Typewriters and Teenage Potboilers

A few weeks ago, I visited an old high school friend, Ric McCauley, and his partner Steven in Cape Charles, VA, a beach town down on the Delmarva Peninsula near where the Chesapeake spills into the Atlantic. A very quiet place. Ellie, their Labrador, was kind enough to pose with an old typewriter left behind by the previous owners of the beach house, and I snapped a few photos.

My mother was a typing teacher in the days before typing became “keyboarding”. Old typewriters were common around our house. My father, an auctioneer, was always getting them at flea markets or auctions. The clunky things didn’t fetch much of a price. The first story I ever typed up was written on an old typewriter from the ‘40s or thereabouts. I never got much beyond the first page; it was to be a tale about a dark and stormy night, full of broken wine glasses, bear skin rugs and the kind of backstabbing I saw on Dallas and Dynasty. Good thing it made it into the old circular file.

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