Dem Ol' Olivetti Lettera 22 Portable Typewriter Blues

I’ve been looking into the guts of Olivetti Lettera 22 and 32 portable typewriters for 54 years now. The latest one I've opened up is a 22 which belonged to the son of Australian war correspondent Tom Fairhall (see below), and is now in the loving care of Tom’s grand-daughter. I’m servicing it for her.

       Each time I take a 22 apart to work on it, I’m reminded of certain basic truths about the model. Often the first thing I notice on a grey-blue model such as this one is the taupe paper plate, which is a sure sign that the machine has at some time been serviced by an authorised Olivetti dealer, and the dealer’s offer of a repaint in grey-blue has been taken up, gleefully or otherwise. Personally, if the offer had ever been made to me, I think I'd have stuck with the original colour. In this case, however, there are other tell-tale signs the opportunity of a "new look" was accepted. Underneath the ribbon spool cover and under the main part of the mask one can still make out the original taupe colour, where the overpainting has been fairly light.

       This machine’s serial number is T7764657, which means it was made in 1962, just as Olivetti was gearing up for the introduction of the 32. You may recall my blog post of a few weeks ago about a “crossover” 22 model, painted in the grey-blue and with the 32’s squarish keys, which was made (also in Glasgow) a little after the machine I’m working on now. I’m left wondering whether, as the grey-blue 22s came out just before the switch to the 32, dealers were encouraged by Olivetti to offer the “new” standard company colour on those that were taupe.

        I suspect this particular machine wasn’t handled all that professionally by whoever serviced it at that time. Maybe the dealer gave the job to an apprentice, thinking it wasn’t too demanding. In particular, the reassembly was very poor. Taking the ribbon spool cover off wasn’t as easy as it should be. The indication, straight away, is that the grommets holding it down at the front have disintegrated with age, and the rubber has attached itself to the prongs of the cover. Sure enough, so it proved to be.

       What made things a lot worse, however, was that whoever had done the previous servicing had reassembled the machine by using the screws which hold the top section in place over the mechanics to screw in the bottom plate, and, of course, vice versa. Between the rubber “glue” and the wrong screws having been used, unscrewing the top part was unnecessarily difficult. How anyone could have thought the longer screws went in the bottom plate is beyond me.

       I’ve cleared away the dried and disintegrated old grommets. Happily I’ve still got a small stock left of the grommets Richard Polt sent me from Cincinnati some years ago, and they fitted the holes perfectly. I look forward to a proper reassembly, knowing everything will now fit together again perfectly.

       The owner mentioned a certain sluggish as the carriage moved to the left, about halfway across. I made an exhaustive search for the cause – often such a thing is related to the drawband not being properly positioned. Eventually I discovered the three hinges which hold the bottom of paper plate in place had come loose and were interfering with the carriage movement. Fixing that seemed to make a big difference in the movement. It’s interesting that on these repainted machines the dealers never went to the trouble of taking out the paper plate, yet when reassembling the typewriter they might have given some thought to at least having a look at the way the paper plate was bearing up. Seemingly not.

Eraser rubbings on the bottom plate.

       The owner’s major concern was that the ribbon didn’t reverse once it reached one end, and she thought there was a problem with the vibrator. The reason the ribbon didn’t reverse was that she believed the eyelets were there to attach the ribbon to the spool, not thinking they automatically switched the direction of the ribbon movement once they hit the slot. So she had cut off the ribbon that went beyond the eyelet.

       Here is an image of Tom Fairhall on the Kokoda Track on November 19, 1940. He was born on November 19, 1912, at Raymond Terrrace, New South Wales. After early days as a reporter with several local newspapers, such as in Port Kembla, Fairhall became editor of the Illawarra Evening Star, and then joined the Sydney Daily Telegraph, working as sub-editor, roundsman and war correspondent in South-East Asia. He was wounded by shrapnel in New Guinea during a Japanese bombing raid in 1942 and was commended by US General Douglas MacArthur for his "long and meritorious service". After the war, Fairhall worked with the Sydney Daily Mirror and The Sydney Morning Herald, from which he retired in 1978. He died on April 27, 1990, at Bellevue Hill, New South Wales, aged 77.

RIP Stirling Moss (1929-2020)

Stirling Moss at his Imperial Good Companion portable typewriter in the Bahamas, while recovering from injuries suffered in a crash at the Goodwood racing circuit in England in 1962.
Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss was a British Formula One racing driver and an inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. He won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several classes of motor racing and has been described as one of the greatest drivers never to win the Formula One World Championship. In a seven-year period between 1955 and 1961, Moss was world championship runner-up four times and third another three times. He won 16 Formula One Grands Prix and competed in as many as 62 races in a single year and drove 84 different makes of car over the course of his racing career.  Moss died at his home in Mayfair, London, yesterday, at the age of 90, after a long illness.

The Pandemic, The Simplex Typewriter, and The Little Boy Writer

These past few fraught weeks have been a reminder of the dreadful fate of Raymond E. Koessler, whose typewriter I treasure above all others I own. Raymond was given this Simplex Special No 1 for Christmas in 1913, when he was nine. He wrote many letters with it, as well as little stories, the originals of which I still have safely stored in the Simplex’s box.

Raymond died, aged 14, in 1918, a victim of the pandemic called the “Spanish flu” (Influenza A virus subtype H1N1), which actually had nothing to with Spain, but quite conceivably had the same origins as Coronavirus. Raymond’s typewriter was the subject of my very first post on this blog, more than nine years ago, and this present-day nightmare has me thinking about him yet again.

Raymond is buried at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Cemetery, Cashton, Monroe County, Wisconsin.

We need to be reminded that while the 1918 pandemic spread rapidly, killing 25 million people in just the first six months, it was during its second wave, from October through to December 1918, that the highest death rates were recorded. The immune systems of people of all ages, but particularly young adults, overreacted to the virus - the so-called “cytokine storm”.

Headlines from the La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press, September-December 1918

A majority of deaths were high among otherwise healthy young adults, aged between 19 and 42. All told, between January 1918 and December 1920, the pandemic infected 500 million people – about a quarter of the world's population at the time. The global death toll is estimated to have been up to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million (more than 675,000 Americans had died by the beginning of 1918, 8459 of them in Wisconsin alone).

The pandemic reached Wisconsin in September 1918. In Monroe County a thousand people contracted the flu. From August 1918 to April, 1919 there were 136 deaths in the county from influenza and pneumonia, or 3.8 deaths for every 1000 people. Raymond had previously suffered from a bout of pneumonia in 1915.

        Raymond’s Simplex was bought by his uncle in La Crosse, 24 miles west of Cashton, at Doerflinger's Department Store, on the corner of 4th and Main. 

The La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press, Christmas 1912

The Hills Were Alive With the Sound of Typewriters

Marta Feuchtwanger (née Löffler; 1891-1987), widow of Lion Feuchtwanger, photographed with a Smith-Corona portable typewriter in 1985, in the library at Villa Aurora, at 520 Paseo Miramar, in the Pacific Palisades north of Los Angeles, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the ocean. The Feuchtwangers settled here at the start of 1943.The Villa was built in 1927-28 and was a 20-room house with a massive garden that gave direct access to the beach. Marta was captivated by the view from the garden over the Bay of Santa Monica.

The thought "the hills were alive with the sound of typewriters" came to me, naturally, when I read Alex Ross’s article under the banner “Onward and Upward with the Arts” in the March 9 edition of The New Yorker. The article, titled “Exodus: The Haunted Idyll of Exiled German Novelists in Wartime Los Angeles” appears online as “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writersin Exile: Wartime émigrés in LA felt an excruciating dissonance between theircircumstances and the horrors unfolding in Europe.”

Bertolt Brecht with his Erika portable.

Ross opened thus: “You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day.” He went on to list the writers: “Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora [at 520 Paseo Miramar], a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard.

Vicki Baum with her Mignon.

“Vicki Baum, whose novel Grand Hotel brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next door to the conductor Bruno Walter.

Elizabeth Hauptmann at her Corona 3 portable, with  Brecht.

“Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of The Threepenny Opera, lived in Mandeville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s ranch. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno rented a duplex apartment on Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write the post-Marxist jeremiad Dialectic of Enlightenment. At a suitably lofty remove, on San Remo Drive, was Thomas Mann, Heinrich’s brother, the august author of The Magic Mountain.

The New Yorker illustration by Cristiana Couceiro, showing, clockwise from top: Franz Werfel, Salka Viertel, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann.Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. 

“In the nineteen-forties, the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent.”

Cyd Charisse (at an Olympia portable), Peter Lorre, Jules Munshin, and Joseph Buloff in Silk Stockings (1957).

What Is It About Typewriters and Boxing? (Part 1)

“There’s blood on my typewriter.”

Psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers (1927-2013) in an interview with Rosemary Jones of the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, April 11, 1993.

Typing his “Sports Splutterings” column on a Woodstock in Cleveland, Ohio, Walter Lawrence Johns (1911-2002), long-serving sports editor for the Central Press Association, a division of King Features Syndicate, declared her the “new flyweight boxing champion of the TV world”. She’d “kayoed a flock of heavyweight questions” in a long count bout that matched Tunney versus Dempsey at Soldier Field, Chicago in 1927, wrote Johns. Blonde psychologist Joyce Diane Bauer Brothers, a 5ft tall, 101-pound, 28-year-old mother had, in a sustained campaign of 20 months in the mid-1950s, seen off all other contenders and her challengers to win a purse that would equate today to $1.24 million. The challengers included former world light-heavyweight champion Tommy Loughran, a man who’d beaten Jack Sharkey, Max Baer and James J. Braddock, all world heavyweight champions.

Aside from promotional photographs to celebrate her wins, Joyce Brothers never donned a pair of gloves. On December 6, 1955, just turned 28, Joyce Brothers became only the second person, and the only woman ever, to win CBS’s The $64,000 Question by answering seven questions on the TV show. Brothers won another $4000 on June 24, 1956, by beating a challenger to her title. On October 27, 1957, Brothers repeated her 1955 effort by winning the $64,000 Challenge, for a grand total of $132,000. Her subject each time? The history of boxing, ancient and modern. 

Joyce Brothers and Bobo Olson at the weigh-in

Brothers’ expertise reaped other rewards. Three nights after winning her first quiz jackpot, she covered the world middleweight title fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carl “Bobo” Olson at the Chicago Stadium for the United Press wire service (the story she typed at ringside revealed Stanley Ketchel was her favourite fighter, “although he was considerably before my time”). Hers is possibly the only title fight report byline which started with “By Dr …” and the words “I couldn’t have been more wrong” (she had tipped Olson to win). On March 25, 1958, Brothers also became the first woman to commentate on a world title fight on television, when she provided between-rounds “colour” for CBS during the Robinson-Carmen Basilio middleweight bout at the Chicago Stadium.

The Newspaper Enterprise Association wire service, in a nod to Damon Runyon, quoted Mushky Magee of the International Boxing Club as saying, “This gal has to be 8 to 5 – that’s in man-to-man betting – to go all the way. Couldja imagine her and all she got stuck in her cropper talking about percentages with Al Weill [former matchmaker at Madison Square Garden]? She might wind up conning him out of the whole building.” Sammy Richman added, “We all wanna know who’s gonna be the dame’s manager.”

“Truly, the typewriter of the heavyweights has been busy these days.”

New York newspaper heralding the coming of Jack Johnson, 1906

For six solid days there’d been talk of nothing but typewriters (with the odd old map thrown in). Then it came time for me to leave Cincinnati, and Richard Polt drove me to the Union Terminal. As we passed through Over-the-Rhine and across the West End, I noticed we were on Ezzard Charles Drive. I was as surprised to see the Cincinnati Cobra thus honoured (he was Atlantan by birth, a Buckeye by early adoption) as Richard was than I knew of him. But then the conversation quickly got back on track, because there’s a 1951 Press photo out there of Ezzard Charles sitting, behind an L.C. Smith standard typewriter, at a newspaper sports desk.

Herbert Slade and John L. Sullivan

        Once inside the Union Terminal I soon found a wonderful picture card of the Galveston Giant himself, John Arthur Johnson. But was genial Jack really the first non-white to fight for the world heavyweight championship? Oh, no. That honour belongs to the Māori Herbert Augustus Slade (1851-1913), who faced the Boston Strong Boy John L. Sullivan before 12,000 people at the Madison Square Garden on August 6, 1883, five months after Slade had given exhibitions in Cincinnati with Jem Mace. The Cincinnati Enquirer said of the Sullivan fight, “It is over, and again the laurels of victory encircle the brows of the champion. Sullivan, our pugilistic Alexander, having conquered all who dared face him from New or Old Worlds, adds the antipodean scalp to his belt, and can now rightfully claim to be the champion of the world.”

        John L. Sullivan’s quick-fire bare-fisted jabbing on white and coloured faces so impressed Kansas writer Joshua Short that in 1891, a year before Sullivan relinquished the world title to Gentleman Jim Corbett, with gloves and under Marquis of Queensbury rules in New Orleans, Short conjured a machine called the “John L. Sullivan Automatic Typewriter” for a story titled “A Typewriter Romance” in the Salina Vade Mecum. A “beautiful and winsom damsel” called Rosalinda Matilda Fortier was the agent for the Sullivan Automatic in Short’s little homily. A half-tone illustration of the typewriter appeared on the lower left hand corner of the wedding cards when Rosa married W. Wolsey Wycliffe. Sadly, the John L. Sullivan typewriter never existed outside of Short’s fertile imagination. 

           A latter-day Joshua Short was Russell Baker (above), who died, aged 93, on January 21 last year. Baker was a columnist for The New York Times. In 1977 he wrote a piece satirising a Manhattan party set-to between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, in which Baker matched Henry James (“working out on the big typewriter”) with John L. Sullivan (“hanging around James’s typewriter urging the great belletrist to discuss existentialism …”).

“No other subject is, for the writer, so intensely personal as boxing. To write about boxing is to write about oneself - however elliptically, and unintentionally.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938?-) in her preface to On Boxing, 1987, written with a Remington manual portable typewriter, or was it a Smith-Corona by then?)

        What is it about typewriters and boxing? (And Joyces who are boxing fanatics?) Richard Polt, of course, spent his formative years in Oakland, California, a place closely associated with at least two famous typewriter-wielding boxing writers. Well, one in particular: Jack London. The other was the man who gave the English language the word “hype”, Herbert Anthony Aloysius “Hype” Igoe (1877-1945), who came from Santa Cruz but spent time in Oakland. Igoe was considered by no less an authority than Damon Runyon as “probably the best informed writer on boxing who ever lived”.          

The other Oaklander, London, grew up in the East Bay area but didn’t write a lot about boxing. Yet by chance he came to cover arguably the most significant bout in history, the one in Sydney on Boxing Day 1908 when Jack Johnson became the first African-American world heavyweight champion. London boasted in his fight story in The New York Herald, “I often put on the gloves myself, and, take my word for it, I am really delightfully clever when my opponent is a couple of stone lighter than I am, half a foot or so shorter, and about half as strong. On such occasion I can show what I’ve got in me, and I can smile all the time, scintillate brilliant repartee and dazzling persiflage, and in the clinches talk over the political situation and the Broken Hill [Australian mining] troubles with the audience.”

“My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) in an interview with Josephine Herbst, Key West, Florida, 1930.

        Following in the shuffles of Jack London, many other writers have put aside their typewriters and pulled on the gloves, most notably Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabakov, Norman Mailer and George Plimpton (the last two sat ringside together for the greatest bout ever, when Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974).

In Paris in July 1922 Hemingway cajoled Ezra Pound into teaching Hemingway to write in exchange for Hemingway teaching Pound to box. Hemingway and his first wife Hadley also sparred with Gertrude Stein, until things got a bit ugly and Stein drew blood. Pound and Hemingway were part of Stein’s The Crowd, which jollied together at The Jockey. Another member was Mina Loy, whose Swiss-born husband, Fabian Avenarius Lloyd (better known as Arthur Cravan), was a nephew of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, whose lover, Lord Arthur Douglas, was the son of the aforesaid Marquess of Queensberry, of boxing rules fame. Whether this dubious connection emboldened said Lloyd-Cravan is not known, but in the most brazen act yet of writer-crazily-takes-on-fighter, the begloved poet Cravan entered a bullring in Barcelona and faced none other than the mighty Jack Johnson. Johnson was, for the time being, cash-strapped and exiled in Barcelona, and needed funds to hire two American jazz bands for the café he was running. Cravan, described as a prototype for the Dada movement, was left gaga after six rounds of Johnson gesticulating rather than jabbing.

By comparison, Plimpton did actually go through the motions of boxing. In January 1959 Plimpton survived three rounds of “sparring” with the immortal Archie Moore in Stillman’s Gym in Manhattan for a Sports Illustrated story. There’s an hilarious blow-by-blow description by Plimpton of the day Moore “kilt some guy” at Stillman’s at The Sweet Science. Did Plimpton offer himself up for further humiliation, at the hands of “pound for pound, the greatest fighter ever”? It seems like half a million online experts (including Wikipedia) will have us think so, and that Plimpton also sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson – there’s even a photo which purports to show a bloodied Plimpton with a laughing Robinson. The truth is Moore felt he was too out of shape to play his 1959 self in the 1968 film of Plimpton’s 1966 book Paper Lion, so the script was changed and Robinson, at age 48, stepped in and sparred with Alan Alda, who was acting the role of Plimpton. Robinson was paid $1500 for a day’s light work.

        Plimpton had been inspired to face Moore after being told by America’s Cup yachtsman Mike Vanderbilt in Palm Beach in 1958 about another writer who’d challenged a champion boxer. And without a doubt, the funniest typewriter pounder versus punchbag pounder mismatch was when Paul Gallico took on Jack Dempsey while Dempsey was in Saratoga’s White Sulphur Springs preparing to defend his world title against Argentine’s Wild Bull of the Pampas, Luis Ángel Firpo, in September 1923. No so funny for Gallico, perhaps, but side-splitting for all those who saw Gallico, down on all fours, trying to hang on to the canvas and stop the ring from spinning backwards and forwards. Gallico, sent to Dempsey’s den by the New York Daily News, looked the part – he was 6ft 3, 190lb and had stroked the varsity rowing crew. But he had never boxed. Hype Igoe warned him Dempsey never took it easy on anyone, and the “bout” lasted 1min 37sec, most of it spent with Dempsey holding a groggy Gallico up and dancing. Gallico wrote, “I was assisted from the enclosure and taken some place else to lie down until my addled wits collected themselves sufficiently for me to get to my typewriter. I had a splitting headache and was grateful to be alive.”

Dempsey might have made a dizzied mess of Gallico, but typewriters would, on behalf of writers, soon have their revenge.

                      TO BE CONTINUED