Kip's Tips: Advice on Buying Typewriters in 1966 and 1975

Changing Times: The Kiplinger Magazine devoted spreads in its September 1966 and August 1975 editions to tips about buying typewriters. Also known as Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, the American publication offered business forecasts and personal finance advice. Kiplinger Washington Editors Inc was a closely held company managed for more than nine decades by three generations of the Kiplinger family. W.M. Kiplinger (1891-1967), a former Associated Press economics reporter, founded the eponymous Washington DC company in 1920. With his son Austin H. Kiplinger (1918–2015) he co-founded Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine in 1947. Grandson Knight A. Kiplinger continued the dynasty until the 2019 sale to Dennis Publishing. 

Austin Kiplinger with son Knight Kiplinger in March 1987.

SEPTEMBER 1966

                                                                           AUGUST 1975

Velva Darling: The 'Girl Philosopher' and her Corona Portable Typewriter

With a caption claiming Velva Darling was a “famous girl columnist” who wrote a daily column for two million newspaper readers, this photo appeared in a Corona advertisement in Popular Science in December 1930. Corona said Darling had “a special rack constructed in her car so that she can use her Corona on the road!”

At the start of her short but spectacular career as a syndicated columnist, in October 1926, bobbed and blue-eyed Velva Darling was described by the San Francisco Examiner as “living evidence that women need not be homely in order to be intelligent. She belongs to that class of beauty which gentlemen prefer, and she believes in short skirts, flappers and the Charleston.” It was a line taken up by other newspapers during the following two years: “[Velva] has gained a host of readers of her highly popular articles … which goes to prove that, despite the assertions of scientists and woman-haters, beauty and brains ARE sometimes combined!” – or so declared dailies in Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania. When the Boston Globe took up her features on Christmas Eve 1929, it said her following “may be envied by some of the graybeards among the philosophers. Miss Darling is a college graduate and knows how to use English effectively, but that doesn’t make her a bit high-hat. She knows people, as you will learn in reading her daily articles. The newest addition to the Globe’s list of feature writers doesn’t write textbook philosophy. She writes a snappy, up-to-the-minute discussion of some interesting question every day. Her viewpoint is the viewpoint of American youth.” The Arizona Republic in Phoenix added, “If ever there’s a genius beauty contest, Velva Darling ought to walk off with the big silver bathing beach …” It said she was 23, when in fact she was 28. H.S. Hunter summed Velva up succinctly in the El Paso Herald - “a nice young girl with a brain”.

Velva Gertrude Darling was born in Kiester, Faribault, Minnesota, on June 2, 1901, the daughter of storekeeper Seymour Orlando Darling (1876-1956) and his wife Belle Ingeborg (née Vedvig, 1879-1946). Velva grew up in San Luis Obispo, a city almost halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She left there in late September 1921 to enter Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She returned to California in 1923 to enter Stanford University, pledged to the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. She studied English and journalism and graduated with honours in 1925 (see photo below, right).

While a junior at university, Velva started a women’s column for the Stanford Daily, a student-run, independent daily newspaper. Soon after leaving Stanford, Velva took her Corona four-bank portable typewriter to San Francisco to start her journalism career. In March 1926, the San Francisco Examiner exposed the fact that Velva - who it described as “a brunette of surpassing loveliness” - had eloped to be secretly married to Shell Oil engineer and polo player John Biddle Dorcy in San Rafael on September 17, 1925, just before Dorcy left for a post in Shanghai. Velva vehemently denied there had been a wedding, but it turned out to be true. Not that the marriage survived very long.

When, on October 22, 1926, the Examiner announced Velva had sold an article to Cosmopolitan magazine and signed a $100-a-week contract to write a series of pieces for William Randolph Hearst's King Feature Syndicate, it chopped a year off her age, saying she was “only 24”. Her daily  column, “Sometimes I Think Yes But Sometimes I Think No”, began to appear across the United States in February 1927.

In 1928 she moved to Hollywood, after William Fox offered her $2500 to make a movie from her features titled “Hey, Hey Henrietta!” Described at the time as a “feminine humorist”, Velva would become known as the “girl philosopher”, though at 27 she was already well past girlhood. In newspapers, however, her age kept dropping, to the point where New York Governor Al Smith gave her special car number plates 22-22, “She’s 22, too!” having become a catchphrase of a “very modern girl” who featured in Velva’s articles.  Still, Velva was rightly regarded as “the youngest feature writer in America”.

Velva switched to the McNaught Syndicate in 1929 and also worked for United Press as a special correspondent and The World’s Work magazine when flying with Charles Lindbergh.  But her illustrious career crashed even more suddenly than it had begun. On Christmas Day 1930 the Oakland Tribune announced Velva was to marry Los Angeles attorney Eugene Howard Marcus (1902-1968). She vowed marriage would not interfere with her writing, but it did. She continued her column until June 1931, and then it abruptly stopped. Her last article took as its theme the lot of married women. By 1932 Velva had found a new medium for her particular brand of philosophy, through KNX, a commercial radio station in Los Angeles. Beyond that, as far as newspapers were concerned, it was as if she had never existed. Velva and Eugene were married in 1934. Velva died in Los Angeles on September 18, 1969, aged 68. Even in death, she took one last year off her age, the California death index listing her year of birth as 1902.

Beyond the Typewriter: Smith-Corona and the Wolff on 47th Street (1986)

In its March 10, 1986, edition, New York magazine’s technology columnist Phoebe Hoban devoted her Star Tech article to what she described as “Retro Tech”. This was in response to customers asking salespeople at the Wolff Typewriter-Computer Company on Broadway and 47th Street Photo for something that provided “the pleasure of word processing without the pain. An electronic typewriter doesn’t quite fit the bill, but neither, regrettably, does a full-fledged computer.” Hoban went on to describe “a curious hybrid from Smith-Corona” – the PWP, or Personal Word Processor System 12. It was labelled a “lobotomised computer” and “idiotproof”, aimed at people terrified of technology.

The PWP Systems 12 and 14 were conversion kits, transforming a computer-compatible Smith-Corona typewriter into a computerised word processor. The typewriter and the kit were usually sold separately.

Ted Munk's machine?

Typing With The Wind: One Underwood Master Typewriter, 12 Typists, 7.8 Million Keystrokes in Two Weeks

Richard Polt's Underwood Master

Using just the one typewriter, an Underwood Master, at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in 1938, 12 typists typed 1,560,341 words from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. The exercise, sponsored by Underwood to prove how efficient and durable its new Willie Dobson-designed standard model was, turned out to be a huge publicity success.

Mitchell’s book, ironically typed on a Remington portable No 3, is 1472 pages long, contains 426,590 words and takes the average reader 28 hours, 26 minutes to get through, at 250 words a minute. The Underwood typing team of 12, six women and six men, completed copying it three times and were up to page 729, going through it a fourth time, when the “world’s first typing marathon” ended.

The typists had completed a first copy of Mitchell’s novel within 94 hours, 22 minutes, on the fifth day of the event. They typed a lot faster after that. The marathon lasted 14 days without stops, from 12 noon on Friday, August 26, to 12 midnight, on Saturday, September 10, 1938. The 12 typists each typed for one hour twice a day, their shifts coming day and night. They changed place behind the one Underwood Master 1295 times. In all they typed for 324 hours, at 4816 words an hour, or 80.3 words a minute. They employed 7,801,705 keystrokes on 5480 sheets of paper.

*This picture was taken before the marathon; there were two changes to the team which typed in Toronto.

The typists were: Men – Charles White (captain) 139,599 words; Alexander Orr 132,077; John Newman 121,474; Edwin Amsden 119,654; Delmar Dodge 116,687; Arthur Ballard 115,554. Total 745,044. Women – Irma Wright (captain, right) 170,402 words; Margaret Faulkner 168,598; Elda McColl 126,637; Margaret Ward 124,326; Wilma Alexander 119,277; Frieda Laidlaw 106,057. Total 815,297. Grand total 1,560,341.

The next year, 1939, the event was turned into a United States versus Canada contest. The US won the first of these, typing a net (after deductions for errors) 1,596,243 words on 7531 sheets of paper from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 348,000 words on 1392 pages (23 hours, 12 minutes to read). Canada typed 1,560,577 words. The US average words per minute was 82.1 and Canada 80.2. In 1940 teams representing to two nations copied from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, 1170 pages of it. Canada won with a net score of 1,654,744 (87.7 words a minute) to the US’s 1,537,708 (82.2). Katherine Gray, office manager of that year’s New York World’s Fair, used an estimate of three pounds of energy for each keystroke on a manual typewriter to calculate that 24,174 tons of energy would be used in the contest. She claimed an electric typewriter would require only two ounces of energy. Canada retained the international trophy in 1941, typing from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Papers and Addresses at an average of 88.34 wpm to the US’s 88.26.

Above, the 1940 US v Canada contest

Below, the 1938 typists

The Toronto typing arena.

One-Claw Typists at an Underwood Portable Typewriter

We’ve had some fishy typewriter stories on this blog over the past 10 years, but this one nips them all. It concerns an Underwood portable typewriter and the catch of some very large marron in the south-west corner of Western Australia, 73 years ago. The longest of the marron measured 21 inches (53.34cm); to emphasis the size, the catch of an 18½in (47cm) marron in Busselton in January 2019 was headline news. They usually grow to a maximum of 15in (38cm).

Now some non-Australian readers may not have heard of marron: they are a tasty crustacean, the largest freshwater crayfish found in Western Australia (and the third largest freshwater crayfish on Earth), endemic to that part of the Indian Ocean coastline between the town of Harvey and the port city of Albany. Fishing for marron has long been a West Australian tradition.

In 1948 a couple of fisherman were so proud of their catch that they took it into the offices of the United Press on Princep Street in Bunbury, to show it off to Henry Roy Golding MBE (1902-90), editor and publisher of the South Western Times as well as the Manjimup-Warren Times, Harvey Murray Times and The Blackwood Times, Bridgetown. Golding (right, right) was hugely impressed by the catch and entered into a deal with the fishermen, by which he was allowed to write about the catch provided he didn’t mention where precisely it was made. Broadly, it had been in the Warren area. Golding then had the problem of illustrating just how big the marron were. He looked around his office, spotted his Underwood portable typewriter, and propped two of the marron up against the keyboard for a photograph. Now, it’s highly unlikely that many of the readers of the Manjimup-Warren Times, Harvey Murray Times and The Blackwood Times in 1948 would have been familiar with the size of an Underwood portable typewriter, given that many of them lived in such isolated inland spots as Jardee, Yanmah, Palgarup and Nyamup (circulation must have been a nightmare). Still, the point was made. These were BIG fish!

The name marron covers two closely related species of crayfish, the critically endangered Cherax tenuimanus and the species that is outcompeting it, Cherax cainii. They belong to the genus Cherax within the Parastacidae family and are decapod crustaceans (10 legs). Marron are considered a luxury food and are the subject of a developing aquaculture industry in Western Australia and other Australian states. Total Australian production of farmed marron was 30 tons in 1996. In Western Australia, recreational fishing for marron is tightly controlled, with a limited season; permits are required, and minimum sizes are enforced. And people who catch large marron still adhere to the tradition of staying silence about where they were caught.

Alan Seaver's burgundy Underwood portable.