A4 • Friday, February 22, 2019 | Cannon Beach Gazette | CannonBeachGazette.com
Views from the Rock
Bird poop
on the
window
VIEW FROM
THE PORCH
EVE MARX
What’s a typewriter,
grandpa?
I
woke up this morning to brilliant sun,
a gift from the angels who look out on
the Left Edge. It had been raining for
days, a cold, piercing, rain, the kind that
leaks into your collar, sending cold rivulets
down your neck. Luckily my hair is long
enough to function as a cloak or cowl; still,
it’s unpleasant getting drenched. So the gift
of morning sun was extra glorious — until I
noticed the bird poop.
A great robin red breast has been visit-
ing of late. By “great” I mean large. This
big boy has taken up residence in my front
yard. I like robins. They’re cheerful as can
be, and the sight of that great red breast
staring in my front window is heartening.
The robin prefers to perch on a branch of
one of our two apple trees. As I’m work-
ing at my desk, I feel his beady bird eyes
on me.
When I was a child, my parents forced
me to take piano lessons. I wasn’t very
good. The teacher was a lady named Mrs.
Mehich who lived on our street. She had
three pianos in her house and a Siamese
cat named Mu Chi Chi Chi Meow Meow
Meow who hunted birds. One day he got a
robin. Mrs. Mechich, who bore more than
a passing resemblance to a crane or a fl a-
mingo herself, swooped in before he killed
it, and for some weeks nursed it back to
health. She kept it in a cage in the same
room she gave piano lessons. It was an
imperious, proud thing, but she acted like it
was a pet.
When we fi rst moved to this area, I soon
learned how obsessed people are with their
windows which must be sparkly and smear
free. I remarked on this fi xation to our land-
lord, Grant, when we were renting in Gear-
hart. He built that house and also a house
in Cannon Beach. He seemed confused.
“People don’t clean their windows in New
York?” he asked.
Writing this, I’m thinking my day will be
marred if I don’t get busy with the Windex
and some newspaper and get rid of the bird
excrement. I wonder if it’s my pet robin that
did this, and if this is his way of telling me
my yard belongs to him.
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I
had something of a jarring journalis-
tic 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 I don’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 handwritten sheets
and typed it before delivering to the man-
aging editor, who would pass it to the edi-
tor, who would have then passed it to the
assistant editor who would type the doc-
ument 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 Wallace sent
employees 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, Wal-
lace preferred the soporifi c “Pleasantville”
postal address. Each May, Fridays became
holidays, so workers could tend to their
gardens.
Type a letter? There were 25 bod-
ies waiting with carbon paper to make a
correction.
CANNON SHOTS
R.J. MARX
When Spencer Tracy and Robert Red-
ford portrayed real journalists, they inhab-
ited 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 newfan-
gled typing machine” after he saw a Rem-
ington in a Boston store window — in the
1870s.
Twain’s 1883 book, “Life on the Missis-
sippi,” was the fi rst literary work to be com-
pleted on the machine, Michael Rosenwald
of the Washington Post reported last spring.
In small towns, journalism was a fam-
ily affair. I was down at the Cannon Beach
History Center and Museum on Friday as
they kindly opened their archives to me,
old newspaper predecessors to the Gazette.
The Cannon was the fi rst on record,
published by Jack and Jim Dennon in the
late 1940s when a few hundred folks lived
in town and street lights were a big issue.
The Cannon started as a Cannon Beach stu-
dent newspaper — this was before Can-
non Beach merged with the Seaside School
District — with mimeographed headlines
in cursive script.
In the 1990s The Upper Left Edge,
under the supervision of “Editor/Publisher/
Janitor The Beloved Reverend Billy Lloyd
Hults” was an exquisite work of art. Head-
lines read: “Put your good where it will do
the most,” and “Jerry Brown for President.”
It is the physical appearance and tactile
experience that makes print so seductive.
Ironic that it would take America’s
greatest writer Mark Twain to alter technol-
ogy inexorably.
Typewriter gave way to teletype and fax
machines and telexes and bits and bytes,
PCs, iMacs, iPhones and apps. Talk about
a tsunami, but these took place every gen-
eration, 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
’80s when I got my fi rst personal computer,
an AT&T 6300 with dual 5 ¼” fl oppy disk
drives. It’s probably worth something — at
a museum.
Public works employees recently dug up
at 50-year-old time capsule buried under-
ground at the Tolovana Arts Colony. 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.”
National Park Service
American robin (turdus migratorius).
FRIDAY, Feb. 22
Emergency Preparedness Committee, 9 a.m.,
163 E. Gower St.
TUESDAY, March 5
Cannon Beach City Council, 7 p.m., City Hall, 163
E. Gower St.
WEDNESDAY, March 6
Cannon Beach City Council, 5:30 p.m., work ses-
sion, Chamber of Commerce and Escape Lodg-
ing RV Park, 163 E. Gower St.
MONDAY, March 11
Cannon Beach Rural Fire Protection District
Board of Directors, 6 p.m., 188 E. Sunset Blvd.
TUESDAY, March 12
Cannon Beach City Council, 5:30 p.m., work ses-
sion, City Hall, 163 E. Gower St.
WEDNESDAY, March 13
Cannon Beach City Council, budget preliminary
discussions, City Hall, 163 E. Gower St.
MONDAY, March 18
Ecola Creek Watershed Council, 4:30 p.m., City
Hall, 163 E. Gower, Cannon Beach.
TUESDAY, March 19
R.J. Marx
Wikimedia Commons
Publisher
Kari Borgen
Editor
R.J. Marx
Circulation
Manager
Jeremy Feldman
Production
Manager
John D. Bruijn
Advertising
Sales
Holly Larkins
Staff writer
Brenna Visser
Contributing writers
Joseph Bernt
Eve Marx
Bob Dietsche
Nancy McCarthy
Dave Fisher
Cara Mico
Rita Goldfarb
Rain Jordan
CANNON BEACH GAZETTE
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Oregon 97138
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9285
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Cannon Beach Public Works Committee, 9 a.m.,
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