This article in the Sioux City Journal about a retiring typewriter repairman has an interesting line in it:
The brothers also cleaned and bagged typewriters for the Army and Navy and then transported them to Chicago. The typewriters were sealed up and put in an unusual place.
“I asked them, what they do with them overseas,” Bauernfeind said. “They put them in the bottom of the ocean for storage.”
Hmmn, the Army and Navy sent thousands of typewriters to Davy Jones’ locker wrapped in plastic bags? Did they ever retrieve them? Is there a vast storehouse of freshly-sealed and preserved vintage typewriters littering the floor of the ocean somewhere? WHERE?
That’s odd. Why would they want typewriters there? Coming up next month: The secret typewriter factory on the dark side of the moon! :)
Yeah, I saw this too and thought it was pretty bizarre. Something got lost in the telling, I think!
John was telling me the other week about how he buried a skip filled with electric typewriters sometime in the 80’s. I guess… sometimes, you’ve just got to do these things.
Totally worth the dive-time. Salvage ho!
Reminiscent of the “typewriters sunk on D-Day” story, with the difference that this time the sinking was done by the Pentagon, not the Germans (follow link below and search for “20,000” – also although the link is 15 years old it’s a nice tale if you haven’t seen it)
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/type.htm
Maybe there’s just some kind of sunken treasure mythos that pervades the culture of typewriter repairmen. :D
My guess is…this was tongue-in-cheek, meaning that they scrapped the typewriters by dumping them overboard *after* spending the time, money and effort to clean them. Sounds exactly like something our wasteful gov’t would do to me.