A Tribute to Peter Tytell, Son of The Typewriter Man

Peter at Riverdale Country School, New York, in 1963, aged 18

New York typewriter forensics expert Peter Van Tytell passed away at his home in Manhattan on August 11, two days before his 75th birthday*. His death came 10 months after Peter and his now widow Tikya had won in the Supreme Court of New York the right to move forward with their case over Peter’s malignant mesothelioma, against the Mole-Richardson Company. Mesothelioma is a rare and fatal type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.

Peter contracted the disease while working at various locations for the New York City Parks Department as an electrician-stagehand hanging lighting during the summer of 1969. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma on February 16, 2017. MRC cables insulated with asbestos were part of New York City festival lighting projects, such as street events and block parties. The Times Square Stage Lighting Company was a third-party defendant in the court case. The Tytells began action on April 21, 2017, to recover for damages resulting from Peter’s exposure to asbestos.

Apart from setting up stages and lighting for music festivals in New York City, Peter worked as a trucker and carpenter and in the 1960s lived in San Francisco, working as a roadie for the Steve Miller Band, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. Peter was present when the Dead first played with two drummers.

Martin Tytell

Peter ran his late father Martin’s Tytell Typewriter and Questioned Document Company in a second-floor store at 116 Fulton Street, NYC, to July 31, 2001, after Martin had retired at the age of 87 at the end of 2000. Martin, known as “Mr Typewriter” died on September 11, 2008. His wife Pearl is still alive at the age of 102! The company they founded together in 1938 catalogued two million typefaces in 145 languages, from Gaelic to Sanscrit. Peter continued the document investigation service started by his mother.  

One of Peter’s success stories concerned a set of documents submitted by the Qatar Government to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a dispute with Bahrain over possession of islands in a stretch of oil-bearing ocean. He was called in as an expert and was able to establish that the “Royal Seal” on the “century-old” papers dated back only to 1956. Peter had been browsing a gift shop at The Hague when noticed that a collection of floral-motif Latin seals from the 1980s bore a close resemblance to the seals used on the Qatar documents. Further examination showed that the newer seals had been placed on reused documents from the Ottoman Empire to create the forgeries. “These findings have led to the determination that the suspect documents bearing these seals could not have been prepared on or about their purported dates,” he wrote in his report. Qatar withdrew the documents in 1998. And in 2001 the court ruled that the Hawar Islands, the largest of those in dispute, would stay with Bahrain, and rejected Qatar’s claim of sovereignty. The court awarded Qatar a smaller island region.

Peter in 2001

Peter also testified for the prosecution to help gain a conviction in a case that involved documents said to connect President John F. Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe and mobster Sam Giancana. A former paralegal at a New York law firm, Lawrence X. Cusack III, had defrauded $7 million from investors in a scheme to sell the fake documents. Peter told the court that the typewriter used to create the documents did not exist at the time they were supposed to have been written. Cusack was found guilty in 1999 and received a nine-year sentence.

New York Magazine, January 20, 1986

Peter’s expertise was used in the investigation of the Killian documents controversy, which involved six documents critical of President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard and the use of four of these documents, presented as authentic, in a 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004. The programme, aired during Bush’s re-election campaign, reported that Bush had received special treatment in the early 1970s, and used memorandums said to be from the files of Bush’s squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, to make its case. After the documents’ authenticity came into question, CBS convened an independent panel to investigate why the segment had been produced and aired so hastily, and asked Peter to examine the four documents. Peter told the panel the superscript “th” in the documents could not have been made by the Olympia manual typewriter used in the early 70s. The “th” of the Olympia was underlined and did not rise above the adjacent characters, unlike the “th” in the documents featured in the 60 Minutes segment. That, plus the proportional spacing and a typeface that closely resembled Times New Roman in Microsoft Word, led him to conclude that the documents were probably created on a computer unavailable in the early 1970s. Soon after the panel delivered its findings in early 2005, CBS fired a producer and three executives for their role in the segment.

In 2011 Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, asked Peter to examine a two-page work-for-hire contract that Paul Ceglia, a wood-pellets salesman, said entitled him to a substantial stake in the social media giant, which he sought in a federal lawsuit. Peter demonstrated that the contract showed unusual differences between the typefaces and spacing from one page to the other, suggesting that they had been prepared at different times. He also concluded that attempts had been made to age the pages artificially. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014 on the grounds that the contract was a forgery.

The inspiration: Michigan-born Albert Sherman Osborn (1858-1946) is considered the father of the science of questioned document examination in North America. His seminal book Questioned Documents was first published in 1910 and later heavily revised as a second edition in 1929.

This case was cited in 2017 when Peter was awarded the Albert S. Osborn Award of Excellence, which honours members of the  American Society of Questioned Document Examiners who have “contributed above what is expected of a society member.” The society said Peter “first darkened a courtroom door in 1971, and has testified many times ever since, both in US and international courts. He has testified in notable cases in Hong Kong, international tribunals, and has been involved in other high-profile cases such as Ceglia versus Zuckerberg. He has been retained by prosecutors, defence, plaintiff, and civil defence attorneys in thousands of cases. [Peter] is the last word in document examination for any cases involving typewriters or typewritten documents. He has always given his time and expertise to anyone who asks. He has maintained reference collections that are second to none.”

Peter in 2010

Those who have asked include me, in the case of a Corona 3 portable I bought on eBay from a New York deceased estate auction. I remain indebted to Peter for his help in that memorable matter. A truly wonderful typewriter man has left us. We are so much better for having known him, if only through emails and the like, and much the poorer for his passing. Vale Peter, RIP.

*I thank Bill MacLane of Palm Coast, Florida or alerting me to Peter’s death.

Not So Tough: Why Journalism is Dying

Yesterday someone posted one of the later versions of Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter on a New Zealand journalists’ Facebook group. It was addressed to “those who think that better ‘music’ was made on typewriters”. A young chap who was studying journalism in Manukau in Auckland while I was in my 25th year in the trade, commented:

2020: "What's a typewriter?"

2040: "What's a mobile?" [cell phone]

I felt like adding:

2021: “What’s journalism?”

Actually, good, old-style journalism is already a distant memory, as my earlier post - Jim Mulvaney's tribute to Peter Hamill - spells out. And in the wake of Hamill's death, The New Yorker last week ran an article by Tom Robbins* titled "As Newsrooms Close Across the Country, Remembering Why They Matter".

Mortimer Matz, a New York press agent who turned 96 this summer, is one of the few people who remember what it was like to work at the Daily News in its glory days. Matz started at the News as a copyboy in 1949. When the photo assignment editor was called up to fight in Korea, Matz was promoted to take his place. Back then, the newspaper occupied several floors in an Art Deco skyscraper on East 42nd Street. A bas-relief carving in the building’s granite street wall depicts a crowd of New Yorkers beneath the words “He Made So Many of Them”. The quote is attributed to Lincoln, who allegedly said, “God must love common people - he made so many of them,” although, like not a few stories in the paper, the sentiment was more important than the facts.

In 1950, the paper’s circulation was more than two million on weekdays and more than four million on Sundays. The News had two airplanes and a fleet of “radio cars” that were constantly roaming the streets of the city, ferrying photographers and reporters. Matz sat beside other editors at the city desk, a long table lined with telephones and cluttered with papers. Behind them were clattering ticker machines for the wire services - the Associated Press and United Press - which churned out a steady ribbon of news copy. Matz’s job was to dispatch photographers to scenes of crime, disaster and sporting events. In July 1956, when the Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Nantucket, taking 51 lives with it, Matz stayed at his slot for 48 hours, directing a score of photographers who flew to the island in one of the newspaper’s airplanes. “We would’ve sent both planes, but one of the pilots was sick,” he said.

Even on a normal day, with no big stories breaking, the room filled with a haze of cigarette smoke and the sounds of people punching typewriter keys and shouting into telephones. “The place crackled,” Matz said. “The whole atmosphere - it was crowded, excited, and noisy.”

Newsrooms are quieter these days, thanks to computers and vastly shrunken staffs. When I went to work at the News in 1988, the only evidence of the planes was a nice watercolor of one aircraft that hung on the newsroom wall, along with other mementos from the old days. The only people using typewriters were the “inquiring photographer”, who turned out a daily column of person-in-the-street interviews and photos, and the librarians, who typed names and headlines on thick manila sleeves that held the clippings filed away in the “morgue”, a vast forest of file cabinets holding the paper’s archives.

The News has moved twice since then, first to a cavernous and soulless office building on West 33rd Street and 10th Avenue, and then, in 2010, to Four New York Plaza, in lower Manhattan near the Battery. When Covid-19 struck this spring, the News, like so many businesses, allowed its staff to work remotely. This week, the News’ owner, Tribune Publishing, announced that, although it intends to continue publishing “for years to come”, it has decided to close the News office permanently, “as we evaluate our space needs”. The announcement that the Daily News will no longer have a newsroom came as a double whammy for many veterans of the paper, who are still mourning the death of Pete Hamill, the legendary writer and columnist who was briefly the editor of the paper, in 1997, and who died on August 5.

Newsrooms, of course, are at bottom a workplace, a central location where tasks of the day are organized and carried out. But at the Daily News and many other publications, “the newsroom was really this sort of joyous place, filled with oddballs and brilliant people,” said JoAnne Wasserman, who joined the staff as a reporter in 1986 and was laid off in 2013, amid one of many rounds of staff reductions. “You’d have these conversations on the fly with colleagues about an idea,” she said, “and the idea would grow into a great story. You’d get to see the expressions on people’s faces.”

Eavesdropping on conversations and interviews also aided the learning curve. “You’d listen to people talking to cops and sources; it was how you learned,” she said. “I feel bad for young reporters who have to work solitary. I learned so much from watching and listening.”

There is much concern that closing the newsroom is a preliminary step in shutting the paper itself. But the News has survived tough scrapes before. In 1992, the paper filed for bankruptcy after the death of then owner Robert Maxwell, a British publishing magnate who either jumped or fell from his yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands, leaving behind a mountain of debt. At the News, a few of us, led by the veteran political reporter Frank Lombardi, paid to produce hundreds of campaign-style buttons reading “Daily News: Too Tough to Die.” When Bill Clinton, then running for President, came by the newsroom for an interview with the editorial board, Lombardi pinned one on the delighted candidate’s lapel. The Cardinal John O’Connor got one as well when he visited. When John Gotti was on trial in a Brooklyn federal court, the crime reporters Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci offered one to Gotti’s brother, Peter. He promptly pinned it to his shirt. “Too tough to die,” Peter said. “I like that.”

*Tom Robbins, an investigative journalist in residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a contributing writer at the Marshall Project, has been a columnist and staff writer at the Village Voice, the Daily News and the Observer.

Pete Hamill, A Reporter’s Editor

William Peter Hamill Jr, Brooklyn-born of Northern Irish Catholic parents, was a journalist, novelist, essayist and editor. Suffering from heart and kidney failure, he died on August 5 at the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, aged 85. Pete Hamill was described as “the author of columns that sought to capture the particular flavors of New York City's politics and sports and the particular pathos of its crime.” He was a columnist and editor for the New York Post and The New York Daily News.  Below is a tribute paid to him by his former colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim Mulvaney*:

“Let’s get outta here,” Pete Hamill said as the 11 o’clock Daily News editors’ meeting ended on a March Monday in 1997.  It was my first day as Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations, a position Pete created as part of his strategy to try to save the dying newspaper.

He grabbed a jacket from his office, a fishbowl at the top of the newsroom, and slalomed through the maze of desks, scattering praise and greeting reporters by name. Their faces brightened.

Traditionally, Daily News bosses practiced management by intimidation and ridicule. Pete Hamill understood what it took to get a good story – he had published thousands – and was predisposed to trust reporters who worked the streets, and predisposed to be wary of second guessing editors who dared not leave their desks even for lunch, fearing they’d encounter something contrary to their insular view of the world.

Pete was a tabloid legend whose columns glowed with the voice of working folk. Hamill and his competitor, Jimmy Breslin, ruled New York journalism for decades. Breslin introduced America to Clifford Pollard, the 42-year-old who dug the grave for JFK for $3.01 an hour. Hamill narrated the final seconds of Robert Kennedy’s life, Pete walking backward through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, describing the shots as “pap-pap-pap-pap-pap like a distant firefight or the sound of firecrackers in a back yard.”  Pete was one of the men who grabbed the killer, Sirhan Sirhan. “I wanted to break his face, to rip away flesh, to hear bone break as I pumped punches into that pimpled skin,” he wrote.

Hamill and Breslin were capable of turning a crime scene into a piece of art. Breslin presented facts in machine gun staccato. Hamill was musical, pounding his typewriter to a jazz beat borrowed from drummer Gene Krupa: “Lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops, lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops.” The music went through the keys and emerged on the newsstand as poetry.

The 1976 movie All the President’s Men changed journalism, attracting a generation of Ivy Leaguers longing to be Bob Woodward (actually yearning to be Robert Redford playing the reporter).

Jimmy and Pete were the link to old school journalism. Pete dropped out of an elite Jesuit high school to work as a sheet metal worker. Jimmy got a diploma from John Adams High School in Queens and resisted college in order to cover sports.

Even in the self-described enlightened age of Ivy League journalism, this kid from Hollis, Queens, realised he could make it by doing the hard work. Breslin taught me to learn the language of mobsters. Hamill taught be to learn the language of victims.

I did the Irish-American writer’s Stations of the Cross, moving to Belfast to cover the war and live as an abused minority. I was smart enough not to compete with my idols who had produced the essentials about life on the Falls Road, instead heading across the religious divide to the Shankill Road, mining the Loyalist stronghold for tales Jimmy and Pete hadn’t gotten.

Back in New York we rode the A train downtown, disembarked at Chambers Street for a short walk to one of his regular spots, the Odeon.

“What did you see, on the subway?” Pete demanded.

“Uhh, people aren’t as scared as before I left New York. Half the straphangers were reading, no longer afraid to lower their eyes.”

“Good. Didja notice what they were reading? Books, magazines, not a single newspaper. You know why? Because there’s nothing worth reading in the papers. If that doesn’t change, we’re goners.”

Pete had lured me home to New York from Southern California, where I’d worked as a hired gun for a newspaper looking to win big prizes for investigative reporting. Pete had the same idea. “People don’t want that crap, they want Jacob Riis, real reporting.”

Investigative reporting started with the muckrakers, notably Jacob Riis, who plied the mean streets of Manhattan, exposing abject poverty and mass corruption in an illustrated book called How the Other Half Lives. Pete believed it was the stuff that would make readers return.

Investigative journalism done right is a risky proposition. Reporters may spend hundreds of hours without striking oil.

Before I arrived at the Daily News Pete had cancelled the lone ongoing investigation – “Donna Watch” – a team of reporters assigned to full time surveillance of Donna Hanover in hopes of catching her cheating. “Donna Watch” was hatched under a previous editor as a favor from the publisher, Mort Zuckerman, to Mayor Giuliani.

“Leave the lady alone,” Pete said. “God love her, isn’t being married to Rudy enough suffering?”

“Does Zuckerman have the patience to let us succeed?”  I asked over coffee.

“We’ve got to take him at his word and hope for the best,” Pete replied. “I bumped into him last year on an elevator in the Washington Hilton, before the White House Correspondents dinner. He started to chat me up. We hopped off the elevator, someone pointed out Bill Clinton across the room. Mort approached Clinton but the president elbowed him aside. Bill shouted, ‘Hillary, look who’s here, it’s Pete Hamill.’ I thought Mort was going to melt away like the wicked witch.”

They were an unlikely pair. Zuckerman is a slight Canadian-born real estate tycoon who desperately wanted to be a bold name in a Liz Smith celebrity column. He dated Gloria Steinem, designer Diane von Furstenberg and Arianna Huffington. Smart ladies, but not the celebrity A-list of Hamill’s conquests: actress/dancer Shirley MacLaine, singer Linda Ronstadt and, most famously, Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. The widow of JFK, heir to the massive Onassis fortune, Jackie O, was the biggest name in celebrity dating.

Mort hired Pete with great fanfare, predicting the paper would rise like a Phoenix. Alas, Mort was incapable of letting Pete be Pete. We rode the subway north aware that we were living on borrowed time.

Our first investigation focused on the silent asthma pandemic ripping through working class neighborhoods. We took readers inside the emergency room at Lincoln Hospital during the hectic midnight shift, introducing them to terrified parents and wheezing children. Scenes directly from Riis.

Pete was long gone by the time we published, a victim of Zuckerman’s insecurities. The last straw came when Pete refused a direct order from the publisher to do a special section on the upcoming auction of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewelry at Sotheby’s.

“Mort doesn’t understand who our readers are,” Pete lamented. “The Daily News motto was ‘tell it to Sweeney’. Sweeney, all Sweeneys, are hard-scrabble Irishers who hate the Brits. This jewelry is blood money dating to the famine. Doesn’t Mort understand they don’t sell the Daily News on Park Avenue.”

I lasted longer than Pete but was bum-rushed out before my one-year anniversary by an editor who went on to a competing paper running a series on race, hiring actors because he didn’t trust reporters.

The last time I saw Pete was at a presentation at the Centre for Jewish History in September. He was sadly diminished, pushing a walker, battered by dialysis, his banter slowed but still thoughtful. He grabbed my right forearm with his left, delivering a hearty handshake. He said he was glad to see me, his blue eyes illuminated as an exclamation point.

“Keep punching,” he advised, “it’s all we can do.”

*Jim Mulvaney led a team of reporters in California which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Mulvaney had written from 80 countries before his journalism career ended at the Daily News. He is now an adjunct professor in the law and police science department at John Jay College in New York City.

Alfred Eisenstaedt and his Photographs of Typewriters

One of my favourite Eisenstaedt photos: Sports writers at the Saratoga racecourse

Press Box, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1939.

On Saturday, the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, it would have been a surefire bet that the photo taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE magazine, of nurse Greta Zimmer Friedman and sailor George Mendonsa smooching in New York City's Times Square on August 14, 1945, would be dusted off by pictorial editors around the world and used a few times more.

Eisenstaedt’s iconic shot wasn’t LIFE’s choice as its main pic in its August 27, 1945, Victory Celebrations spread. And it was by no means the only memorable photo taken by Eisenstaedt with his dependable 35mm Leica IIIa and Miroflex cameras. At one point I didn’t think Eisenstaedt had taken very many photos with typewriters in them – how wrong I was! It turns out he just didn’t use the word “typewriter” in his captions too often. Probably thought it was superfluous to needs. Eisenstaedt photographed playwrights George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams with their typewriters, as well as authors Erskine Caldwell and Rachel Carson, actors Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren, and fellow photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. He photographed typewriters being used in the Graf Zeppelin and being offered for sale in an Italian flea market (the very sort of place that inspired Michael Adler to write his typewriter histories).

A student typing at the University of Missouri.

Summer workshop for jazz and dance, Idyllwild, California, 1959.

German-born Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) was one of the great photojournalists of the 20th Century, though his name isn’t as well known as the two who joined LIFE’s photographic staff in 1936. Bourke-White and Robert Capa. Eisenstaedt was once considered LIFE’s best snapper – that is, at least, until New Zealander George Silk was recruited by the magazine’s pic editor Wilson Hicks in 1943.

Douglas Southall Freeman, American historian, biographer, newspaper editor, radio commentator, author and twice Pulitzer Prize winner.

LIFE featured 90 of Eisenstaedt’s pictures on its covers, and more than 2500 of his photo stories were published. These ranged from the extraordinary and bizarre to the mundane, but often with a touch of humour. Eisenstaedt’s images were said to “have a power and a symbolic resonance.” In later life, Eisenstaedt was fond of getting himself into the frame, and of dressing up for the camera too.

Above, Arthur Miller, below Tennssee Williams.

Below, Patricia Prochnik, voted No 1 debutante of the season, taking dictation from her father Edgar, former Austrian minister to the US, teacher of diplomatic history at Georgetown. Patricia in a typing class at her business school.

Below, various images of Margaret Bourke-White with typewriters. In the first she is outside her home in Connecticut with Eisenstaedt himself. In the last two, Bourke-White is being played by Teresa Wright, alongside Eli Wallach (playing Eisenstaedt) in a TV series about her life. 

Below, George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin on set with Eisenstaedt, 

Below, Ada Louise Huxtable, Rachel Carson, Erskine Caldwell, activist Sam Brown and Vance Packard.

Below, Michigan senator Arthur Hendrick Vandenberg,

 who helped set up the United Nations.

Below, women journalists covering League of Nations conference, Geneva, 1933:

Below, Eisenstaedt and Sophia Loren.

Passengers using Remington portables on the Graf Zeppelin

flight to South America, 1930:

Below, student typing at Rollins College, student typing at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, 1957, and other unidentified typists from 1937-38.

Below, Jessie M. Pickens, a state board of health secretary with the Works Progress Administration in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1937, the model for the typist in Thomas Hart Benton's History of Missouri mural. Jessie and Thomas were childhood friends.

German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann dictating to his secretary. 

Below, typewriters being sold in an Italian flea market in the early 1930s:

Here are a few other notable Eisenstaedt photos. I’m sure you’ll be able to identify most of the subjects, including Goebbels, who gave Eisenstaedt a dreadful glare. There's the ice skating waiter at the Grand Hotel in St Moritz in 1932 (shot with a Miroflex camera), and the children at the Guignol puppet show at Parc de Montsouris in Paris in  1963.

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