From the Archives

Yes, Millennials, you can think of this as an early iteration of your laptop. Battery life? Never a problem, and the transition from “sleep” to “on” was seamless. No waiting. It’s a classic portable typewriter of the kind that clickety-clacked on dorm room desks all across campus in the 1950s and ’60s—converting painstaking research, fleeting inspiration, and last-minute invention into orderly black characters with tidy white margins. Weighing in at 20 pounds, portability meant that you could lug it to college in the family car, but not into the classroom. Marilyn Berger Jung ’58 owned this Quiet De Luxe Royal in high school and brought it with her from Cincinnati to Denison, where she remembers writing papers for Wally Chessman, Merle Brown, and Ken Marshall. Jung confesses that she relied on the “hunt-and-peck” technique for shorter papers, until the summer after her junior year when she took a touch-typing class in readiness for senior writing projects. But for long papers, students of that era had the option of hiring one of several local women in Granville who typed student papers for a per-page fee. Recalling the twin ordeals of correcting typos and negotiating footnotes, Jung adds, “whatever they charged, it was worth it!”