney-general of the US. From there he went on to private practice at Miami. Oh, and the Sydney Airport mentioned in the title? It's not our Sydney Airport. On July 27, 2009, the Sydney Airport in Nova Scotia was renamed J.A. Douglas McCurdy Sydney Airport.
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On Board with the World's Fastest Typist: Otis Blaisdell's Grand World Typewriter Tour - 15 Nations in 12 Months (And Mom Went Too)
Harrison Otis Blaisdell (1886-1960)
Otis Blaisdell with an Underwood No 4 in 1910. For his exhibitions across America and around the world, Blaisdell often spurned the use of "souped up" championship-ready Underwood 5s, to prove he could type just as quickly on ordinary "stock models".![]()
'He typed like a maestro plays a piano': An indication of Otis Blaisdell's
remarkable drawing power on his world tour was this large audience
for his speed typing exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, on October 24, 1919.
Harrison Otis Blaisdell emerged from the 437th Detachment of Engineering Corps of the US Army at the end of World War One, immediately rejoined the Underwood speed typing battalion at 30 Vesey Street, New York, and prepared to embark on a victorious worldwide campaign of his own. On July 2, 1919, the 32-year-old Blaisdell and his mother, Eudora Eleanor 'Ella' Blaisdell, 57, set off on the Niagara from Vancouver for Australia, arriving in Sydney on August 11. It would be almost a full year (August 8, 1920), before they returned home to New York, on the Imperator, from Southampton in England. In the intervening 12 months they had toured Australia (Blaisdell thought Tasmania was a separate country!), New Zealand, Singapore and the Straits Settlements (some of the latter are now part of Malaysia), Sumatra (now part of Indonesia), Borneo (now divided between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei), Java (Indonesia), Hong Kong, China, Japan, the Philippines, Burma (now Myanmar), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, South Africa and finally England. And at every port of call - including Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Shanghai, Hankou, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Manila, Rangoon (now Yangon), Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), Colombo, Cape Town and London - Otis Blaisdell gave well-attended demonstrations of his speed typewriting skills. He and his mother were not all that long back in the US before Underwood sent them packing again, first to Puerto Rico in March 1922 and then to South America in 1924.
Oddly enough, the day Blaisdell left New York, Typewriter Topics announced he had married "a former Underwood girl", Elsie Brendgen (1899-1977). Maybe her husband's travelling didn't appeal to Ms Brendgen. In 1928, Blaisdell married (again?), this time to divorcee Mary Dorothy Moran (1898-1976). And that marriage, apparently, lasted less than six years.
Blaisdell's mother, 'Ella' Blaisdell, née Otis (1861-1947)
Underwood paid for Blaisdell's mother to go along with him on these trips because, as Underwood Vice-President Clinton Lawrence Rossiter (1860-1925) explained to Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, "Mr Blaisdell is the sole support for his Mother, who now resides with him in New York City, but as we wish Mr Blaisdell to be prepared to spend as many months in the Far East as may be necessary, it is quite imperative that his Mother should accompany him - not only from a financial point of view but also on account of the prolonged separation. We also believe Mr Blaisdell's work will be conducted to better advantage if he has his Mother with him and is free from any worry as to her welfare while away." Ella Blaisdell also wrote to Lansing (under a Underwood letterhead) explaining that she had been divorced in Chicago in 1908.
At the various places Otis Blaisdellvisited on his whirlwind 1919-20 world tour, he was taken care of by the Underwood Typewriter Company's overseas agents, who organised his typing demonstrations. These included:
Australia: Stott & Underwood (see previous posts for the history of this company).
New Zealand: Stott & Hoare (the original name of the Australian company)
Ceylon (Sri Lanka): Founded in 1844 by British businessman William Milne, who was joined by David Sime Cargill in 1850.
Hong Kong, China, Japan: Dodwell & Co was one of the leading British merchant firms, or hongs, active in China and Japan during the 19th and 20th centuries. Its forerunner was W.R. Adamson & Co, founded in Shanghai in 1852 as a result of the efforts of a group of Cheshire weavers who needed to increase supplies of raw silk for their mills. Branches were set up in Hong Kong, Foochow and Hankow. It was the first of the British merchant firms to venture into Japan, opening a branch in Yokohama in the early 1860s. In 1872, the firm appointed a shipping clerk in its Shanghai office named George Benjamin Dodwell (1851–1925). Dodwell secured in 1887 the agency for chartering and managing ships on behalf of the Canadian Pacific Railway between Hong Kong and Vancouver, thus establishing the first regular steamship line across the Pacific. He formed Dodwell & Co in May 1891. Shipping agency and tea trading were major concerns and by the turn of the century it could claim to be the largest shipping firm on the Pacific coast. Dodwell Co acted as the exclusive agent for the chartering of ships by the Japanese government during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Its Japanese trading business expanded further through the export of coal to Singapore and Shanghai, and the shipment of Japanese straw braid from Kobe for Europe. During World War One Dodwell's shipping business boomed with the chartering, bunkering, and sale of Japanese steamers to the Allied powers.
Burma: Siegmund Oppenheimer & Co of Rangoon handled a diverse range of goods - from Underwood typewriters to engineering and building materials to wines and spirits, military equipment, tents, wolfram-ore bags, hospital furniture, police uniforms, orchids and elephant harnesses. It is now a branch of the Innwa Bank. Oppenheimer & Co was founded in 1885 by Siegmund Oppenheimer (1858-1920). He was the founding president of the Rangoon Trades Association.
Philippines: The origins of Smith Bell & Co date to 1838, when a young Scotsman named James Adam Smith was sent to the Philippines to look after the interests of Jardine Matheson & Co. Six years later, after establishing good connections, Smith went into partnership with Henry Constable and Robert Philip Wood. This partnership eventually served as the foundation of what was to become Smith Bell & Co. In 1880, the Philippines experienced one of its worst rice shortages because of milling inadequacies. Responding to this acute situation, Smith Bell operated its own fleet of lighters and inter-island steamers, and the company was able to distribute rice to the southern provinces. It also also had to cope with the sugar shortage crisis. Smith Bell established the Luzon Sugar Co, the first sugar refinery in the islands, a few miles north of Manila. Coinciding with the extension of free trade between the US and the Philippines, Smith Bell was incorporated in 1909. World War One gave Smith Bell a chance to achieve maximum prosperity as products such as copra, hemp and sugar were in great demand and the islands imported more manufactured goods.
India: Y. Narayan operated a typewriter supply agency on Esplanade Row, George Town, Madras, and produced its own typewriter manual for the Indian market. We have no information on the major Underwood agency, Warden & Co.
Singapore, Straits Settlements, Sumatra, Borneo and Java: Paterson, Simons & Co was an early trading company in Singapore whose origin can be traced back to 1821. It played an important part in the early commercial development of the colonial state. It stemmed originated from Holdsworth, Smithson & Co, a business established in Singapore in 1821 as a branch of the London and Liverpool merchant firm, Rawson, Holdsworth & Co. In 1828, William Wemyss Ker went to Singapore and joined Holdsworth, Smithson & Co. He was admitted as a partner in 1830. Following the retirement of Holdsworth and Smithson, the firm was renamed Ker, Rawson & Co in 1835. William Paterson and Henry Minchin Simons, who had been assistants in the company in the mid-1840s, were admitted to the firm as partners in 1853. In 1859, Ker, Rawson & Co was dissolved, and Paterson, Simons & Co was formed, Ker, Paterson and Simons as the founders. This company exported tropical produce of all kinds - such as rubber, copra and pineapples from Malaya, Borneo and the East Indies - to Europe and other countries, and imported merchandise including cotton goods and other manufactured products from Europe and the US. It also acted as an agent for shipping lines, insurance companies, industrial enterprises and state governments. By the beginning of World War One, the firm had become the agent and secretary for 16 planting and rubber companies, and it had branches in Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Klang and Port Swettenham. Today the company is headquartered in Britain, with operations throughout West Africa.
Otis Blaisdell's passport photo in 1919.
Otis Blaisdell, was born on October 23, 1886, in Chadron, Dawes County, Nebraska, and trained at a business school in Chicago with the aim of becoming a court stenographer. Blaisdell was working for American Express in the Windy City when, aged 19, he first stormed on to the speed typewriting scene, in March 1906. He typed 141 words a minute for 30 minutes to finish second to defending American champion Charles McGuerin at the National Business Show on March 19 and the next night lost to the legendary Rose Fritz in a blindfolded competition, with 66wpm. In the first world championship, at the Madison Square Garden in New York City in November 1, 1906, Blaisdell again finished second to Fritz, with 64wpm. These performances had Underwood rushing to sign him up for $5000 a year for its championship team, and Blaisdell moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn, and joined Underwood at Vesey Street, New York City, in April 1907. He failed to make the placings at that year's world championship, but his speeds began to improve markedly under Charles Smith's coaching. He won his first title, the American championship, in Chicago in February 1908, with 88wpm, better than Fritz's 87 in retaining her world title four months earlier (Blaisdell was third with 80).
Blaisdell was undoubtedly the Roger Bannister of the typewriter. Whereas Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier in 1954, it was Blaisdell who first broke through the 100 words per minute typing speed limit in 1909. And his achievement came in equally inauspicious surroundings. Before the Missouri Valley Commercial Teachers' Convention in St Joseph on November 27, 1909, Blaisdell typed 6184 words of unfamiliar matter in an hour, at an average of 103wpm. This broke Fritz's world record, set at the world championships in the previous September, of 95wpm (with Blaisdell second on 92wpm). Just as Bannister was to be, Blaisdell was feted around the globe for his amazing skill at the keyboard - in Blaisdell's case, he was broadly heralded as "The Fastest Typist in the World". [Bessie Friedman was the first woman to achieve the feat of 100wpm over an hour, with 107 in Spokane in 1912; Florence Wilson reached 112 later the same year.]
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 30, 1910
For three years from 1909, Blaisdell's efforts on behalf of Underwood were concentrated on training for (four hours daily, "as carefully as a prize swimmer or popular pianist") and performing in speed typing championships and travelling across the US exhibiting his typing talents. In the absence of Fritz, Blaisdell finally gained the world title at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 1910, with 109wpm. The previous month he had beaten Fritz in Hartford, Connecticut, 107 to 104. To celebrate his championship triumph, on November 18 Blaisdell reclaimed the out-and-out speed world record from Florence Wilson (134), with 135 words from printed matter in a single minute, without errors, at Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was an effort he was to repeat in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1912.
Blaisdell created another milestone in retaining his world championship with a "regular stock" Underwood at Madison Square Garden on October 26, 1911. His winning score of 112wpm established that someone could type for an hour faster than the average person could talk. On this occasion he beat Fritz (third, 107) as well as Wilson (second 110). But the following year Blaisdell was to be dethroned by the mysterious, mercurial Florence Eliza Wilson (1894-), the petite Saratoga stunner whose 117 pushed Blaisdell back to third (115 after two many errors). Emil Trefzger was second (116), Margaret Owen, ominously for an amateur, fourth (114) and Fritz fifth (113).
The fetching Florence Wilson (above and below), who fleetingly graced the championship speed typing arena before disappearing into obscurity in 1913.
While Owen (1913, 15, 16, 17) and Trefzger (1914) won the next four world titles, Blaisdell became more of a demonstrator than a competitor, but, with her mother Louise, accompanied Owen on her national tours. Blaisdell also became increasing involved in the technical side of typewriter design and manufacture, leading ultimately (in 1926) to him one of the patentees of improvements to Underwood's combined typewriter-calculator. This project came under the wing of Elliott-Fisher after it was merged with Underwood in 1927.
After being put in charge of the Underwood display at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915, Blaisdell spent Christmas and the New Year in Hawaii (image below) where he added to his typing performances by taking his Underwood completely apart and quickly reassembling it. Blaisdell was also Underwood's manager at the 1916 Atlantic City Exhibition. No doubt his subsequent experiences with the US Army engineers in 1917-18 added to his mechanical expertise.
Blaisdell's profound knowledge of the workings of Underwood machines was in large part behind the company's decision to send him Down Under - and elsewhere - in 1919. He was to concentrate his demonstrations and promotion as much on the Underwood bookkeeping machine as on the typewriter. And as he was travelling on a commercial business passport, he needed an export licence from the US War Trade Board to do so. The board was created by President Wilson in 1917 to control imports and exports, before these duties and functions were transferred to the Department of State in July 1919.
Blaisdell's Australasian tour was all the more important to Underwood because, since being introduced to this country on a properly promoted basis in 1908, its typewriters had struggled to make major inroads in the market here. Canadian William Alexander Lingham had tried to recruit state agents across the newly federated nation in 1902, but generally failed. Underwood's Australian and New Zealand agents, Stott & Hoare, did not have an extensive network of outlets. That was one of the reasons why, in July 1908, Remington's long-standing head of exports, George Henry Richards, arrived in Australia with his Melbourne-born wife to take his company's agency from Stott and negotiate a new deal with Chartres. Six weeks later Stott signed up as Underwood agents, taking over from John Sands (the Australian organisation became known as Stott & Underwood in September 1909). Just before the introduction of its first portable, Underwood felt Blaisdell's tour would would greatly heighten the Far East profile of the Underwood 5 and the business machine. Certainly, in terms of the typewriter, that proved to be the case. In particular, the massive publicity generated by Blaisdell in Australia in late 1919 and New Zealand in early 1920 could hardly have failed to achieve its aim.
In later life,Blaisdell went to work for IBM in New York and died there on May 16, 1960, aged 73. He is buried at the Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn.
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Me and Norman Greenbaum
During a year-long run, I covered 68 tracks, detailing the stories of the performers and their songs. The criteria was quite rigid: "One-Hit Wonders" had to be tracks that had reached No 1 on the Australian national Hit Parade, and be the one and only entry on to the charts by that artist or group. We had lots of "But, but, what about ...", yet I stuck firmly to the rules, no exceptions were made.
At the end of the run, 45 guest judges, all considered very knowledgeable in the field of pop and rock music, were invited to list their Top 10s from the 68 nominations. From those votes, a consensus was reached, and the final Top 10 can be seen below.
The Times was soon flooded with thousands of entries from readers trying to match exactly the consensus Top 10 (one threatened to send in 31,263,411,763,584,000 computer-generated entries, to cover every base). It was at that point that we started to think about settling on competition winners, and giving out appropriate prizes. And I was busy in other ways. I was tracking down artists from the Top 10 consensus list and interviewing them on the telephone. It was no simple task, as it might today, given the way the Internet has expanded - there was no Wikipedia back then, for example.
To my great delight, I was able to find one artist representing each song - from Norman Greenbaum on his farm in Northern California, Denny Zager in Nebraska, Doug Fieger of The Knack, Ed Bazalgette of The Vapors (super importantly, as he was able to explain what Turning Japanese was all about), Verdelle Smith in Brooklyn, Mary Weiss, one of the two survivors of The Shangri-Las, Evelyne Lenton of Belle Epoque, who for a while became a good friend,Robin Scott ("M"), the only one of the Top 10 to argue he wasn't a "One-Hit Wonder", and Cynthia Johnson of Lipps Inc. I was all the more pleased about this achievement when the late Times journalist Mark Juddery returned from England to announce that BBC TV had done the same series, with almost the same Top 10, and had failed to track down Norman Greenbaum.
I had found Norman Greenhaum early on in my searches, and we struck up a very good rapport. So much so that Norman was soon offering any sort of support I needed. And then it struck me that the most appropriate prize for the overall winner of our competition would be something personal, an item of memorabilia from the No 1 One-Hit Wonder himself, Norman Greenbaum.
Norman duly obliged, with not just one item, but a bundle of them. When his box of stuff arrived, Australian Customs took one look at the name and address of the sender (some dippy Santa Rose hippie?) and ripped Norman's package apart, then Cellotaped it back together. When, at the prize presentation, the competition winner saw what her prize was, she too tore the retaped package to shreds, in her excitement. I managed to grab and repair the top part, as my own souvenir of the "One-Hit Wonders" feature. I still have clippings of all the articles in the series, but Norman's piece of cardboard sits proudly on top of the pile. And I think fondly of Norman every time I look at it.
TOP 10 ONE-HIT WONDERS
No 2
No 3
No 4
No 5
No 6
No 7
No 8
No 9
No 10
Also Run:
Also Run:
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Aladdin’s Cave of Typewriters in Canberra
The Remington J (export version of a Junior) was sold briefly in Australia in 1918. They were priced at £14, compared to £24 for a new standard visible Remington, but quickly became a rarity here. In 1925, a second-hand if rarely used Remington J could still fetch £12.
Many and many's the time I have dreamt of discovering an Aladdin’s Cave of typewriters. Of someone calling me up and saying, "We've got a store of old typewriters just sitting here, carefully packed away, waiting for you to come and have a look at them."Yesterday that fantasy came true, and it turns out the much dreamt-of treasure trove is right here in Canberra. Indeed, one of the many things which astonished me about the whole experience of finding it is that the collection is on a street I have often wandered down, without ever sensing the slightest inkling of a suspicion that so many typewriters were kept there, and all in such great condition. Most amazing of all, however, is that I walked out of that place, an hour after finding it, without so much as taking possession of a single machine. Tested but left behind were immaculate Corona 3s and 4s (the keytops on one 4 were blinding!), Underwood standards of four different generations, Remington portables and 10s and 12s and an utterly mind-boggling Remington Vertical Adder Model 122, Gromas and Torpedos (Blue Birds), and a fully functional Remington J (for Junior). And that's listing just a few that I took out of their cases or wrapping.
A model 22. The one in the collection is a 122 in even better shape.
John's father worked on the typewriters of Hudson's Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority and serviced the typewriters, mostly European-bought portables, brought here by migrant workers. When the scheme was completed in 1974, and the workers started to disperse, John's dad acquired many of the machines used by the authority. As a typewriter dealer, he had already amassed many old machines, which he had accepted as trade-ins on new typewriters. Thus, after 25 years in the business, John's dad was left with a collection of machines dating from the turn of the century to the mid-1970s, some of the 70s machines still unused and unsold (and still in the collection). John's dad had used his expertise to carefully service and in some cases fully restore many of the older typewriters he owned. Then, sadly, he passed away.
My own Corona 4
So, 40 years ago, two of John's sons where left with the problem of what to do with hundreds of typewriters. The bulk of them were simply dumped, many of them IBM Selectrics. One in particular went to the local museum, but soon disappeared from there, souvenired by someone who knew its worth. But the sons had worked with their dad and had some idea of the value of what was in the collection. They kept about 30 of the machines, and carefully stored them under plastic or in their cases in Canberra. And there they have stayed for four decades, untouched until my visit yesterday. This story is not yet finished. I will post on further developments. But in the meantime, maybe you'd like to try to imagine what this storeroom looks like, what an Aladdin's Cave of old typewriters materialises into, when it turns from a fantasy into reality. One word to help you on your way ... WOW!!!
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The Homecoming Typewriting Author - Lloyd C. Douglas Goes Back to Columbia City, Indiana
Lloyd C. Douglas at his Remington Rand typewriter
Douglas addresses a 58 per cent empty movie theatre
after the "World Première" of White Banners.
Monroeville Breeze, June 6, 1940
Lloyd Douglas and his mother Jennie Douglas
By that time her surviving son had become one of the world's most widely-read novelists. Lloyd Douglas' writings - combining Biblical lore, adventure and love - were read by millions throughout the world and brought him a far greater audience than he ever reached as a minister. Magnificent Obsession and The Robe were his best known works, but others also made into movies were White Banners, Green Light (starring Tasmanian Errol Flynn), Disputed Passage and The Big Fisherman. The Robe, the film rights to which were sold for $100,000 to Twentieth Century Fox just after Douglas died in February 1951, was the first film released in the widescreen process CinemaScope, shot with Henri Chrétien's original Hypergonar anamorphic lenses. This development led to Fox screenwriter Nunnally Johnson famously saying he'd have to turn his paper sideways on his typewriter platen. 
Lloyd Douglas, like his father, became a Lutheran clergyman. He was ordained in 1903 and the next year married Bessie Io Porch, like him the offspring of a Grace Lutheran church minister. Douglas received his doctor of divinity degree from Fargo, North Dakota, College in 1920. He served in pastorates in Indiana, Ohio, Washington DC, Michigan, California and Montreal. He started writing fiction in 1927 and in 1933 retired from the pulpit to concentrate on writing and lecturing. While working on a book of essays designed to apply Biblican rules to everyday life, he decided they would be more interesting and effective in novel form. "It occurred to me," he said at the time, "that the good purpose I wanted to describe would reach more people in story form." The result was Magnificent Obsession, the first of a series of 11 successful novels. The book was based on the true story of Detroit-born Edgar Adolph Khan (1900-1985), the son of the architect of the modern assembly line factory who became a famous neurosurgeon and pioneer in the use of craniotomy for the removal of subdural hemotomas in infancy.
Lloyd Douglas' favourite story was how he came to write The Robe (1942). A woman in Canton, Ohio, wrote to him and asked if he had ever heard the legend of the Roman soldier who won Christ's robe in a dice game after the crucifixion. "It set me to thinking," Douglas said, "and I decided to do a little story about it." The "little story" became a book 700 pages long. It entered The New York Times Best Seller list in October 1942, rose to No 1 a month later, and held the position for nearly a year. It remained on the list for another two years and returned on a number of reprints.
One of the writers for the screenplay for White Banners, by the way, was Lenore Jackson Coffee (1896-1984), below right, a liberated lady who sometimes worked from home so that she could be close to her young children. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about the heroine of White Banners, called Hana, for her 2007 album Shine.
Lloyd Douglas died of a heart attack at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Beverly Hills, California, on February 13, 1951, aged 73.
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Once Upon a Time in the White House: Pioneer Press Secretary Who Put a Premium on the Truth
In October 1954, White House Press Secretary in the Eisenhower Era, Jim Hagerty, watches as Dorothy Rochon Powers (1921-2014), legendary reporter with the Spokane Spokesman-Review, types up her story on a Royal about President Dwight D. Eisenhower's arrival for the dedication of the McNary Dam on the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington. The Press Room was in the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, Washington.
"We can't stand the truth": The 31st White House Press Secretary
Next Thursday, July 26, Sarah Huckabee Sanders will have been White House Press Secretary for one tumultuous year. It's unlikely the occasion will be marked by any change in the now familiar three-ring circus, the bizarre daily ritual which has come to characterise White Press press briefings, one which provides such bewildering amusement for the world at large. Little St Don, as George Saunders (author of Lincoln in the Bardo) dubbed him in The New Yorker this month, may be the ringmaster, but Sarah Sanders is the star trapeze artist, blithely and adeptly swinging from "misspoke" to "misspoke", balancing fable with fake news. 
It wasn't always so. Indeed, it was almost never so, at least not to this scandalous degree. Yet again, for all the earnestness and apparent honesty of the White House's first full-time Press Secretary, Jim Hagerty - the ridgy-didge journalist who took care of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the last man before Little St Don not to have held an elected office before becoming President - there were also some light moments back then. United Press's seasoned White House correspondent Merriman Smith - seen above with Polly Witte filing their stories on Eisenhower's heart attack in Denver on September 24, 1955, from the Lowry Air Force Base, Colorado - was one of the large army of journalists who set up camp in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, while Eisenhower recuperated at his white brick farmhouse, dubbed the "Gettysburg White House". Smith, reporting in November on Eisenhower's recovery, said "Outside the entrance to the temporary White House Press Room here is a large sign which says 'Matinee Today'. This does not refer to Press Secretary James C. Hagerty's afternoon Press Conferences. The sign is an ad for the movie house next door. Hagerty's conferences, however, frequently take on the aspects of a show. Hordes of college students and school children often descend on the conferences. The younger children, particularly, stand and watch the reporters banging away on their typewriters." To be fair to Smith, there wasn't a lot of hard news to report at the time. Eisenhower, who had suffered his heart attack while his visiting in-laws in Denver, secretly plotted his re-election campaign during his recovery, while Hagerty handed out updated medical reports.
The White House Press Corps typed their stories in a converted gymnasium provided by Hotel Gettysburg owner Henry Scharf. Press Conferences were held in the same gym.![]()
For the first week of Eisenhower's convalescence, Hagerty was the sole link between an anxious nation and its ailing chief. With a cool, assured touch, Hagerty meticulously informed a tense world about the President's progress. Behind the scenes, meantime, Hagerty played a significant role in the Administration's decision-making. Within a year, Hagerty had performed a similar service when Eisenhower underwent abdominal surgery. His performances in both crises won him more respect from newsmen than any previous Presidential press secretary. The Press called him - facetiously but affectionately - ''Iron Man Hagerty''. Hagerty had emerged as one of the President's most trusted advisers. He could handle reporters' questions and a golf club on the course with the President with equal skill. The Press liked Hagerty because he was honest. Photographer Arnold Sachs put it best: “If Jim told you something, you could take it to the bank.”
In its obituary for Hagerty, The New York Times declared, "At the White House, Mr Hagerty, who was known as Jim, won reporters' respect for his competence and candour." Will the same be said of his latter day successors, one wonders?
What we do know is that there is a range of remarkable coincidences between the time when Hagerty served Eisenhower and during this present period, during which Little St Don has been taken good care of by Ms Sanders (and his friend "Pootin"). For example, Eisenhower worked toward improved relations with the Soviet Union, even on the issue of nuclear arms reduction, and met with Nikita Khrushchev on a number of occasions. But these efforts were ultimately ruined by the U-2 incident in 1960. The Eisenhower terms were also marked by several Soviet spy scandals, including in the Middle East. Eisenhower achieved an armistice in Korea, against Republican Party opposition. While one talks of building border walls, the other, Eisenhower, painted for relaxation - his wife Mamie's favourite, "The Mexican" (1953), hangs on the second floor of the farmhouse to this day.
Jumpin' Jim flash
James Campbell Hagerty was in fact the seventh person since 1929 to hold the role of White House Press Secretary, but the first full-timer and the first to serve two full Presidential terms, from January 20, 1953 until January 20, 1961. He was also responsible for changing the role of the Press Secretary by instituting the practice of regularly scheduled Presidential news conferences. For the first time, everything the President said at a press conference could be printed verbatim; Hagerty abolished the longstanding rule that the President could not be directly quoted without specific permission. In 1955, he pioneered the admission of newsreel and television cameras to Presidential news conferences. Hagerty was known for providing much more about the lifestyle of the President than his predecessors, including the great detail he went into on Eisenhower's various medical conditions.
Jim Hagerty died at the Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville on April 11, 1981, aged 71.
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The Poppy-Red Portable Typewriter
POPPY-RED
Now everything is Poppy-red
Poppy-red, Poppy-red
In loving memory
Now everything is Poppy-red
Poppy-red, Poppy-red
The gifts she gave to me
In loving memory, memory
- Richard Thompson
Had an urge to keep my hand in by giving a typewriter a new, brighter life. This Adler Gabriele 25, given to me earlier in the year by a lady in the bush, was in very good working condition, but had a quite drab sort of non-colour. I thought a paint called "Poppy-Red" would do the trick, and it did. Maybe I should hold on to this one for next Anzac Day. Unless it becomes a "must-have" for someone in the meantime. It looks equally great on red silk or matching poppy-red wool.
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Happiness is a Warm Typewriter - 50 Years on from The Beatles' White Album
The Pop-Art Olivetti Valentine came out three months after "The White Album"
Geoffrey Lee-Martin: Sent to the South Pole in shame?
Can it really be half a century ago? Surely not! How old am I? But I can remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday. I was banging away furiously at an Imperial standard typewriter (not a Model 80, I hasten to add) on the editorial floor of The New Zealand Herald on Wyndham Street in Auckland. The keyboard was positively burning, when suddenly my concentration was shattered by the entry to the newsroom of Douglas Gordon Button. Doug (right, as he looked in 1968) might just as well have been christened Benjamin; he was born old and tried very hard to grow progressively younger. There was certainly a spring in his step this day. He was the Herald's popular music writer, and he'd just received an advance copy of The Beatles' latest album, the one most commonly known as "The White Album". Doug as skipping between the typewriter laden desks, waving the album in the air, yelling, "It's here! It's here!", when the chief-of-staff, Geoffrey Lee-Martin, decided to take the wind out of his sails (after all, Doug was wearing bell-bottoms). It's Lee-Martin in the image at the top of this post, banished to a place among the penguins to type on an Empire Aristocrat portable in Antarctica. Anyway, back to the story at hand: Lee-Martin walked over to Doug's desk and snatched up "The White Album". The insert with the lyrics fell from the album sleeve and Lee-Martin grabbed it, and started reading out, as loud as he could, so we all hear, the first words that he spotted:Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Not supposing for one second that George Harrison, like George Orwell before him, was actually writing (with a little help from his friend John Lennon, and Harrison's mother Louise) about the human pigs in our society, in a thinly disguised attack on greed and materialism, Lee-Martin clearly thought he was belittling Doug and The Beatles. Lee-Martin probably went to his grave at the end of 2011 believing he'd succeeded in doing just that, instead of coming across to everyone else in the Herald newsroom that day as a proper smart-arse. He was, after all, poking fun at music on an album which, as Tony Palmer put it so well in The Observer, would "surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making". Not so for some, it seems!
George Harrison and The Beatles' press officer, "Sergeant" Derek Taylor, at a Litton Industries, Japanese-made Imperial Model 80 typewriter at the 94 Baker Street, London, offices of Abbey Corps in 1968.
Below, Yoko Ono, with John Lennon, using the same typewriter.
Yes, it is coming up to 60 years since "The White Album" was released - in Britain on November 22, 1968, and in the United States three days later. In the last month there has been confirmation from Paul McCartney that there will be a golden jubilee reissue of the album, and an official announcement about the anniversary release is expected from Apple Corps-Universal Music either next month or in September.
In the meantime, here are some Beatles-with-typewriters (Triumph-Adler, Smith-Corona and Oliver Courier) images to keep the cockles of my heart warm in this blisteringly cold Canberra winter:
Below: Taken during the filming of a promotional trailer for the movie A Hard Day's Night.
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Gerda Taro and her Remington Model 1 Portable Typewriter
Gerda Taro photographed by Fred Stein
using her Remington Model 1 portable typewriter.
Groundbreaking German photojournalist Gerda Taro, crushed to death by a charging Loyalist tank outside Madrid during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, is the subject of today's Google Doodle.
The information on this 1938 GUM card was gathered from LIFE magazine's tribute to Taro, published immediately after her death. The last sentence is wrong. Capa was not Taro's husband and he found out about Taro's death through newspaper reports.
There are conflicting reports about exactly how Taro died, with many latter-day stories confusing the Loyalists (Republicans, Popular Front, International Brigade), with whom Taro sided, with Franco's Fascists (Nationalists or "rebels"'), and who was retreating from whom at Brunete at the time Taro was killed. The LIFE magazine tribute of August 16, 1937, and a US newspaper report of July 28, just two days after her death, make it abundantly clear that it was a Loyalist, not Fascist tank which hit the car Taro was riding on:
Taro and Capa photographed by Stein at the Cafe du Dome in 1935.
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The Rise of Female Political Journalism Down Under (I)
Pioneering Canberra political correspondent Gay Davidson - born Miringa Gay Yandle at Aranui, Christchurch, New Zealand, and a product of the Christchurch Press- has been inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.
The hall, a promotion from the Melbourne Press Club, was yesterday expanded to include Australian Capital Territory journalists. Apart from Davidson (above), those added include World War One correspondent and historian Charles Bean (below, at a Bar-Let portable) and former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford.
Davidson (1939-2004) was the daughter of immigrants to New Zealand: Dulverton, Somerset-born Geoffrey Allan Yandle (below) and his Cork, Ireland-born wife Abina (née Hegarty). Abina raised the baby Gay alone while Geoff served overseas with the Royal New Zealand Air Force as a pilot officer in World War Two.
Gay was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Name School, Christchurch Girls’ High School from 1951 and Canterbury University from 1957. She started her 46-year journalism career as a cadet with the Press in Christchurch in 1958 and two years later married fellow journalist Naylor Hillary (below).
In 1967 Hillary won a Commonwealth Scholarship to the Australian National University in Canberra, to work on a PhD with a study of guerrilla conflicts in Southeast Asia. Gay settled here with him, but the marriage ended and Gay joined The Canberra Times. She had contacts in the newspaper through former Christchurch colleagues Robert (below) and Jeannie Ferris, with whom Gay and Naylor at first lived.
Gay pioneered the "Gang Gang" page 3 column in The Canberra Timesand graduated to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Press Gallery, becoming the first female head of bureau for any major Australian newspaper and the first woman president of the Press Gallery. She was later leader writer and senior columnist for The Canberra Times, a stringer for The Associated Press and a pioneering screenwriter on Telstra’s Viatel, a precursor to the Internet.
During Gay’s coverage of the infamous November 11, 1975, dismissal of the Labor Government by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, Gay was photographed beside sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, trapped in a media scrum as David Smith, Secretary to the Governor-General, read aloud the dismissal proclamation. The image found its way on to a souvenir tea towel.
She is better remembered today in what is known as Old Parliament House, or the Museum of Australian Democracy, with a display or her Adler Contessa semi-portable typewriter and tributes to her liberation of the lavatories. One objection raised to her being appointed a political correspondent had been the absence of a ladies' lavatory within easy distance of TheCanberra Times office in the Press Gallery. Gay assisted a female teleprinter operator in the adjacent offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who had broken her leg, to use the men's lavatory by standing guard. Gay pressed a case for a shared toilet, saying there would be “no embarrassment” as most of the men in there would be “facing the wall”.The Parliament's Sergeant-at-Arms was informed, and the lavatory was re-designated and appointed as a uni-sex facility.
Gay’s second husband was Walkley Award and Journalist of the Year winner Ken Davidson (below), economics correspondent for The Australian from 1965-74 and economics editor of the Melbourne Age until 1993.
Gay Davidson’s elevation to the Australian Media Hall of Fame – she is only the 32nd woman inducted among 212 members, completely disproportionate given the rich history of female journalism in this country – caps anotable year in the history of female political journalism in both Australia and New Zealand.
Across the Tasman, 2018 marked a year when “Political reporting, like the country’s political management, underwent significant change.” One summary of the situation there said, “In much the same way that Jacinda Ardernhas brought a different approach to political power in New Zealand, the changing of the media guard could see a different style of political reporting emerge. The political bureaux of all our main media organisations will be led by women for the first time ever. It was once true that women held few senior editorial or management positions in the media, but those days are long gone. Being ‘pale, male and stale’ is so 2017.”
In 1930s Australia, there were just two accredited female members of the Federal Press Gallery, Lynn Denholm from The Sydney Morning Herald and Norma Jones from the Melbourne Herald (above). In 1941 the Australian Journalists’ Association decided “the admission of women members to the Press Gallery is necessary in the general interests of the association”. By 1981 there were 25 female Gallery journalists among 180 Gallery members, and by 2015 that number had climbed to almost 100, or about one third of Gallery members.
NEXT: Stella May Henderson.
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'The Typewriter' Comes to Canberra
Leroy Anderson’s famous piece “The Typewriter”, composed in 1950 and the theme for one of the late Jerry Lewis’s most watched comic efforts, will be performed in Canberra for the first time next Sunday.
The typewriter to be used will be my poppy red Adler Gabriele 25, which I refurbished earlier this year.
The typewriter will be “played” by one of Canberra’s top percussionists, Veronica Walshaw, above, principle percussionist with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Veronica will be playing with the National Capital Orchestra as a guest soloist specifically for this piece.
The NCO first tried out a “playable” typewriter which belongs to the 97-year-old father of one of the orchestra members, but found the machine wasn’t fully functional. So Steven Strach, timpanist and percussionist with the NCO, came to me for help. Steven, a forensic document examiner by day, was the man who organised my typewriter workshop at the Australasian Forensic Document Examiners’ Conference in Sydney a few years back.
My first thought for “The Typewriter” performance was the poppy red Adler, but I offered two other machines, including an Oliver 5. And after Veronica also tried an Olivetti Lettera 32, she settled on the Adler.
There will be two performances on Sunday at the Canberra Grammar School, John Lingard Hall, Red Hill. Each will feature a theatrical component to “The Typewriter” piece.
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The Wedding Typewriter - a Valentine!
My youngest son Martin is getting married tomorrow, to Laura James. The wedding will take place at Tuggeranong Homestead, where Charles Bean from 1919-25 typed the first two volumes of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18. Instead of a Corona 3, the portable which Bean first used, it seems more appropriate on this occasion that the typewriter is an Olivetti Valentine:
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