Midnight Mutterings | Columnists

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

I’ve never personally known a columnist before I became one of sorts, here on The Orcasonian a few years ago. I hardly know what to think of daily columnists in big newspapers when I find it difficult to produce a tiny product every two weeks. However there have been a few columnists I read regularly when I had access to actual newspapers made of paper. One was Russell Baker who wrote for the New York Times and later wrote a memoir called Growing Up. Baker won two Pulitzers: one for his column, which consisted partly of humorous musings about politics, and one for his memoir: Growing Up. Which I read and loved. In Growing Up he told a couple of funny stories that I still remember after all the decades that followed. Another columnist and humorist I read in my youth was Art Buchwald. Buchwald and Baker both won Pulitzers and they were both friends of E.B. White. (The only things I had in common with Buchwald were that we are both the youngest of four children, and neither of us graduated high school. I don’t think I have anything in common with Russell Baker.)

One other columnist (whom I also didn’t know personally only partly because he died before I was born) was Don Marquis, which began writing a column in the New York Evening Sun in New York City in 1916. I’m not sure when he began to include stories about Archy. The short version is that Archy came into the newsroom after hours and left notes, sometimes poems, for Don the Columnist on Don’s typewriter. In the beginning, everything that Archy wrote was in lower case. As Archy wrote by jumping on the keys, and could not make capital letters as it would require jumping on two keys at once. (Did I mention that Archy was a cockroach?)

The notes that Archy wrote on Marquis’s typewriter were about the happenings in the alley, particularly about Mehitabel the Cat. And other beings who lived the the alley. The columns were eventually gathered in Don Marquis’ first book called Archy and Mehitabel, published in 1917. Later there were several other Archy and Mehitabel books as well as multiple other media forms (ie plays, musicals readings based on Marquis’ (Archie’s) works. I think Marquis (and Archy) were poets as well. In any case you can read about it here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel where you will see a drawing of Archy and a tiny typewriter. You can see other online sources of materials about Don Marquis and Archie.

I came to know about Archy and Mehitabel when I was a seventeen year old freshman in college, before you were born. I was taking a chemistry course and was complaining in my lab group that I didn’t think I had done very well on a test. As in my other classes as well, I didn’t own a textbook and was frequently late or absent from class as the campus was
large and my sense of direction and geographical memory were very poor, then as now. I actually didn’t realize that my handicap was not shared by everyone and marveled at how other students  arrived at the correct building and room and on time at that. (An i-Phone would have saved me a lot of grief for sure.) I was already living on Orcas when the mighty
GPS arrived from heaven, though I didn’t own one until they showed up on phones. In any case, the graduate assistant for the chemistry class somehow took pity on me and became my friend and helper. (Of course it may have been because I was the only girl in the class, which, for once, worked in my favor.) In any case, he, inexplicably, gave me a copy of Archy and Mehitabel, which I read that night.

I still remember some of it, particularly the bit about when Mehitabel was criticized for leaving her newborn kittens in the rain barrel, she retorted that she was not to blame, that the rain barrel was dry when she left her babies there. My copy is long lost and the Orcas Library does not currently own one, though the first book of the series is still in print. I haven’t read the others, and don’t know if they are still in print as well. I plan to get a copy of Archy and Mehitabel. If it is a good as I remember, I’d donate it to the library if I can bear to part with it.

And now about the typewriter Archy used for his notes to Don Marquis: When I was in, maybe, seventh grade, my mother thought I had too much time on my hands and convinced a friend’s mother that her daughter was in the same circumstance. Thus we were enrolled in a typing class in a secretarial course in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m not sure what transportation we had, since we only had horses to get together from our homes. but we showed up for a few weeks to learn to type on the same sort of manual  typewriters that Don and Archy used. I suppose the other, more adult students, all women of course, had stronger hands, but I was the worst student in the class and my friend was second worst. My little finger on my left hand just could not make the q work, which was a problem as my formal name, which was at the top of every assignment contained a q. We had timed tests and I never got above 20 words/minute,
with a lot of errors. Five minutes after graduation from college when I arrived in New York City, I bought a tiny, manual Olivetti which won a design prize, but it didn’t solve my typing incompetence, even though I could make the q work. I don’t know what happened to that Olivetti, which must have been stolen or lost in a move. But I still miss it.

Then, when I lived in Seattle forty years ago, I bought one of those Archy typewriters, a Royal, at a yard sale and carried it four or five blocks home. The ribbon was dry and useless until my neighbor sprayed it with acetone which revived it completely. I still have that old typewriter, although the q/3 key does not work and  that’s still in my name. And, it is about four times heavier than it was when I bought it and carried it home all those years ago. Last week I moved it to a different table and could barely lift it. I amazed at how  much heavier things get as they age. And I need to get some more acetone to revive the ribbon too.

I’m still a terrible typist even when Apple gives me all the help a normal person should need.

Friends who stay at my house sometimes leave me faint notes on that old machine, and I love the notes. Still, I’m not sure they are ready for this column. I suppose I need a cockroach for that, and a cockroach would likely be a better typist than I am.