The mere mention of a typewriter has stirred the far reaches of memory. 

     I didn't even have a typewriter for the longest time. And I never learned to touch-type because Typing and Virgil were taught in the same time slot at my high school, so you had to choose.

     In college, I had to borrow other people's to type papers.

    When I worked at Vogue in 1967 and '68, I had a big IBM Selectric, gray, I think. A cherry red Selectric was something to aspire to then.

     Later, when working at the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin, which everybody in Philadelphia still read in 1969 and '70, I had a metal desk the color and approximate size of an aircraft carrier, but with chrome trim like a 1950's kitchen table, and a depression in the center front from which one could cause to surface quite majestically--grip, flip, roll, ka-BOOM--an enormous manual typewriter bolted to an impressive mechanism with many moving iron parts. What a gizmo! 

     The Presto! Change-o! of its arrival out of the depths was irresistible, but typing on it took muscle; you had to hit each key hard enough to make an impression on all six of the carbons in the six-copy copy sets we typed our stories on.

    When I bought my first computer in the 1980's--a KayPro II with no modem and no hard drive--I broke three keyboards in a row before I managed to lighten my touch.