As part
of International Typewriter Appreciation
Month, I’m telling a few tales about the way in which sports writers greatly
appreciated their portable typewriters on their international travels in the
60s and 70s.
HAVE TYPEWRITER,
WILL TRAVEL
Part Two
The Olivetti
on the Nile
Richard D. Erickson only ever used a typewriter to
type his rowing schedules. There was never room nor need for one on his coach’s
launch. As a sideline to coaching the oarsmen and women of the University of
Washington, Dick Erickson sometimes filed rowing reports to a Seattle radio
station. But these were mere sound bites, if very loud ones. They were
off-the-cuff comments, never written. The same applied when, later in life,
Erickson took up cable TV
commentating for the spring Windermere Cup opening day races on the Montlake
Cut on the Lake Washington Ship Canal. Erickson, never known to restrain his
enthusiasm, didn’t feel a need to write down what he was about to say: he was
an unabashed rowing fan without a typewriter, and he knew his sport.
Throughout my long career in sports writing, I was unashamedly
the proverbial “fan with a
typewriter”. Hardly surprising, since whatever skill I had in banging out
stories on my Olivetti Lettera 32, it took me across the globe many times and got
me ringside seats at the peak events of all the sports I loved most. I covered
two Olympic Games, three Commonwealth Games, more than 100 rugby Test
matches – from Murrayfield in Edinburgh to Carisbrook in Dunedin – and World
Cups in both codes, world track and field, swimming and rowing championships,
Royal Henley, Ashes Test cricket, Wimbledon and the Australian Open tennis, British
Open golf and Admiral’s Cup yachting. Not bad for a kid from the boondocks of
New Zealand. And, in most cases, not bad for the same little Olivetti.
I once even plonked the Lettera 32 beside Maury
Wills at Candlestick Park, where Wills boasted to me about being in the
Guinness Book of Records for circling the bases in 13.4 seconds in 1953. He and I exchanged observations about “a
pitcher’s game’ and “a bowler’s wicket”.
One offers a great deal more excitement than the other, but I won’t hint
at which.
Maury Wills on the cover of SI
Bowler’s wicket or otherwise, I always felt a keen
sense of excitement as I sat at my Olivetti in the Press boxes of the sports
world. The constant challenges of writing and filing copy were a very large
part of that. Facilities afforded the Press at major sporting events from the
late 20th century are light years ahead of those journalists in the 1960s and
70s had to endure. More importantly, back then we could not have envisaged the
technology, such as mobile phones and laptops with modems, which later became available
to transmit copy. But I wouldn’t trade my experiences from the
earlier period for one jot of the dream ride that sports writers get today.
Nor would I contemplate swapping my memorable
misadventures in Egypt during a steamy Christmas 1978 for the air-conditioned
comfort of a modern press room.
In Part One of this series, I mentioned
the special difficulties which were presented in covering rowing. I love
rowing, but by its very nature, in the days when there were few of the hugely
expensive man-made courses around, rowing was not a Press-friendly sport.
Rowers headed for the best and longest (standard length, 2000 metres) stretches
of relatively still water that they could find, often reservoirs or lakes;
rivers with any sort of flow in them were a last resort. Hence, there were
usually no built-up areas within sight, so no telephone lines. In such
circumstances, being armed with a portable typewriter became all the more
critical.
Dick Erickson
A memorable character I often encountered on the
international rowing circuit was Erickson, one of those people for whom
Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, let alone Christopher Latham Sholes’, had
little purpose. Erickson’s booming voice (most necessary for a rowing coach)
could cross the Atlantic in a single bound, and I used to imagine the Seattle radio
station simply hanging a microphone out of its distant window. Invariably, Erickson’s
tone also conveyed a grandiose message.
One balmy Friday evening at Royal Henley, a useful
Irish police crew, the Garda
Síochána na hÉireann eight, beat Harvard University to advance to a semi-final
clash with Erickson’s renowned Huskies in the Grand Challenge Cup, the most
prestigious event. Erickson somehow managed to squeeze
his considerable frame into a British Telecom booth outside the Press Room and knocked
the jowls of Fleet Street journalists from the nearby bar slide by hollering
down the line, “Tomorrow we meet the Irish cops, and man can those guys move? But
we’re gunna make ’em look like flatfoots!” Erickson’s eight Big Foots did beat
the Garda, but not by much. Under Mike Hess’s captaincy, Washington went on to
take the title too.
Yet Erickson was capable of the classic
understatement. When he took Washington’s Huskies back for their fourth
consecutive visit to Egypt, for the 11th Nile International Rowing
festival in 1980, Erickson calmly observed, “This is one of the most unusual
athletic contests I’ve ever attended.”
The Huskies at Luxor
I had had the pleasure of the company of Erickson
during Washington’s second visit to Egypt, in 1978, and I can only vouch for this
assessment. Also invited to the “Festival of Oars” on the Nile was an Irish
Universities team, and I quite happily gave up a Christmas at home in snowy
Dublin to cover the trip, and spend a largely uncelebrated Yuletide under the
clear blue skies of Luxor and the smoggy ones of Cairo. From experience in
working in North Africa, I knew my Olivetti would be my most vital piece of
luggage.
Washington’s rowing program budget was apparently
large enough for the US representatives to ship to Egypt a carbonfibre shell
and oars. The Americans, unlike the Irish, were aware of what lay ahead of them.
When the bus from Luxor Airport approached the Savoy Hotel, one of the Huskies
warned, “What you see if just a façade.” He was dead right. Accommodation was a line of small, basic shacks beyond the almost imposing front. The Americans
also knew to take with them massive jars of peanut butter. As for us, it was a
case of Irish incompetence meets Egyptian ineptitude. We were simply told to
assemble at Orly Airport, by whatever means available – boat, train, plane or
hovercraft. Preparation? Zip and zero. Equipment? None, bar just the one
portable typewriter.
Instruction from the Egyptian Tourism Ministry was,
“Once at Orly, we will look after everything else.” If this had turned out to
be even half true, the trip would have held little of the fascination it
did. We were embarking on a 10-day reign
of utter confusion. But it was a confusion of fun.
The course in Cairo
The highlight was the opening ceremony at Luxor
Temple, followed by a parade through the town’s chanting crowds to the start
line. One eights race was held in Luxor, two days before Christmas, and a
two-program started in Cairo on Boxing Day. Washington, winning in Luxor, had
never rowed so fast. There was a 35-metres a minute flow in the Nile, and it
took the Huskies just a tick over six minutes to cover the two miles. The Irish
paddled home 22 seconds in arrears. They had excuses. “The boat they lent us
came out of the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities,” complained the stroke, Gerry
Macken. “It was last used in the year 3002 BC.” Macken decided to fix the
well-seized seat slides by stealing into the Washington camp late one night,
grabbing a few fistfuls of peanut butter and lubricating the rails.
On the flight back to Cairo, Erickson handed each
member of his crew 10 Egypt-Air postcards and instructed the oarsmen to write
to sophomores back home, encouraging them to work hard to make the team for
Egypt the following year. Such dedication to a fairly pointless cause!
In Cairo we did stay in a grand hotel, Shepheard’s,
and on Christmas Day, with nothing else happening, we drank the place dry of
Guinness Foreign Extra Stout. On a narrow stretch of the Nile, Domnhall
McAuley, a sculler from Queen’s University, Belfast, narrowly lost to
Abdel Aziz Mohammad and a dead, bloated donkey, which floated, feet up, across
the finish line a length ahead of Domnhall. But McAuley got no medal. Indeed, I
was the only Irish medal-winner: a silver, for turning up to cover the
festival!
I deserved it too. Each day I was in Egypt, I had dutifully
written a story on my Olivetti, taken it to the hotel’s reception, and left instructions
that it be wired to Dublin.
The Huskies at Giza, outside Cairo
We flew back to Paris on an otherwise empty
Egypt-Air jumbo jet, missed our connection to London, took a bus to Gare du Nord, a crowded train
to Dunkirk, a rough ferry crossing to Dover, a train to London, and finally got
a flight home to Dublin. In the process I had mislaid my passport and wallet,
but retraced my steps and found them on a bus seat at Orly. It was only at
Dublin Airport that I was “mugged”. Mr Macken, the mischievous stroke, informed
me that his crew had commandeered my Olivetti from the carousel, and unless I
handed over my silver medal for safe keeping in Trinity College’s archives (“We
have to have something to show for this trip,” he explained, quite reasonably),
I shouldn’t expect to ever see it again. The medal remains at Trinity College
to this day, not too far distant from John Millington Synge's Blickensderfer 5.
I reached home, typewriter restored, exhausted,
dirt-encrusted and feeling thoroughly enriched by my Egyptian experience. My editor
called. Not one word of what I’d written on the Olivetti in Luxor or Cairo had
reached Dublin. “Never mind,” said Tim Pat Coogan. “I hope you had a lovely
break from your typewriter over Christmas.” Some break!
*Richard
Davis Erickson, born in Arlington on December 29, 1935, died at Marysville on
July 26, 2001, aged 65.
Tomorrow: Round the World on a Typewriter
What a pleasant surprise to read about this storied character on a blog from so far away! I graduated from UW in 2009 and saw my first Windermere cup races just last Spring!
ReplyDeleteBob,
ReplyDeleteGreat to see you are alive and well.
Hard to believe its 43 years since our visit to Egypt.
I was some trip, especially for a group of 'wet-behind-the-ears' Irish students not familiar with foreign travel. Our biggest achievement was winning the Trials held on the Newry Ship Canal that previous November. Against all the odds we managed to beat Queen's University, Belfast and University College Galway to earn the right to represent Ireland at the so called Festival of Oars in Egypt. Once we landed in Cairo, it was pretty obvious to us that some of the participants took the whole exercise a lot more serious than we did, that's not to say we didn't try hard when we were on the water.
Our background was very different from that of the US University structure: who had professional coaches with large budgets and scholarships. We were complete amatures, with volunteer coaches and limited resources. However, it did not stop us from having a wonderful time, making new friends and enjoying the Egyptian experience. I do recall wandering around Luxor with yourself seeking out an off-license called the Karnak Wine Store so we could host a party in our hotel. it was during that trip we became great friends with the Leander Crew who later went on to win the Thames Cup in Henley the following year. One of the crew members was Andy Holmes, who later went on to win multiple Olympic medals and who sadly passed away in recent years.
If my memory serves me right you were replaced by Derek Jones as rowing reporter in the Irish Times. He and I became great friends and stories about you were legendry, especially from the Rugby community.
I could write here all day about Egypt, but unfortunately I have to earn a living.
Please contact me at gerrymacken57@gmail.com so we can continue this discussion and I'll try and dig out some old photographs.
Bye the way I think you took some literary license with regards to my actions and comments during that fateful trip in 1988.
Regards
Gerry
Hi Bob,
ReplyDeleteJust checking if you received my earlier comments re Egypt 1988.
Regards
Gerry Macken
Opps,
ReplyDeleteSorry I meant 1978.
Regards
Gerry