Hanoi Typewriters: or How I Popped in on Ho Chi Minh's Baby Typing

At the top of a long list of things to do in Vietnam a few weeks ago was to track down Hồ Chí Minh's Hermes Baby portable typewriter in the Hồ Chí Minh Museum in Hanoi. That didn't take very long. And although it's ridiculously obscured in a pyramid-shaped glass display cabinet, I was still able to get a pretty good look at it. What I wasn't expecting to find was a wax figure of Uncle Ho typing on another Hermes Baby, at a desk set up just a few yards away on the same floor of the museum. This second, later model Baby has a Vietnamese keyboard, unlike the Baby that Ho actually used, which has a French keyboard. The museum has many original documents typed by Ho, and I was told by an Australian anthropologist that the accents and descenders were usually added by hand on top of or below the typed characters.

Note the care the curators have taken so that Ho's wax fingers are positioned exactly as they are in the photo below:

The Olympia Traveller we found in the Indigo store said "No touch" but the temptation just to brush off some of the surface crap was enormous. And I don't think there'd be too many takers, whatever the price. Still, it was interesting to compare the keyboard layout with Ho's later Baby.

The manufacturer's logo on the back of this seriously dilapidated model in a restaurant was vaguely familiar, but I'm still trying to work out what the brand is.

Later, on the other side of the city, in the French Quarter, we visited the Grand Hotel Metropole, where this typewriter image was at the top of a display about famous writers - Graham Greene (The Quiet American was set in Vietnam, of course) and Somerset Maugham in particular - who had stayed at and written in and about the old hotel. 

Then it was on to the Vietnamese Women's Museum, where I knew I'd find the Voss typewriter used by "The Rose of the Barbwire Forest", Bà Ngô Bá Thành, who was such a vigorous campaigner for women's rights during the Vietnam War that Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's regime had her kidnapped.

Ngô Bá Thành (centre)

We couldn't find the Olivetti Studio 42 in the traditional Vietnamese home in the Old Quarter (it had been moved), but the typewriter hunts in Hanoi were so much fun it was worth getting drenched to the skin from being caught in a sudden Monsoon thunderstorm.

And there was always plenty of coloured paper for me to type on:

Fats: You Gave Me Such a Thrill

One of my old friends, now late of this world, once told me his mother always wanted him to be a journalist, but he ended up a piano player in a New Orleans brothel anyway. Well, in the old red-light district of New Orleans at least, if not exactly in what Jeff Noble preferred to call a "knocking shop". And not before Jeff had had a very long and quite distinguished career in newspapers, one upon which he embarked as a young man in a hurry and at the cost of a chance to sprint for Australia at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. Like me nine years later, Jeff had taken up an early December end-of-college year cadetship in journalism, thus denying himself the chance to compete against the legendary Bobby Joe Morrow, the Texan flyer who was dubbed "The Fastest Nice Christian Boy in the World". It might have been an interesting clash: Jeff could never have been called "nice" and wasn't especially Christian either. 
   But while his track days may have been ended, Jeff still cherished the idea of attaining the badge of honour about the journalist and the brothel piano player, of being a Jelly Roll Morton rather than a Quentin Reynolds. He reached the point in life where he could afford to spend his annual leave in Louisiana, making Rue Bourbon his Mecca and haunting the seedier streets of "The Big Easy" and, over time, befriending the people who would secure for him the job of his dreams.
   He eventually got to settle in the north-west of the French Quarter, beautifully positioned in Gretna, twixt Basin and Dauphine streets. From there he sent me a postcard, saying how thrilled he was that Leonard Cohen had described “The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill” as the one immortal line from song. “You just see that full moon suspended. You just want to gaze at it. It stops the mind spinning,” Cohen had said, in a sound opinion he was to repeat more than 20 years later. Jeff added, "It's a line I wish I'd written myself." It was actually written when Jeff was aged just one, by Larry Stock and Al Lewis.

   From left, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Paul Shaffer, Fats Domino and Ron Wood at the Storyville concert on June 5, 1986.

   Thursday, June 5, 1986, was my second son's first birthday in Brisbane, but I was visiting Jeff in New Orleans, and we went to the Storyville Jazz Hall at 1104 Decatur Street - right in the heart the old bordello district - and chanced upon an evening when someone fell ill and Fats Domino was joined on stage by my hero, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Charles, and by the Rolling Stones' Ron Wood on guitar. Seeing such giants of popular music in the flesh - I had first heard Domino, Lewis and Charles on scratchy 78rpm shellac resin discs in the mid to late 1950s - was as wonderful as it had been unexpected. 
   Antoine Dominique Domino Jr's death in Harvey, Louisiana, on Tuesday of this week, aged 89, brought fond memories of that fantastic "Fats & Friends" concert flooding back from 31 years ago. Indeed, I hadn't thought about it much in a decade, since December 2007, when I reflected on my own then 42 years in newspapers, still convinced I'd have to be dragged out of a newsroom in a wooden box. It never came to that, happily, but it did for some of the unforgettable characters with whom I'd worked, including Jeff Noble.   

   What I remember Jeff best for was the night he commandeered the piano in the restaurant at The Metropole on Wickham Terrace in Brisbane and belted out Louis Jordan’s Let the Good Times Roll for the right royal entertainment of four-minute miler Sir Roger Bannister, among many others. We all, it seemed, loved Louis Jordan. But no more so than Fat Domino, or any of the other great "rockin' piano" players.
    The first time I saw that badge about “My mother thinks I’m a journalist but actually I’m a piano player in a brothel”, it was beside another one someone had written, one which read, “My name is Robert Messenger and I’m wearing this badge because I'm suffering from a colossal identity crisis”. I can’t recall the occasion, but I just can’t shift the image of those badges from my mind.
   If I’d known then and all that … I’d have gotten out of the crazy, family-life-killing profession of newspaper writing and become a meat packer instead. The more so if I'd ever been able to grasp that I revered the printed word far more than I did my own family. I should have taken the hint, I suppose, when I was called a "prima donna" for complaining about a change a sub-editor had made to a story I'd written at The Irish Press on Burgh Quay in Dublin in 1974. Or upon being accused, seven years on, at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, of being too "precious" about my choice of adjectives.  
   It was 10 years ago last March that my friend John Coffey, who comes from the same town as me, was sacked by The Press in Christchurch for telling his sports editor, Coen Lammers, to leave "his f...... copy alone" because "he always f...s it up".  The New Zealand Employment Relations Authority found John's dismissal had been "fair". Coffey was one of New Zealand’s leading sports writers for 44 years. Such treatment would never have been meted out to Sir Neville Cardus, who in anger over a mild rebuke about wasting words, return cabled the (then Manchester) Guardian from the Marylebone Cricket Club's tour of Australia in 1937, “I’ll send punctuation, you insert f…… words.”. We didn’t all turn out to be Carduses, sadly.
   I’m not entirely sure what my mother wanted me to be. Like Cardus’s unwed Manchester mother – a "genteel prostitute" – I fancy she desired something other than a miner or a wharfie for a son. When my mother was pregnant with me, she had her tea leaves read and was told certain things about what I’d be, none of which came within the proverbial of what I became. Let’s just say I never became the genius she was confident I'd turn into.
   I think my parents probably thought journalism was an honourable profession. I know the fathers of certain female friends made the mistake of thinking I'd be a desirable "catch". “How far will he go?” one asked my then editor in what he thought was confidence, 40 odd years ago. “How much will he earn?” Little could the editor have known what a mess it would all turn out to be. Nonetheless, that rightfully concerned father, a publican with a piano in his bar and a red light out the back, did get himself a journalist for a son-in-law. A good one, too, the offspring of a miner and a proper homemaker. One who would became editor of the New Zealand Press Association and who had the good judgement to flatten the now (as of last week) Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Winston Peters, in the press bar of the "Beehive", New Zealand's Parliament House in Wellington.
   By contrast, my life seemed in December 2007 to be more reminiscent of the experience of then Australian National Party deputy leader Nigel Scullion, whose wild night out in St Petersburg was predominantly peopled by Icelandic whalers and Canadian crab fishermen. Yet nowhere on my travels, happily, was I reduced to playing piano in a brothel. For one thing, like Bob Dylan when he was washing diner dishes by day and playing in Bobby Vee’s band The Shadows by night – as Elston Gunnn (yes, three “n”s) no less – I can’t play piano.
   But one time, covering cricket in Kalgoorlie, I organised an early evening tour of the gold mining city's notorious red-light district, Hay Street. This is a little less salubrious than Bourbon Street, yet I was joined by some notable Test cricketers, Barry Richards included. When I mooted the idea, I got so many recruits so quickly that a colleague yelled out, “Geez, Messenger, you’re better than Kerry Packer at this!” As we boarded our plane that night, it was noted some of my little band of rebels were missing. No doubt they were playing piano in one of Hay Street's many seedy brothels.
   Journalism, I must confess, had its moments. With enough years and enough travel, it was bound to. But I left the profession five years ago today, wishing I had something to show for it all. Now, with Fat Domino's death, and remembering Leonard Cohen's words about the line from Blueberry Hill, I have come to realise that my disillusionment with life back then was premature. Domino's song has since turned out to be far more prophetic than I could have possibly known:

When I found you

The moon stood still

On Blueberry Hill

And lingered until

My dream came true

Typewriter Doodles

Yet another typewriter has featured in Google's doodles. Today's doodle marked what would have been the 106th birthday of British journalist Clare Hollingworth, who was the subject of an ozTypewriter blog post almost exactly a year ago, on October 11, 2016.
Hollingworth scooped the world with news of the outbreak of World War II. On August 31, 1939, the then 27-year-old Hollingworth had been working as a journalist for less than a week when London's Daily Telegraph sent her to Poland to report on worsening tensions in Europe. Terry Chapman takes up the story of what happened in the early hours of the morning of the very next day, September 1, in his book Outbreak: 1939: The World Goes to War:

Hollingworth, who went on to report on conflicts in Palestine, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, China, Aden and Vietnam, said she would "happily go anywhere with just a toothbrush and a typewriter". But that typewriter was most usually a Hermes Baby portable, not a standard as shown in the Google doodle.

Hollingworth was born in Knighton outside Leicester, home of the Imperial typewriter, but she generally used the Hermes. 
Hollingworth died in Hong Kong on January 10 this year, aged 105.

RIP Jerry Lewis (1926-2017)

Jerry Lewis has died in Las Vegas, aged 91. He'll always be remembered for "The Typewriter" and for inventing "air typewriting". See http://oztypewriter.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/free-air-typewriter.html

60 Typewriters Must Go - for Free, and Fast!

After more than 10 years, during which time it featured on the ABC TV show The Collectors, the Australian Typewriter Museum in Canberra has been closed down and is in the process of being dismantled. There are 60 typewriters here that can be collected, if anyone wants one or more for free, but you'll have to be quick. And they'll have to be collected from the former museum. Anything left here at the end of the month (August 31, 2017) will be dumped. If you fancy anything, let me know ASAP and I'll hold on to it for you. Admittedly, they are mostly electrics and wedges, but some of the older typewriters might came in handy as spare parts machines. There's also a box of typing manuals and typewriter parts books, and a very large chest packed with toy typewriters. As for me, I'm off to a new home, which won't be entirely typewriter free. And this blog will be back to full flow shortly.

Vale Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter and director Sam Shepard died last week, aged 73. Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He died on July 27, in Midway, Kentucky. He was the author of 44 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays and memoirs. New York magazine described him as "the greatest American playwright of his generation".

Shepard died of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. This November 1939 image shows Gehrig with his wife Eleanor. 

3 Million Page Views and Counting

On one of the coldest mornings in Canberra's recorded history, this blog was running hot. At 7.28am today, its page view counter turned over to the three million mark. I haven't been all that active in blogging since March, but the page views just keep on ticking over. The blog, now almost 6½-years-old, went from two million page views to three million in 20 months, the same time it took to go from one million to two million. It contains 2300 posts and has 170 followers - comments are approaching 8800.

The Paddington Bear Typewriter

I got back on Wednesday from Bombala in south-eastern New South Wales - where the koala "bear" soft toy craze started almost 90 years ago, in 1927 - to hear the sad news that Paddington Bear creator Michael Bond had passed away in London, at the age of 91. I guess one could argue that Paddington Bear is the late 1950s British manifestation of Australia's symbolic koala soft toy, though the koala - notwithstanding the overwrought opinions of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory - is not a bear at all.

Karen Jankel, Michael Bond’s daughter, with Bond's Olympia typewriter.

Nor is the Olympia SM9 semi-portable typewriter upon which Bond is claimed to have created Paddington Bear the typewriter Bond actually used when he wrote his first Paddington Bear story, in 1954. Bond bought the Olympia in 1965, 11 years later.

Thomas Michael Bond was born in Newbury, Berkshire, on January 13, 1926. He served in Egypt with the Middlesex Regiment of the British Army in World War Two and while based outside Cairo was offered the use of a typewriter in the orderly's office. It was with this machine that Bond wrote his first short story, in a tent in 1945. He sold the story to the magazine London Opinion, for which he was was paid seven guineas, and thought he "wouldn't mind being a writer". In 1958, after producing a number of plays and short stories and while working as a BBC television cameraman, Bond's first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published. By 1965, Bond was able to give up his BBC job, buy his Olympia typewriter, and work full-time as a writer. Over the next 52 years more than 35 million Paddington books were sold in more than 40 languages, and have inspired pop bands, race horses, plays, hot air balloons, a movie and a television series.

Bond married Brenda Mary Johnson in 1950 and in Selfridges on Oxford Street on Christmas Eve three years later, on a whim, he bought her a hand-puppet bear as a Christmas tree stocking filler. Bond remembered, "It was the last one on the shelf and looked rather forlorn, I felt sorry for it. I called it Paddington because I'd always wanted to use the name; I think it has a nice, safe, West Country sound." A few weeks afterwards, in early 1954, Bond sat in the couple's one-room flat off the Portobello Road, west London, staring at his then typewriter (not the Olympia) and a blank piece of paper. "Glancing round in search of inspiration, my gaze came to rest on Paddington, who gave me a hard stare from the mantelpiece, and the muse struck, along with what was destined to become the equivalent of a literary catchphrase. Suppose a real live bear ended up at Paddington station? Where might it have sprung from, and why? If it had any sense it would find a quiet spot near the Lost Property Office and hope for the best. I knew exactly how my own parents would react if they saw it, particularly if it had a label round its neck, like a refugee in the last war. There are few things sadder in life than a refugee." Bond typed, "Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform." He later recalled, ''It was never intended as a book. I just wrote something to get my mind going. But it rather caught my fancy, so I carried on."

This was the start of Bond's series of books recounting the tales of Paddington Bear, a bear from "darkest Peru", whose Aunt Lucy sends him to England carrying a jar of marmalade. In the first book the Brown family find the bear at Paddington Station, and adopt him, naming the bear after the railway station. Bond gave Paddington the government-surplus duffel coat and bush hat that he himself wore. And around his neck he hung a luggage label bearing the words, "Please look after this bear. Thank you." Bond said, "Paddington was the first character-driven story I’d ever written and for some reason he came alive."

World Typewriter Day 2017 Project

World Typewriter Day 2017 project
- watch this space for the finished product!

Famous Australian Singer's Corona Portable For Sale

$450 ono

Contact oz.typewriter@gmail.com

The Way We Were: A Familiar Scene

Artwork by Leonard Dove (1907-1972)