Click, click, click, was the sound of the typewriter.

The other day, I was sitting across the table from my daughter and she was wearing an initial “R” necklace. I commented on how pretty it was and Valerie told me it was a key off an old typewriter. This is a big seller on eBay now apparently. It was indeed a white letter on black background with a silver rim around it.

Well, this brought back memories. I learned to type on the old Underwood typewriters. No electricity needed for this thing. You had to push the keys down and you got the click, click and more clicks. I think in the old typewriter classes, you were required to type 60 words per minute to pass.

I have a couple of these old typewriters in the garage. When I was working at Brigg-Weaver, one of the accountants cleaned out the storage area near the vault. He put old typewriters, adding machines, comptometers, and all that was in the room that was old equipment in the dumpster…Then pushed the compact button and it was all crushed. That of course was before we knew about recycling. We were ready to tar and feather him.

Personally, I thought it was a dumb thing to do. Many businesses use this type of old equipment for decorating in their offices. The JC Penney building in our area has a store display of the first Penney store with the old equipment in it. We also had a safe where the top was round, with a round opening in to the safe. The base had several rows of drawers with lock and key. I wanted it moved to our new building and put on display in our lobby. No one appreciated my great idea and I don’t know who ended up with the antique safe.

As they say, you keep stuff that is far from valuable and junk stuff that is now considered a collectors item. When we go with my daughter to antique stores, my husband is continually saying, “We had one of those. I wonder what we did with it?”