Requiem for a machine

By T.W. Burger

It was built somewhere around 1917, the same year my father was born and while the U.S. threw itself into World War One, also known as The Last War. As if.

It was a gift from a schoolteacher aunt when I was 15. I like to think she gave it to me because she recognized in me a writer taking root. More likely, she had decided nobody would ever be able to decipher my handwriting.

It was the beginning of a very productive relationship. School papers, journals, poetry (most of it very bad, some of it published, and most of that very bad as well) and, eventually, my early freelance writing. I wrote for the local daily paper, and the local weekly, which accepted my personal columns, for which I did not get paid; I didn’t care. Just seeing my stuff in actual print was enough, back then. I wrote for a local publication called New Arts Review under five different pseudonyms because the publication’s previous management was so disorganized, nobody would write for us. I used a different style for each name. It was a great education. All this while working full-time driving concrete mixer trucks and selling advertising for the publication. I did not sleep much.

I put a lot of miles on the machine, an Underwood Upright, serial No. 5115744. It weighed a little more than 30 pounds. I carried it by hand all the way across town to be serviced once and lost the use of my arms for what seemed like a long time. The service guy told me I was out of my mind. He was probably right. I think it has more steel in it than the average modern automobile.

I meant to keep it forever, but I got hired by the first in a series of newspapers that all insisted I learn to use their computers. Don’t get me wrong: I love computers. They make correcting mistakes a piece of cake, and making copies is easy and does not involve carbon paper (young people may have to look that one up.) But computers don’t really have anything like a personality or, dare I say it, a soul. They just sit there, humming smugly, and doing their work efficiently.

I could – and have – finished a story on deadline on the Underwood by the light of a candle when my electric utility and I could not agree on whether I had paid my bill on time.

But times change. I have owned, used, and loved a variety of laptop computers, and have written news stories and columns in my car, on a bus traveling from New York City after a visit to the hole where the Twin Towers used to stand, even leaning back against a tree.

The Underwood, I’m afraid, got lost in the shuffle. Too heavy, too hard to move around, and too slow in an age where whatever I wrote on my laptop could be on a newspaper website mere moments after I filed it online.

The trusty machine sat in a box in my damp basement workshop for decades.

When I finally sought it out for journal work, it had rusted shut. Keys immobile. Carriage paralyzed. A kind of mechanical rigor mortis had set in. Even several baths in the lubricating tank at the shop did little good.

It was, essentially, dead. Because of my own neglect.

A friend has given me another, even older, Underwood. It is, the technician tells me, very likely entirely salvageable. I hope so. It may give me journal entries that I can easily read years down the line.

But it won’t be quite the same, somehow.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.

He can be contacted at twburger@comcast.net