This is the story of the second life of an IBM Selectric typewriter. You young people out there possibly do not remember the machine that ended the use of typewritten character uniqueness to solve murders. I sure remember it, for IBM in its several manisfestations was practically synomonous with my career at Boeing. In the fifties for example, like the faithful to Mecca, The Boeing Company got to sending its engineers back to Endicott, NY, for training. There, IBM's cloned competence proved to be a little tiresome for the supplicants. Some weeks into one of those sessions a Boeing guy muttered "what do you do in this town if you are tired of movies and hate men?" The IBM brand of competence was indeed legendary and was announced by its dress code and the ubiquitous framed THINK. That and more aside, the Selectric, twenty pounds of swiss watch precision, was a great machine. The crisp jet black type it produced set a new standard for manuscripts. Until a week ago I had one sitting on my workbench waiting for exploratory intervention.
The Selectric came to Boeing twenty years after the last installation of IBM electronics in a B-52. Carbon copies had come and gone, replaced first by the Kodak Verifax and then by the Xerox. At this point Selectric mechanisms and Xerox electrostatics synergized to publish the cold war at Boeing. Even so, about the time the Selectric reached its peak of dominance along came the challenge of cold electronics, the Word Processor, and something went out of typeing. Now, suddenly, engineeers and sundry bodies were seen hunched over their keyboards. Mistakes? Piece-a-cake. But for ten years the Selectric had been king of the word.
(Actually, IBM incorporated electronic memory into late models of the Selectric, but swiss watch precision was soon done in by cheaper plastic electronics.)
IBM meanwwhile had made the leap from computing with punched cards to computing with holes in semiconductor crystal lattices. Mainframes the size of locomotives soon populated chilly rooms. By the late sixties "Big Blue" had become a term of respect.
The immense effect of computers on industry was manifest in Boeing offices as a rapid transition from the early word processors, electronified typewriters, to true computers misused as electronified typewriters. The personal computer had arrived, and IBM, stuffy and code dressed, had done it. It went something like this: At a "tipping" point in the seventies there was invented a radical change in the intimacy between the software and hardware of a solid state chip. This change enabled computing to expand like a Japanese paper flower in water. As electronic slide rules went into our shirt pockets, IBM was able to combine the new chip technology with its Big Blue resources to forever change the meaning of "desktop".
What happened next seems hardly fair. A flower child in sneakers had slipped some trojan horse software into the PC's operating system which allowed the flower children in Palo Alto to make copies of the whole darn PC. Within twelve years (uh, look, I'm doing the best I can) IBM's seminal role in the PC was history.
Isn't that a fascinating revolution of sorts. But meanwhile twenty pounds of swiss watch precision endures, and the one on my workbench looked to be in pretty good shape but for a stuck "carriage". Exactly why somebody with a Mac, two PCS, and a laptop would want a typewriter is cloudy, but most likely it was because a screwdriver isn't of much use on a computer. Also, my living with the Selectric all those years, was it not my due to get into one and find out how that spinning golf ball could stop just so? But fate put other things in the way and laid down a protective layer of dust. Three years passed. Its steno table was pressed into service for the laptop, and itself had been moved to a shelf of ignominy in our re-cycle cabinet. A moment had to come and it came: I googled® Selectric repair. By extreme good fortune one of the Selectric's developers was still breathing, and further, was doing it not in New York but in Oregon. Price of gasoline be damned, that Selectric was going for a ride.
Bill Skillman lives in Ashland, and so gave the directions from southbound i-five. When it came time to leave, unwilling to face i-five, we decided to wend a somewhat parallel way to the east. As you follow that route be aware that I had not googled® an alternate approach to Ashland.
The big rivers of the Cascade Range water western Washington. Mount Rainier's pair are the Nisqually to Puget Sound and the Cowlitz to the Columbia at Kelso. We could drive up the Nisqually a ways but then would have to "bushwhack" across a divide to the Cowlitz, cross it, and then across another divide to tiny Wind river which would take us to the Columbia at the Gorge. You might say that those bushwhacks retraced the St Helens 1980 blast zone. There was no trace of the blast that we could sense, only that the route was beautiful. If in checking the route on a road map one has trouble separating the forest roads from the creeks, it may help to characterize the route as threading the valley between St Helens and Adams while favoring St Helens a lot.
That's painting a rosy picture of the clearcuts and drear monoculture replantings, but remember what we were not seeing, i-five. Then, too, we tourists did not have to live the shattered economy of these parts. We felt a bit guilty when we picnicked at Silver Lake just off the Nisqually and noticed the contrast between our clean 1994 Merc and the native wheels. The cabins seemed deserted and the fish quite safe. We could imagine a low-priced idyllic month paddling about the lily pads on that pretty little lake.
Our route would pass through Elbe, Morton, and Randle.
My Pennsylvania Dutch root was touched by a tiny -- 432 sq ft -- church in Elbe, the Elbe Evangelische Lutherische Kirche. In 1893 some immigrants switched rivers from the Elbe near Hamburg, Germany to the Nisqually. Evidently they brought with them the vigor to carve a town out of the forest and, as evidently, brought their religion. The church seats 46, twice the population of Elbe at last census. The pastors were loggers. In 1983 the church was restored to service, holding services during each summer. Our hosts this day were a couple from Fircrest, a suburb of Tacoma. When we had parked and were about to enter, five nuns in full habit emerged and cut across the lawn to their van, ignoring the pathway. (With a cardboard cylinder around your neck it is difficult to see down.) When we admired the curved pews we learned that they came from the church in Seattle my wife attended when first she came to Seattle, Denny Park Lutheran. The first pew on the left was original and was straight. During our host's presentation we learned that he is a retired basketball referee with stories. One: every new referee had to do at least one gig at Vashon, as initiation.
With a last census population of 21, why did we even stop? Okay, we needed to change drivers, and upon pulling off found ourselves on rail ballast, body rattling chunks; we were next to a railroad track. Ahead a ways we saw a sign for an "historic church" and that was why. PS, there was a restaurant on the track, two passenger coaches tied end to end. We do not recall any other dwellings in Elbee. That year, 1893, was about the time my wife's relatives came over from Norway. Germans and Norwegians alike came over then. As to the Germans, one can only guess the sympathies of those in Elbe when things got bad back in Germany. Did their little church hear anything? I raise the question because the Selectric in our trunk was made by a company that profited from the Holocaust. The book with that story has not been discredited, so there's no qualification: IBM profited. The author is Edwin Black; the book is "IBM and the Holocaust". Google finds a 1997 publication of the IEEE Computer Society titled "Locating the Victims: The Nonrole of Punched Card Technology and Census Work", by Friedrich W. Kistermann. The abstract in part reads: "... the article describes census requirements ~ and in particular the censuses of 1925, 1933, and 1939 ~ in an effort to counter arguments that German authorities used the results of these censuses during the Holocaust period." There are 102 references. Right. The tough part is that IBM was not unique. Take my employer of 34 years: a 1971 Boeing brochure extolled the role of the B-52 in Viet Nam. I don't need to point out which members of a corporation make decisions like IBM's maintenance of death camp computers. But I do need to point out that employees like me who knew what bombers do and remained silent are complicit.
Randle, on the Cowlitz, was our last of State road. Rolling softly we entered forest roadland. The road was excellent, and our spirits too. Evidence that the other end was open was borne mutely by oncoming traffic. Never was traffic so welcome. Midway to the Columbia there is a viewpoint that catches St Helens from about northeast. Her glaciers were gray and skimpy. Well, it's August old girl, maybe you'll get another dress or two before the Celsius hits the fan. Just before the viewpoint a road took off to the right headed for the southeast flank. We passed, thinking it was foolhardy enough being in the forest in a car with a bad head gasket record. It has aluminum heads. The driving was good until we got over the divide of water to Kelso versus water to the Gorge. Translation, until we got to the Lewis River. Then the forest closed in on an unending series of half hairpins. When the last one opened up our punishment was forgotten as there arose before us the headlands of the Columbia Gorge.
Our niece from Missouri was visiting a friend in Hood River just now, and we got to his place in time for supper. I mean, they had not finished it yet. He has a kayak school there called Gorge Paddling. Showing us the boats he pointed to a pair of short blunt ones with fins like a salami slicer. They were surf kayaks, could carve hairpins under the curl. He guides surfing trips to the Baja wintertimes. The immediate connection of interest to us is that our niece, an expert white water kayaker, used to teach at Gorge Paddling. After supper our host put on a movie called Ten Canoes. I went to sleep halfway through which was a shame because it is at the same time hilarious and a breakthrough lesson in humanizing primitives. The actors were aborginals, and could they ever deadpan a joke. It is not to be missed.
Next morning we set out on 1-197 and 97 for Klamath Falls. This stretch of 97 parallels a string of five volcanoes before deferring to one-time Mt Mazama aka Crater Lake. The volcano view at Madras is exquisite. Back at Hood River that morning we had had a late start in consequence of trying to squeeze as much hot water as possible out of the shoddy motel that stuck us for ninety dollars. Because of that, by lunch time we had only gotten as far as Maupin. Not a problem! This fascinating oasis embraces the Deschutes River, and we were happy to dawdle over a great lunch in an old high-ceilinged tavern. Best Reuben in years of searching. Needing a car part we strolled across to the store only to find that the proprietor was out on a wrecker call. Returning to our car we passed a home with this sign on its gate: No Fifth Day Adventists.
Klamath Falls is a region of disunity and discord. It may also be a city, but that's hard to tell. Bear with the personal reasoning then consider the reality.
Our first encounter was in the seventies when we stopped at an Italian restaurant on the north side of the east highway. Never had better. That was with us twenty years later as we drove a now dismal east highway two more times. One was in convoy and we got lost which did not help. In between, we once came up from the south and found a great county museum just off the highway downtown, mark a second great plus for KF. Now, delivering the Selectric, we came from the north for the first time and got shoehorned into the downtown. Downtown at Main and 1-97 there was a fine, reasonable, motel, the Maverick. There was a great old hotel in second life as a Mexican "combination plate" of night club and restaurant. There was an antique Ford dealership reborn as a convention hall still proudly bearing the Ford emblem sculpted into the cornice. And within this three block radius there was also a decrepit rooming house overgrown in front with hollyhocks, and alongside its corner lot having twelve orchard trees heavy with fruit. The front window advertised tailoring, and on the front stoop there was a watchful cat. In back of this property was the Klamath River in dikes just twenty feet across moving at a medium fast walk. Mark a third, giant, plus for KF. Finally, leaving town for the mountain pass to Ashland there was not one single gas station enroute forcing us to youey and get lost in the vast damp plain of South KF. Mark a third minus for KF.
Klamath Falls is the junction of north-south transport routes split by Mt Lassen. That's three roads. Add minor roads northwest and northeast for a total of five roads to disunity. The discord has to do with farming . North of Klamath Lake (Correctly, Upper Klamath Lake) there are dryland pines. South of the lake there is a watered plain. Beginning some years ago, possibly triggered by a dry hiatus, my guess, the release of lake water to the plain has came into intense and bitter discord. Google finds a fully developed literature of hate favoring the farmers, and nothing pro-lake as far as I went into the search. You can guess where the Indians are on the matter. Reluctantly I have to leave this unfortunate situation at that.
We finally found a gas station in the plain and got return directions from the attendant (so generously supplied by Oregon law). He was grizzled, articulate, and polite to a fault. I pegged him as one of the farmers, one not responsible for the hate letters Google found, letters like the one by Phyllis Schafly in the August 6, 2001 issue of "Human Events".
Highway 66 from Klamath Falls to Ashland is a lovely drive through high piney woods. Emerging above Ashland, one descends as in the Space Needle elevator, viewstruck. Well, the passenger is viewstruck. The driver is stuck to the wheel with white knuckles. We passed a cyclist. Actually it was an old gent on a bicycle, his long gray hair flying, and he was wearing a rent parka, no helmet. Cyclists are turned out in multicolor spandex. As we rested at a view pullout the old gent sailed by, his jacket full and bye. Must be a story there. On down we came, and had flat road for several miles until finally houses appeared and a fork. Straight was "Downtown two miles " while the bear right was "East Main". Knowing that Bill Skillman was on the east side of i-five and way east of town, I bore right. Soon, we went under i-five causing a tremor of unease. One mile became two, and we were in downtown Ashland. As the town slowly unrolled at twenty five miles an hour and stoplights, we evolved a recovery plan: keep going. Sure enough we came to a freeway sign, took a right and were on i-five southbound someplace well to the north of Ashland. A construction zone came up that closed an exit. Whaaaa? But okay, desired exit 14 was sure to come, and it did, and we took it. Then it went just as Bill Skillman said, at 1/4 mile there was Oak Knoll Drive and we found number 635. The doorbell was relayed to the garage by a dog bark, and from there emerged a trimly built man of indeterminate age standing straight as a ramrod. We went to the car and I opened the trunk. Skillman reached in and lifted out the Selectric as if it were a loaf of bread. Into the garage it disappeared and he returned for the other typewriter, a 1925 Underwood portable. Holding it lovingly he confessed that while he knew more about the Selectric than anything else, what he really liked was to repair antique typewriters. Even to making irreplaceable parts! He may have been disappointed even so when he opened that box because there was a reason the lid was fastened: most of it was in pieces. We said good bye and youeyed back to where we had just turned onto Oak Knoll. Checking traffic, I chanced to read two signs posted across from us on the main road: one read, "Downtown two miles " while the other read "East Main". I wept.
EPILOGUE
When next in Sutherlin. Oregon, and happen to stop at the visitor's center see if the receptionist is a nice old lady with a young nose. If she is, kiss her for me. But for her we would have had to put up with another thirty miles of i-five and because of her we stopped in Yachat. Yachat is a tiny place on the coast just south of the famed dunes and for my money the best stop on the Oregon coast. The dunes of course were one of the reasons we chose to return by the sea. They are so famous that there was a fenced lot back at Sutherlin with enough dune buggies in it to make the dunes look like ant hills.
To pronounce Yachat think yahoo and then yahat. We spent the best night of the trip in Yachat. May she powder that nose with pride. The place was The Yachat Inn and the room with the sweeping view of the ocean cost $78.
The drive north ranged from okay to nice, but it is a toll road. The toll booth is a region of sprawl called Lincoln City. It is a sleazy talus of stalled traffic off of a rock nearby that looks someting like Abe. Abe, you are forgiven for you know not what you have wronged, uh, wrought, uh, worsened, uh, wonged, yeah, wonged. Having paid the toll so to speak we relaxed in Tillamook with a good lunch downtown followed by a giant double scoop at the giant Tillamook cheese place. We were now on the home stretch lacking only one more fillup of gas before re-committing to the five dollar fluid at home. We filled at Montesano. The final decision, Belfair or Olympia, was Belfair and made just minutes before the McCleary turnoff. We made the boat at Southworth with fifteen minutes to spare.