A4
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2019
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Cannon Beach History Center and Museum
A newspaper with a message.
Wikimedia Commons
Twain’s typewriter. Ah, things were so much simpler then.
What’s a typewriter, grandpa?
I
had something of a jarring journalistic
moment the other day.
A woman called — on the tele-
phone — and said, “I want to drop off a
letter.”
I said, can you email it?
She said that she doesn’t have a
computer.
I told her that we didn’t have the offi ce
staff to re-input a typed or handwritten
letter. Letters need to be submitted via
email, verifi ed and adhere to a number of
principles.
Fifty years ago someone at the front
desk would have welcomed the letter
writer into the offi ce, taken the handwrit-
ten sheets and typed it before deliver-
ing to the managing editor, who would
pass it to the editor, who would have
then passed it to the assistant editor who
would type the document
and then sent it to the
copy editor before going
back to the editor.
Ah the good old days.
Reader’s Digest founder
and publisher DeWitt
R.J.
Wallace sent employees
MARX
anywhere they wanted
to go once a year, on the
thought that they would
become better, more well-rounded human
beings as a result.
Digest commuters from throughout
the New York Metro area could ride to
work on company buses to the bucolic
offi ces in Pleasantville. Even though
the offi ce was technically in the town of
Chappaqua, Wallace preferred the sopo-
rifi c “Pleasantville” postal address. Each
May, Fridays became holidays, so work-
ers could tend to their gardens.
Type a letter? There were 25 bod-
ies waiting with carbon paper to make a
correction.
When Spencer Tracy and Robert Red-
ford portrayed real journalists, they
inhabited small cities.
So there was an awkward pause on the
phone.
Here was a woman looking to express
herself to put pen to paper and share her
thoughts. She wanted her ideas shared
with the world, but was rendered mute
without a computer. Why she didn’t have
a computer — access? money? choice?
— didn’t really matter.
Think about it: Shakespeare scribed;
our Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln
and everyone until Mark Twain decided
to turn to the typewriter. He called it “the
newfangled typing machine” after he saw
a Remington in a Boston store window
— in the 1870s.
Twain’s 1883 book, “Life on the Mis-
sissippi,” was the fi rst literary work to be
completed on the machine, Michael Ros-
enwald of the Washington Post reported
last spring.
In small towns, journalism was a
family affair. I was down at the Can-
non Beach History Center and Museum
recently as they kindly opened their
Cannon Beach History Center and Museum
The Cannon, one of Cannon Beach’s earliest
journalistic entries.
Wikimedia Commons
Mark Twain didn’t yet have the typewriter at his desk in this 1880 photo.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters should be exclusive to the Cannon Beach Gazette, should be fewer than 350
words and must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. You will be con-
tacted to confi rm authorship. All letters are subject to editing. Letters written in response
to other letter writers should address the issue at hand and, rather than mentioning the
writer by name, should refer to the headline and date the letter was published. Discourse
should be civil and people should be referred to in a respectful manner. Letters in poor
taste will not be printed. Send letters to editor@cannonbeachgazette.com or via our
online form at cannonbeachgazette.com.
archives to me, old
lisher/Janitor The
newspaper pre-
Beloved Rever-
decessors to the
end Billy Lloyd
Gazette.
Hults,” was an
The Cannon
exquisite work
was the fi rst on
of art. Headlines
record, published
read: “Put your
by Jack and Jim
good where it will
Dennon in the
do the most,” and
late 1940s when a
“Jerry Brown for
few hundred folks
President.”
lived in town and
It is the physi-
street lights were
cal appearance and
R.J. Marx/The Daily Astorian tactile experience
a big issue. The
Cannon started as A letter to the editor. Now what do we do?
that makes print so
a Cannon Beach
seductive.
student newspa-
Ironic that it
per — this was before Cannon Beach
would take America’s greatest writer,
merged with the Seaside School District
Mark Twain, to alter technology
— with mimeographed headlines in cur-
inexorably.
sive script.
Typewriters gave way to teletype
In the 1990s The Upper Left Edge,
and fax machines and telexes and bits
under the supervision of “Editor/Pub-
and bytes, PCs, iMacs, iPhones and
Cannon Beach History Center and Museum
Street lights in CB!
apps. Talk about a tsunami, but these
took place every generation, then every
decade, every year, every second.
I gave up my own beloved Hermes
3000 typewriter — so iconic that author
William Kotzwinkle wrote a book with
the same title — for good in the early
1980s when I got my fi rst personal com-
puter, an AT&T 6300 with dual 5¼-inch
fl oppy disk drives. It’s probably worth
something — at a museum.
Public works employees recently dug
up a 50-year-old time capsule buried
underground at the Tolovana Arts Col-
ony. A new capsule was boxed and stored
at Whale Park at a celebration on Feb.
14. History goes by quickly. When 2069
comes, those of us still alive may say, “I
remember the Internet.”
Their descendants will say: “There
you go again, grandpa.”
R.J. Marx is editor of the Seaside Sig-
nal and Cannon Beach Gazette, and cov-
ers South County for The Daily Astorian.