Making Typewriter Desks

Popular Science, January 1956

I felt inspired and, in more ways than one, deeply moved by Ryan Adney’s touching blog post from last week, “TI-99/4A Play-and-Display”. My own father lived to the age of 73, the age I am now. I was 33 when he died, after a series of strokes in 1981, and while this situation was very different from Ryan’s, I had little idea at the time of my dad’s passing just how much it would affect me in the 40 intervening years. I miss him more every day. My paternal grandfather, also Robert Messenger, died suddenly from an aneurysm in October 1919, leaving my father, then aged just 12 years and two months old, the eldest male still living at home with his family. His eldest brother had died from wounds suffered in the Battle of Ypres in 1917, the next two were both serving in the merchant navy and the fourth, Robert Rex Messenger, had died from blood poisoning as a child. So my father had to leave school and find work to support his widowed mother, younger sister and three younger brothers. His great wish was to become a carpenter, but he was eventually found work (by an elder sister) as an apprentice tailor. He made a huge success of a career thrust upon him, yet not once in his subsequent life did he let go of his passion for carpentry. His skills as a home handy man were amazing. Among the many things I’d seen him build was a beautiful desk for me when he gave me an Underwood Champion portable typewriter back in 1957.

It was with this in mind that I was reminded - upon reading Ryan’s post about building a cabinet to house a TI computer in memory of his dad - to go back and look at Popular Mechanics magazines with plans for a typewriter desk. Popular Science and Popular Mechanics offered a lot of ideas for such things, over many years, and my father had also built 14ft sailing boats following plans published in these magazines. Plans for a typewriter desk that I glimpsed a week or so ago and which had appealed to me appeared in the March 1952 edition of Popular Mechanics. When I first saw it, I very quickly moved  on to something else for a blog post idea, thinking this would be way beyond my own range of carpentry skills – as much as I was able to learn from my late dad (high school carpentry lessons were completely wasted on me). My father, of course, would have had no problem making such a thing. But now, after reading Ryan’s post, I’m having second thoughts. My wife’s first husband, who died many years ago, was a carpentry teacher, and I’ve “inherited” most of his tools. Armed with these, I just might be up for the challenge. And with the first blasts of winter arriving today, it’s probably a good time to start thinking about working inside my shed. If this one proves beyond me, I can always try something a little simpler from among the earlier plans outlined here. Something rustic, perhaps?

From Popular Mechanics, October 1936:

From Popular Mechanics, February 1938:

From Popular Mechanics, January 1968:

From Popular Mechanics, November 1950:

From Popular Mechanics, December 1937:

From Popular Mechanics, July 1968:

From Popular Mechanics, February 1926:

From Popular Science, June 1942:

From Popular Science, February 1972:

From Popular Science, June 1921:

From Popular Science, May 1940:

From Popular Mechanics, October 1925:

From Popular Mechanics, September 1917:

From Popular Mechanics, June 1917:

From Popular Mechanics, May 1921:

From Popular Science, October 1920:

From Popular Mechanics, 1910:

From Hydra to Montreal to the West of Ireland: Following the Typewriter Trail

Matt Bissonnette’s latest film, Death of a Ladies’ Man, is coming to Canberra later in the month and friends have already alerted me to the poster, which features a Torpedo 18 portable typewriter. Quite why the Torpedo is on the poster I do not know, because the only typewriter I have spotted in the trailers is one of those Glasgow-made post-war Remington 5s. Which seems a shame, since the Leonard Cohen-laden soundtrack surely deserves a pistachio green Olivetti Lettera 22, just like the one Cohen himself so treasured. But no, it’s a Remington, and therein lies perhaps a hint to the inspiration for the screenplay for Death of a Ladies’ Man, which Bissonnette wrote himself.

It’s well known that Bissonnette is an avid fan of the late, great Cohen, who he calls “the patron saint of Montreal”, and Bissonnette frequently uses the literary or musical work of Cohen as a thematic motif in his movies. Death of a Ladies’ Man is obviously no exception, since it takes its title from the 1977 studio album by Cohen, produced and co-written by the not-so-fondly remembered Phil Spector. Bissonnette’s first feature, 2002’s Looking for Leonard, has a heroine who spends most of her time reading Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers while entertaining fantasies of meeting and running off with Cohen to lead a more fulfilling and interesting life. Sounds a bit like Bissonnette himself. The film also intersperses clips from the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen, acknowledging Cohen as a kind of sublime spirit floating through the movie’s sordid events. Later Bissonnette movies, Passenger Side (2009) and, of course, Death of a Ladies' Man, use Cohen's music in their soundtracks. The latter has seven Cohen songs, including Bird on the Wire and Hallelujah.

Winnipeg Free Press film reviewer Randall King is well aware of Bissonnette’s Cohen fixation and wrote about Death of a Ladies' Man under the headline, “Laughing in the face of death: Humour, absurdity bring a light touch to bleak, Cohen-inspired Irish-Canadian drama.” In another article, headed “Drama draws on spirit of ‘patron saint of Montreal’”, King wrote that “The career of filmmaker Matthew Bissonnette has two throughlines”, the first of which is Cohen. “Bissonnette was raised in the west end of Montreal and has always felt a strong connection to the urbane fellow Montrealer …”

Death of a Ladies' Man went into commercial release in Canada in theatres and on video on demand platforms last  March 12. It has been described as a “dramedy” (goodness, how I hate that word). Irish actor Gabriel Byrne plays the “ladies’ man”, Samuel O’Shea, almost a stage-Irishism, as is O’Shea’s habitual hard-drinking and womanising. O’Shea is a McGill University poetry professor who starts suffering from weird hallucinations, which lead to his diagnosis with an inoperable brain tumour. O’Shea must confront his mortality and make peace with his family (taking advice from his long-gone father). The dead-Dad chats occur after O’Shea retreats to a family cottage in a remote coastal part of Ireland, where he begins work (with his Remington 5) on the great novel he always meant to write. The theme of O’Shea being a man in search of himself may well offer a clue as to the storyline’s roots.

If Bissonnette is indeed as hardcore a Cohen addict as we are led to believe, he will doubtless know about Cohen’s days on the Greek island of Hydra – after all, those were the days of Marianne Jensen (So Long, Marianne). This was in March 1960, when a then 25-year-old Cohen befriended the Australian writer George Johnston (above) and Johnston’s wife, fellow writer Charmian Clift (below). Cohen found his Australian hosts “drank more than other people … and they got sick more”. Johnston was very much the ladies’ man, his affair with Clift, 11 years his junior, being one of the reasons he left Melbourne in 1946.

More to the point, though – as Bissonnette might have found if he worked his way through the Cohen-Johnston connection - was Johnston’s 1964 opus, My Brother Jack. This was written “In near desperation to get the mistakes of his life into focus … In it, David Meredith conducts a search not merely for his own ‘mistakes’, but for his whole past, to map it, to explain it, and to find meaning in it, much in the mode of contemporary existentialist fiction.” Sound familiar? Yes, it’s almost exactly the theme of Bissonnette’s Death of a Ladies' Man, in different settings. After all, the movie is about “Life, death, mortality, love, relationships, family, reality, a hockey ballet, Frankenstein's monster, it's all here.” And tell me, what portable typewriter did Johnston and Clift use? A Glasgow-made post-war Remington 5, of course, identical to the one Gabriel Byrne as Samuel O’Shea uses in his Irish hideaway in Death of a Ladies' Man.

(Incidentally, Samuel O’Shea’s dead father is played by Brian Gleeson, son of Brendan Gleeson, who you may remember from the scene in 2014's Calvary, when he talks to “The Writer” (M. Emmet Walsh), sitting at a Royal portable, an Irish-American writing the great novel he always meant to write, in the wilds of Ireland’s Atlantic Coast. Sound familiar? The Brendan Gleeson character calls the typewriter “an affection”. It may well prove to be in Death of a Ladies' Man too. We’ll see.

The Underwood Portable Typewriter That Rose from the Icy Depths of Peace River, Alberta

Peace River algae?

Three weeks after the first Underwood portable typewriter went on the market in Canada, in late August 1921, Underwood was gifted the greatest free advertisement it could possibly have wished for. A Calgary Daily Herald journalist called Chester Abbott Bloom (1882-1967) had acquired one for $75 as soon as the three-bank Underwoods were offered for sale in Calgary. Bloom believed its super compact size and extreme light 7½lb weight would be ideal for a daunting assignment he was about to undertake – mostly by air, but also steamboat and canoe. Bloom was taken by the Imperial Oil Company on a 3000 miles round trip into oilfields of the subarctic wilderness in the Sahtu Lands along the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. Imperial was setting up oil wells below Fort Norman (between the settlements now known as Tulita and Norman Wells).  

Photo taken in 1921.

Loading the Underwood? The Junkers with pontoons attached.

Gorman's Junkers F 13a, Rene, or 'Q', is on the left.

Bloom flew in Imperial’s Junkers F 13a, ‘Rene’ (G-CADQ), or 'Q" as Bloom called it, piloted by George W. Gorman. These German monoplanes were the world's first all-metal transport aircraft, powered by a 185 hp BMW IIIa engine. Returning to the township of Peace River in Alberta on August 24, 1921, the Junkers’ right pontoon hit a sand bar near the Peace River’s confluence with the Smoky River. The ‘Rene’ flipped over and sunk. Bloom, Gorman, mechanic W.J. Hill and Fort Simpson passenger Walter Johnson clung on to the other pontoon until rescuers reached them in canoes and motorboats. Bloom’s Underwood portable typewriter sunk with the Junkers, along with the journalist’s Kodak 3A Special camera, his field glasses and all the photographs he had taken on the trip. The blueprints of Imperial’s findings also went down. Gorman managed to save one of the two husky pups which were on board.

Where the plane crash landed.

Twenty days later Bloom was reunited in Calgary with his precious Underwood, upon which he had typed tens of thousands of words for his newspaper on that one trip north. It had already become his “inseparable companion”. The portable typewriter had remained in the Junkers on the bed of Peace River for a week after the crash landing, but the Calgary Daily Herald said it was “in remarkably good condition considering the vicissitudes through which it passed.” It required “Only a little overhauling and oiling to make [it] good as new.” The Herald said this an “excellent illustration of the thoroughness of modern manufacturers in turning out reliable articles”. Also returned to Bloom was his Kodak camera, as well as eight rolls of film. Carbon copies of his stories were found in a parcel on a sandbar after washing 10 miles down the Peace River.

Three bylines and photos - all in a day's work for Chester Bloom.

With excellent coordination, the Calgary Daily Herald ran an advertisement for the Underwood portable, inserted by manager Arthur M. Schofield of the United Typewriter Company on Seventh Avenue West, Calgary, on the same page as its article about Bloom’s typewriter being returned to him.

Chester Bloom was born in Edina, Missouri, on November 6, 1882. He began his journalism career on newspapers in Springfield, Illinois, Chicago and Seattle and attended the University of Washington in Seattle. From 1910-11 he worked on steamboats in Alaska, as well as gold mining and prospecting. He moved to Calgary as a city editor in 1912 and became legislative correspondent for the Herald in 1918. In 1928 he was appointed news editor of the Regina Leader-Post, and transferred to Washington DC as correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press in 1933. He moved to Ottawa in 1936, New York in 1939, then back to Washington in 1940 when the US joined World War II. After the war he returned to Ottawa. He died there on October 8, 1967, at the age of 84, and was buried in Manitoba.

Fort Norman in 1921: