Uncommon Type: Some Stories

============== Our Town Today with Hank Fiset ============== BACK FROM BACK IN TIME

OCCASIONALLY THE TYRANTS (did I say “tyrants”? I mean “Titans”) who publish the Tri-Cities Daily News/Herald pay me for taking my wife on trips that mix business with pleasure—paid vacations to the likes of Rome (Ohio), Paris (Illinois), and the Family Compound (hers) on the shores of Lake Nixon, short trips that I then turn into a thousand words or so of A-One quality journalism, or so my staff tells me. This past week I went off on a doozy of a salaried adventure. I went back in time, you see! Not to the age of the dinosaurs, nor to witness the fall of the czars or to talk some sense into the captain of the Titanic. Rather, I time-slipped back into my own past, my hazy self-conscious, transported by a certain simple, yet magical machine…

INNOCENCE BREEDS ADVENTURE: I had set out to provide you readers with a column on the workings of the weekly swap meet at the old Empire Auto Movie Drive-In in Santa Alameda, a monster of a flea market, now in its thirty-ninth year and chockablock with sentimental debris and used hard goods. Old kitchen utensils, old clothes, old books, millions of objets d’art, both nice and rather crummy, piles of used tools and racks and racks of new ones, toys, lamps, odd chairs, and a display of hundreds of brand-new sunglasses now bring in cash where carloads of moviegoers once parked to see, say, Krakatoa, East of Java on a distant billboard of a screen. They heard the movie from toaster-size speakers that hooked onto the car’s window. Movies in mono…

IMAGINE THE LARGEST yard-attic-estate sale in the Western World combined with the Going out of Business Blowout of every Sears store in the country and you’ll have an idea of the scope of the Swap, as the regulars call it. All day, you can wander the rows of stalls, set on the hillocks between speaker posts, nibbling on chili dogs and kettle corn, wanting to buy everything the eye fancies, limited only by the cash in your pocket and the cargo space of your car. Had I wanted to, I could have paid less than two hundred dollars for a redwood burl table, a 1960s Amana refrigerator-freezer, or the front and back seats yanked out of a Mercury Montego. Luckily, I already have those things at home!

I WAS ABOUT to retire to the snack bar for a lime shave ice when I set my eyes on an old typewriter, an Underwood portable of ebony that, I kid you not, gleamed in the sun like a Springsteen hot rod. A quick inspection showed the ribbon was good once you advanced the spool a few inches, and the broken-handled case held a small supply of erasable onionskin paper. Even though a man needs a typewriter these days like he needs a timber ax, I offered the kid running the stall all of “forty dollars for this old typewriter with the broken case,” and he said, “Sounds good.” Should have offered a twenty. Or a fiver.

ONCE HOME, I set the machine out on the kitchen table and gave it the quickbrownfoxj­umpedoverthe­lazydogs test. The D key stuck some, and the A key had a slight drop in it. The numbers all worked, and with some repetitive strikes the punctuation keys loosened up. I typed,

when the bell at the end of the line sounded out clear and clean—and just like that, I was whooshed into the space-time continuum for a voyage back in time which lasted either a wink of an eye or for each moment of the last forty-nine years…

DING! First stop was the back room of my dad’s old auto parts store, which is now the site of Public Parking Lot Number 9 at Webster and Alcorn. He had a big old typewriter in there though I never saw him use it. On weekends as a kid I’d poke out my name on it with my little fingers. When I grew into a teenager I avoided the store as much as I could because if I showed my face at the shop, Dad would put me to work doing inventory for the rest of the day…

DING! I’M IN the eighth grade, the editor of the Frick Junior High School Banner (Go, Bobcats!), watching Mrs. Kaye, the journalism teacher, type out my “Welcome, Scrubs!” column on the ditto master that would become 350 copies of the school paper, a volume read by at least forty students. I was busting with pride at seeing my first ever byline in a published newspaper…

DING! I’M IN high school now, the old campus of Logan High, on the upper floor of a building that was not earthquake safe (never felt a shudder) in a room that was meant for one subject only—Typing, levels 1, 2, and 3, for kids wanting to be professional office secretaries. Nothing but desks and indestructible typewriters overseen by a teacher so disinterested in his/her charges that I don’t recall seeing our instructor. Someone put a record on a phonograph and we pecked at whatever letter was called out. One semester of Typing 1 was all I needed before volunteering for the audiovisual crew. Instead of being in a classroom, I roamed the halls of Logan, delivering movie projectors and threading up the films for teachers who didn’t know how. So I never learned the many formats of business letters or what the heck a “salutation” is. I would have made a lousy secretary. Anyhow, I’ve been typing ever since…

DING! IT IS 2:00 a.m. in my dorm room at Wardell-Pierce College, and I’m pounding out a paper (due in eight hours) for a rhetoric class—and yes, there was such a subject. My title was “Comparative Criticism in Sports Reporting: Baseball/Track,” chosen because I was a sports reporter for the Wardell-Pierce Pioneer and that week I had covered both a ball game and a track meet. My roommate, Don Gammelgaard, was trying to sleep, but I was on a deadline. And because it was raining there was no way I was going to tramp all the way across the quad to the Student Service Building. As I recall, I aced Rhetoric.*

DING! I’M AT a so-called desk in the so-called office of the Greensheet Give-Away, the free shoppers’ guide that once provided the Tri-Cities with oodles of coupons, advertisements, and, in the back pages, local-interest stories where regular folks could see their names in print. I was crafting a piece on a dog show just held at the old Civic Auditorium—my pay was fifteen bucks!—when the most beautiful woman who ever started a conversation with me walked by and said, “You type fast.” She was right, and since I was the fast type, I wooed her, wed her, and have been her main squeeze for over forty years.

THAT SAME DISH of American Womanhood brought me back from back in time when she came into the kitchen, telling me to move that typewriter and set the table for dinner. The grandchildren were coming over and it was going to be Make Your Own Taco Night, so a mess was due. The Underwood has powers unexplained, a vehicle for my dreams, so I locked it back into its case and carried it to a shelf in my home office, pronto. At night I think it glows in the dark…

* Note: A check of transcripts shows I got a B minus in Rhetoric at W-P. My mistake…