Old Tools
To the editor:
Re “The Type That Lasts” (June 5, page B1):
My family had an antique tools shop for 30 years where letterpress equipment was a core staple. Our shop attracted artisans, can-do types, sentimentalists, and the curious.
I recently taught art at a school in New York City for kids with learning challenges and set up my room like an interactive museum where kids could get their hands dirty and feel the wonder of what came before electronics. I brought in an orange 1970s typewriter and a heavy black 1950s rotary phone and stood back.
At first, the kids sniffed. But the clack and whack of a manual typewriter key, the ding of the return lever bell, the washboard rub of the paper as it’s pulled from its barrel when the typist is done — all this entranced them. I could see them waking up to these new senses and skills.
Soon they were lining up to be first to get onto the typewriter, and I had to issue time limits. Piles of poetry were produced, long journal entries were secreted home, and some sneaky expletives were left on the roll for me to find.
The rotary phone was even more startling. Students had no idea how to use it. They wanted to press the numbers, not intuiting that a finger needed to drag the dial face around to hit the metal hitch.
Soon the room was clanging and dinging, happy with industry. Those old tools awakened their senses, their pride of purpose, a connection to the past, and produced a “here-now-ness” in the kids that all the electronics in their lives don’t.
Thank you, David Smith, and all the artisans like him who sing songs of awakeness and of belonging to a culture that makes us feel like we matter.
Ricky Silbersher
Pound Ridge, N.Y.
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