A budding writer goes old school

It was a curious sound I hadn't heard in a very long time.

'Tap ... tap ... tap.” It came from our basement, where my nine-year-old daughter, Ella, was typing on a 70-year-old typewriter.

That old Royal has been sitting in my basement for years, with a 1947 Des Moines Register sports page serving as its dust cover. I can't even remember how I acquired the hefty, gray relic. But for some reason, on Sunday afternoon, it caught Ella's undivided attention.

I fiddled with the ribbon and, remarkably, it still had some ink to give. Ella set to work, and swiftly learned the lost joys of texting, 40s style.

'Aww, I have to start all over again,” I heard her lament after her first major typo. I salvaged the typewriter, but no correction fluid. Pity.

Soon, she had her first essay completed, an autobiographical piece on what exactly makes Ella Dorman tick.

'Hi my name is Ella Dorman and my favorit color is neon green,” Ella typed. 'One of the things about my self is that i love Jolly Ranchers and that my favorit soda is cokxx ... if i had a million dollars than i would buy a puppy a kitty and a rabbit.”

Pet prices these days. Crazy.

It turns out our Ella is trendy. According to the Google, typewriters are having a moment with millennials, not unlike Polaroid instant cameras and vinyl records. Stuff that we once saw merely as stuff has now become an authentic cultural representations of a less complex time. You know, the good old days when an NSA agent would have to stand directly behind you to see what you typed, and you checked your mail once daily.

I get that, I suppose. I'm not old enough to have ever worked in a typewriter newsroom, but I've heard many stories of its lost cigarette smoke-tinged romance. I am old enough to have taken typing class in high school, in the summer, no less. 'J ... K ... J ... Space,” our teacher chanted as we fell into a bored trance. I've never seen a clock move more slowly in all of my life. Much less romance.

Funny thing is, I really never learned to type. Odd that I chose a career path requiring me to type every single day. I have, over the years perfected a modified hunt-and-peck system. The problem is I'm not much of a hunter and I often peck wrong.

So if not for the invention of the personal digital computer, with its handy delete key and spell check, I never would have made it in the journalism game. No news organization could have afforded all that White Out, or the lawsuits.

Ella is, for the moment, our best hope for developing a real typist. By day's end Sunday, she begged me to lug the Royal up to her room and put it on her desk. It seems a little out of place, sort of like Ernest Hemingway in an American Girl store. As of bedtime, she had typed three chapters of her forthcoming novel. I'm not at liberty to share the plot, but it's a page-turner.

I asked Ella if she would rather use our computer.

'Computers are electric, and they're bad for your eyes,” she said, while declaring the typewriter as far more 'awesome.”

And now, I'll blatantly steal Ella's signature ending.

That is all I am going to write today so goodbye.

' Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com.