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A Journey to the Michener Art Museum: Typewriters & More
Gee, Paul, did you really drive to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to see author James Michener’s typewriter? Well, I did go to Manhattan earlier this year to see Robert Caro’s …
Welcome to the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, where they have Michener’s workspace and notes and other memorabilia. I have read a handful of Michener’s books: “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (I wrote a book report in middle school), “Tales of the South Pacific” (you know it by “South Pacific” the movie and musical), and “Space,” which I read on a trip back East in high school when I was living in Southern California. Gotta be honest, I like vintage Michener, before he wrote super-long, super-dense books. (I’m Team Tolstoy and Team (Herman) Wouk if I want an epic.)
But just like with Caro, I’m fascinated by Michener’s writing process. He wrote on an Olympia SM-3 Deluxe. Olympia is the Mercedes-Benz of typewriters, favored by Michener (even after computers), Harlan Ellison, Charles Bukowski, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard, Wallace Stegner and Robert Penn Warren, among others.
Pretty good company, if you ask me.
Neil Simon and I had Olympia SM-9s, which are from the late 1960s (just like me) and it’s probably the best of the bunch. Call me a traditionalist, but my first and favorite typewriters have always been Smith Coronas. The feel is just perfect.
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Silent night, holy night, 2025.
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Apollo 8: The Audacious Moon Mission You Should Know About
Apollo 8 is my favorite space mission — yes, I have favorites because I’m a space nerd — and I started watching this YouTube documentary. Apollo 11 will always be in the history books, but Apollo 8 was awesome and audacious, the first time humans had ever been out of Earth’s gravity and then around the moon.
Apollo 8 is a reminder of the big things we used to do in this country. All the more so since 1968 was such a horrible year overall: The deaths of Bobby Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of American soldiers at the height of the Vietnam War; the unrest in America’s cities; and constant bad headlines all the way around.
This really was a race to the Moon: Apollo 8’s mission changed in secret less than three months before launch because NASA was afraid the Russians were going to beat us to the Moon. The crew believed they had about a one-in-three chance of success. One of the crew members, Bill Anders, said one of the only two times he was ever scared on Apollo 8 was at launch. “Unbelievably violent,” he said. The Saturn V didn’t play, that’s for sure.
Jim Lovell, who died this past August at age 97, was a national treasure, which I think everyone can agree on. He and Bill Anders and Frank Borman not only became the first men around the Moon, they hit every mark. And there’s their reading “Genesis” on Christmas Eve live on TV to every corner of Earth, a mic drop of epic proportions. Plus the classic “earthrise” photo, that photo you’ve seen, that was taken by Bill Anders passing the Moon.
I was too young to see Apollo 8. I’m looking forward to two months from now, when Artemis II and its four astronauts, will lift off from Cape Canaveral and go ’round the Moon for the first time since December 1972.
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Joe Strummer’s ‘Coma Girl’
Remembering the late, great Joe Strummer on the day he died in 2002. If Strummer had never done another thing after The Clash, then he would still have been a legend. But the 50-year-old was in the middle of a creative renaissance, truly in his “roots rock rebel” phase that he sang in the late ’70s. “Coma Girl” is proof of that.
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Remembering Tom Stoppard: A Playwright’s Legacy
RIP to a playwright who showed a new way to look at a classic, and thanks to Mr. Matthews, my English teacher at Coronado High School, who told me about “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in class one day and the Center for Creative Youth writing faculty pointing me back in that direction two years later.
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Echoes of a past crash
Yesterday’s crash of a United Parcel Service MD-11 cargo jet brought back memories of a crash more than four decades ago.
American Airlines Flight 191 was a DC-10 taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport bound for Los Angeles when it lost its left engine as it went airborne, and crashed not too far off the runway. All 273 people aboard were killed on May 25, 1979.
It’s way too early to speculate on the causes of the crash, and I’m not qualified in any way to do that. But it shocked me a bit that the UPS flight lost its left engine, the same as AA 191. Even stranger was the fact that the UPS jet was an MD-11, an updated version of the DC-10.
Dad and I flew into Chicago O’Hare about a week after the crash in early June 1979, and I remember looking down and seeing where it had happened. It was quite obvious, and scary. I also remember flying back from that trip, seeing a lot of DC-10s parked because the FAA had grounded them during the investigation.
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First in, first out
Here’s something that’s never happened to me before: I was the first voter into the polls this morning.
And the only voter for just about all of the time I was in there, even though it was about five or six minutes into the Election Day before I walked in.
Apparently you can get two “I voted” stickers if you are the first in.
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It’s that time of year
Wow, that escalated quickly. One minute, it was Halloween. The next minute, the turkeys are in the freezer case ready for Thanksgiving. Too soon.
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Still not a fan
It’s been two years since I’ve posted “Why I’m Not a Fan of Halloween.”
Guess what? The last 24 months haven’t changed my mind.
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A delicacy of childhood
When I was growing up, this was — for me, at least — the most gourmet of meals: Steamed clams.
I loved ’em. ‘Course, it helped, growing up in the Northeast and being not only close to many restaurants that served them pretty close off the boat but also having grandparents who lived right off the Atlantic Ocean and, especially, having a fisherman next door to them who gave us thousands of clams and quite a few lobsters over the years. I even loved the broth that’s made when you steam them.
I’ve even dug for clams, and especially mussels, myself, along the Massachusetts coast, and gone out on the water with that same lobsterman, as he tended his lobster traps. It’s quite a tradition.
I haven’t had them in a long time and I still didn’t have steamed clams this trip to Massachusetts. But I saw them at the fish counter at the restaurant we went to, Jake’s Seafood Restaurant and Fish Market, at Nantasket Beach, just south of Boston. (If you’re around, it’s quite good.)
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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