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Day One: Monthly Letter
Dear Readers, Who would think an old typewriter could bring back so many memories? See that pale green portable over there? That's a Hermes Rocket, a portable typewriter made somewhere in Switzerland (of all places) back in the 1950s. It might look like an ordinary typewriter to you -- the kind they don't make any more -- but to me it was a dream machine.
Let me tell you how a little girl from Archie Bunker country (Queens, New York City) ended up with a fancy-shmancy Swiss dream machine. You'll need a little background information. I grew up in a three-family brick house on a tree-lined block that backed up onto the Elmhurst station of the Long Island Railroad, just two fragrant blocks away from the General Diaper Factory. It was a solidly working class neighborhood of working fathers and stay-at-home mother, spiced here and there with occasional dollops of the exotic in the form of airline pilots and stewardesses. (These were the days before we had male and female flight attendants.) Artie the Pilot lived two doors down. He was a curly-haired blond version of Dean Martin, the kind of guy who swaggered down the street with his jacket slung over his shoulder. You just knew he dated the prettiest girls, drank the best booze, and only listened to jazz. (A few years later, Artie took over the JFK to Heathrow route and snagged me Ringo's autograph. He saved John's, Paul's, and George's for his nieces. The rat. I ended up selling Ringo's autograph the first winter Roy and I were married to help pay the rent.) But I digress. The year is 1958. I'm 8 years old, highly impressionable, filled with hopes and dreams and an over-active imagination that invariably spilled over into elaborate stories about pocket horses, Mickey Mantle, and The Bomb. I don't have to tell you how my imagination soared when a pretty young TWA stewardess named Lou Caylor moved into the tiny ground floor apartment and took me under her glamorous -- and protective -- wing. She had short curly icy blond hair and big blue eyes. She wore tight ski pants and big bulky hand-knit sweaters from Ireland. She taught me to sing Silent Night in German, to order chocolate milk and a hamburger in French, and best of all she let me use her sea-foam green portable typewriter any time I wanted to. Oh the pure joy of sitting on her day bed with my back pressed up against the wall, balancing the dream machine on a throw pillow resting on my lap. The words seemed to leap from my fingers to the snowy white pages-- ecstasy! I wrote my very first book on that computer: a 70 page wiseass guide to babysitting called The Peanut Butter and Jelly Set that my mother actually kept all these years. I decorated the cover page with the typewriter art recommended by The Writer Magazine (yes, I was reading The Writer as an eight year old) and wrote a heartfelt dedication to other misunderstood children everywhere. Lou loved it! She encouraged me and she encouraged my dreams same as my parents did but with a difference. My parents loved me. They were stuck with me. They were obliged by virtue of blood ties to love everything I produced. Not so with Lou. She didn't have to like me. She didn't have to read a single word I wrote. Her praise -- and her generosity of spirit -- meant the world to me and, believe it or not, it still does.
I don't know how they did it (and my father doesn't remember) but my parents managed to buy me my very own Hermes Rocket that Christmas and I was off and running. I wrote a second book, an embarrassing rip-off of the Vicki Barr series of airline stewardess books that I absolutely adored. (Vicki was in a dead heat with nurse Cherry Ames for my affections. I had yet to discover Nancy Drew.) Ocean Winds featured my heroine, the blond and beautiful Jan Winston, cruise director for the mighty ocean liner S. S. Maria Carlos. Jan was not only blond and beautiful, but she could speak ten languages fluently, execute a perfect swan dive, do the tango, rhumba, and mambo, and negotiate world peace -- all without smudging her lipstick. I remember storing my manuscript pages in a manila folder that boasted a clipping of the latest Breck Shampoo girl pasted to the front. (Little did I know that years later my office walls would be littered with faces clipped from magazines!) I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm lucky to be living the life I dreamed of as a child, lucky to be able to live inside my imagination, to get paid for playing with words and a keyboard every day of my life. Lou Caylor, if you're out there, thank you for helping to give wings to a little girl's dreams. Who inspired you as a child? Who inspires you now? I'd love to know. Here's what's new for September:
Savor September! With affection,
In stores now:
Archived letters:
August 2001
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September 2001
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