my grandfather’s remington portable, circa 1923. this typewriter’s main claim to fame, according to family lore anyway, is that my grandfather composed some of the original Red Skelton radio episodes on it.

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my father’s father died before i was born, and it is my mother who has kept stories of Grandpa Gordon alive so that my brothers and i had some sense of who our grandfather was. the son of swedish immigrants, traveling salesman, radio announcer, perpetually poor, infinitely big-hearted, fond of malapropisms and word play. he was my grandmother’s second husband, the hometown boy she married after the elopement with her sailor beau at age 17 didn’t work out exactly as planned.

when i dug this typewriter out of the back of a closet in my parents’ house a few years ago, i finally found the family resemblance between myself and this son of swedish immigrants. realizing that he and i were both writers gave me the same shiver of recognition as discovering that my niece and i have the very same hair color. though my mother is also a fine writer and i resemble her in many ways, i like to think that maybe my love for the written word came from my father’s side instead. it would give me something besides my funny, mangled swedish last name and my red hair/pale skin to connect me to this missing part of my family.