July 8, 2018

I read in this morning's Plain Dealer that the Sears store at our mall is closing. It's been a long, drawn-out decline since Sears' glory days. When I was a boy in New Castle, PA, it was our go-to store for almost everything, tools, clothes, appliances, auto parts, toys. (It was called Sears, Roebuck, & Co. – Oxford comma ruled uncontested then.) Jack McKee, the manager, was even a neighbor.

We pored over the catalog, especially the toys. I remember you could even order live pets through the catalog! Mom would place our order and you'd get a phone call saying you could pick it up at the store's catalog desk. Same with J.C. Penney. As a teen, I even had a reprint copy of the 1897 catalog, an all-inclusive compendium of life in the late 19th century.

Sears has been a lousy store for decades now. They bought and ruined the Land's End brand. Their Craftsman tools are still good, and I've bought some auto parts there, but I haven't been there for years. If I hadn't read the article, I might not have known it was closing. But... the Sears name will live on in my life, in the avatar of a Forecast 12 typewriter.

This sleek, midcentury baby has an almost Jetsons look to it. It is also practically indestructible. My dad sent me away to college in 1970 (as he did for my brothers and sister) with a brand-new model in a hard-shell case, with my initials MWG crudely slapped on the side in red nail polish. 

Mark: That looks terrible.

Dad: It's so nobody will steal it.

Mark: Who would even WANT it if it looks like that?

Dad: Exactly.

No one stole it.

If you're looking for his handiwork in the photo, this isn't that exact typewriter. In a downsizing fit I sold it in Lakewood. Then I missed it. So I bought another one on eBay, and use it to type weekly letters to my children and other favored souls. But in those pre-laptop days, a typewriter was your most valuable asset at college (along with my slide rule). My dad knew.

The Sears Forecast 12 was made by Smith-Corona, so it's solid and will last forever, although mine could use a good cleaning. I have a couple of other last-of-the-manual-line Smith-Coronas, and consider them the sturdiest, finest typewriters made, the peak of the portables. But Sears somehow got Smith-Corona to include a few options that don't come in any other package. With these features, it might be the best manual typewriter ever made. 

This one has larger pica-size type. (We didn't use the word "font".) I chose elite for college because you could pack more text on paper and I was cheap, but my heart always liked the larger pica size. (There was an "italic" script option, but yuck.) It also came with expensive ribbon cartridges that could type in FOUR COLORS. I saved the one that came with the machine for history's sake, but I use two-color now and really don't even need that. Still, it was a pretty spiffy effect when you handed in a paper, and I used the four-color cartridges for years. The paragraph indent setting alone was invaluable. There is also a half-space button, for when you discover too late, after typing page after page, that you left out a character early on. That little half-space button lets you insert it. Spelling sometimes affected your grade, depending on the professor's whim, so although you couldn't hide your error, you could make the word read correctly. You could even white-out or erase a whole word and type a whole half-spaced word over it. There was also variable line spacing, which could be used in a similar way.

Click through the gallery below to see all the features.

It had fool-proof and easy margin and tab settings, and since I took a lot of science classes, there was a lot of formatting to be done, so those features helped. We were pretty sophisticated considering it was all done manually.

Also there was one button that verged on electric-typewriter territory, and I've never seen it in any other model, the repeat button. When you press it, the carriage moves lickety-split and saves all kinds of time when you're correcting errors.

But the feature that absolutely put it over the top was inside: the Change-A-Type. There was a little box under the lid with changeable keytop caps, and type bits. The typewriter had a pretty complete keyboard already – it had a 1/2 and 1/4, a real numeral 1 (which on older models we faked with a lower-case L) and exclamation point (faked with an apostrophe and a period), and + and =. But this feature let you choose 8 additional characters. Since I was pursuing forestry, I chose the engineeering option, with a degree symbol, pi, plus/minus, a division sign, exponents for squared and cubed, and square brackets. These were truly useful then, but were a bit of a pain and I never really use them today. My sister, who was more liberal arts, chose and used the "international" kit for language symbols, which is what came with this typewriter.

I found the whole available range online:

Anyway, it's Sunday, so I'm about to type my weekly letters to Seattle and Pittsburgh. It's fun to have such a grand machine to crank them out on. The Sears name isn't disappearing any time soon in our house.