"His Typewriter's Covered and Silent ..." Zach Brogan and the Poetry of Berton Braley

Berton Braley

In early May 1914, a veteran Irish-born reporter, Zachariah Brogan, died a miserable, lonely death beside the Northern Pacific railway line three miles east of Columbus, Montana. When his body was found by a section crew late in the evening of June 1, it was badly decomposed and partly eaten by birds. Brogan had put down a sachel of clothes and note books, rolled up his overcoat, laid his head on it, and died in his sleep. He would have turned 71 on July 12. Word of his death reached his family in Leavenworth, Kansas, on June 4. His son initially believed Zach Brogan had been killed in a railway accident, while on his way from Butte, Montana, to Tacoma, Washington. A printer by trade, he had been working as a newspaper reporter in Butte, but in Leavenworth he was remembered as a world-class checkers player.

Is the journalists' traditional sign-off “30” – also the number of pieces in some versions of the game, or the number of minutes in some matches - an added clue to Brogan’s checkers fixation in Berton Braley’s 1915 poem “The Dead Reporter”. Braley had also worked in Butte as a reporter, and may well have gotten to know Brogan. Brogan certainly seems the sort of colourful character who would have interested Braley.

I came across Braley’s “The Dead Reporter” - published in his collection Songs of the Workaday World - after being alerted by an ex-Irish Press colleague to an updated, PC-ed version of another of Braley’s poems, “Type Was Made To Read”. Braley wrote this for the March 1915 edition of the Linotype Bulletin. As the subject matter is close to my heart, I couldn’t resist adding a fifth stanza to the verse, one referring to the type produced by typewriters. After all, Braley did come from near the home of the typewriter.

Braley was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 29, 1882. He was published for the first time at age 11, a fairytale called “Why The Grass Is Green” in The American Youth. In 1905 he graduated from the University of Wisconsin and began work as a reporter at The Butte Daily Inter-Mountain (predecessor of the Butte Daily Post). The next year Braley switched to The Butte Evening News and later worked for the Daily Gazette. In 1909 he moved to New York and worked for Life magazine and the New York Evening Mail. He was at one time an associate editor of Puck magazine and sold poems to the Saturday Evening Post. Braley joined the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1911 and the next year started writing for McGraw-Hill magazines and for United Press. From 1915-16 Braley was a special correspondent in northern Europe for Collier's and from 1918-1919 as a special correspondent in England, France and Germany. In 1922 he travelled through the Orient and in 1927 was a correspondent in London. He died of cancer in St Petersburg, Pinellas County, Florida, on January 23, 1966, aged 83.

Vale Neil Sheehan (1936-2021)

 

UPI's Saigon bureau chief Neil Sheehan photographed at his typewriter in May 1963.

Neil Sheehan, who died at his home in Washington DC on Thursday, was the New York Times journalist who in 1971 obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg for a series of articles which revealed a secret United States Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War. Sheehan, who was 84, had suffered from complications of Parkinson's disease. See "Now It Can Be Told" (NYT) here.

Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was born to Irish parents in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1936. He graduated from Mount Hermon School (later Northfield Mount Hermon) and from Harvard University with a BA in history (cum laude) in 1958. Sheehan served in the US Army from 1959-62 and was assigned to Korea and then transferred to Tokyo. In Japan he began moonlighting in the Tokyo bureau of United Press International (UPI). Following his discharge, Sheehan spent two years covering the war in Vietnam as UPI's Saigon bureau chief. In 1964 he joined The New York Times and worked the city desk before returning to the Far East, first to Indonesia and then to spend another year in Vietnam. In 1966, he became the Pentagon correspondent and two years later began reporting on the White House as a correspondent on political, diplomatic and military affairs.

Sheehan's 1986 book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam was nominated for the Pulitzer Prizes in Biography and History and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 1990, Sheehan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Henry Koerner and Typewriters

Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer Henry Koerner produced two notable works featuring typewriters – his famous “Figure at a Typewriter” in 1950 and a TIME magazine cover of novelist John Cleever in 1964.

Annabel Patterson’s profile of the artist, Real Portraits: TIME Covers by Henry Koerner, published for an exhibition at the Henry Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty at Yale University in 2015, said, “Two moving portraits of his parents (1945 and 1946) and one of his brother (c 1957), in three completely different styles, not only expressed his melancholy and survivor’s guilt but also his commitment to realism, in however many different manifestations. Even his most George Grosz-like representations of humans carry this creed forward, and it was exquisitely expressed in the 1950 portrait “Figure at a Typewriter”, a portrait of a journalism student who worked with Koerner in his studio in this period. The typewriter and the garden setting, however, are an early statement of the relationship between a person and his or her investment in the world - the trademark, so to speak. Much later, a typewriter would reappear in his TIME portrait of the novelist John Cheever.”

C. C. Little, managing director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, presents Koerner with his poster prize.

Koerner was born Heinrich Sieghart Körner  in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna on August 28, 1915. He was trained in graphic design at Vienna's Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt (1934-36) and worked in the studio of Viktor Theodor Slama, designing posters and book jackets. Following Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled via Milan and Venice to the United States, settling in New York. He was employed as a commercial artist in the Maxwell Bauer Studios in Manhattan and achieved initial success as a poster artist, receiving first prize from the American Society for the Control of Cancer poster competition and two first prizes from the national war poster competition.

In 1943, the Office of War Information hired Koerner in its Graphics Division in New York. He was drafted into the US Army and joined the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington DC. It was there that he made war posters which included "Someone Talked", which won an award from the Museum of Modern Art. After VE Day Koerner was reassigned to Germany, working in Wiesbaden and Berlin, and sketching defendants at the Nuremberg trials.

My Parents I

My Parents II, From LIFE magazine, May 10, 1948

Vanity Fair (Mirror of Life)

After being discharged from the army in 1946, Koerner returned to Vienna to discover that his parents and older brother Kurt had been deported and killed. In Berlin, having joined the Graphics Division of the US Military Government, he painted his first major works, including My Parents II and Vanity Fair (Mirror of Life). These paintings were exhibited in 1947, to international acclaim, in a one-person show at Berlin's Haus am Waldsee - the first exhibition of American modern art in post-war Germany.

At college in Pittsburgh

From 1952-53, Koerner was Artist-in-Residence at Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh. He painted more than 50 portrait covers for TIME between 1955-67. Koerner died on July 4, 1991, in St Pölten, Austria, following complications from a hit-and-run accident on his bicycle in the Wachau in Austria.

The Royal No 10 Typewriter at the Heart of a French Murder Mystery

A 1919 Royal No 10 typewriter, serial number 434080, provided the most damning evidence in one of France’s most infamous criminal cases – one which resulted in 1924 in Breton sawmiller Joseph Marie Dit 'Guillaume' Seznec being sentenced to hard labour in perpetuity on Île Royale in the Cayenne penal colony in French Guiana, for the alleged murder of a shady timber merchant and Finistère conseiller général, Pierre-Marie Quéméneur. Seznec proclaimed his innocence until the day he died, in Paris, aged 75, in 1954, the year after the Devil’s Island colony was closed down. It seems highly likely that the Royal typewriter was “planted” in a chimney in a disused attic in Seznec’s home by a notoriously corrupt French policeman, Pierre Bonny, who had gleefully seized an opportunity to impress his superiors in what turned out to be a botched investigation.

While awaiting trial in September 1924, Seznec wrote to his lawyer Marcel Kahn: “For the typewriter, I never saw it before it was introduced to me … and, admitting that I would have needed a typewriter, I had one on my own provision, which I had lent to M. Duchêne. I would therefore have stopped buying them, especially since I had no intention of trading in them. Needless to say that the place where I was reported to have [hidden] this machine was open to everyone and without any closure and even my employees could perhaps attest that they frequented this attic very often and that they did not ever see a typewriter [there]. Surely then this machine, if at least it was found in this place, was brought after my arrest, because before it was not there, it is still a stroke of revenge.”

Guillaume Seznec

Crooked cop Pierre Bonny

Pierre-Marie Quéméneur

Prosecutors presented unsubstantiated evidence that Seznec had bought the Royal second-hand (though it was only four years old) on June 13, 1923, in Le Havre, 255 miles north of Seznec’s home town of Morlaix, but the court also heard that Seznec had lent his car to a young Breton farmer for three days from June 12.

Quéméneur had disappeared on May 25, 18 days earlier. His body was never found. Letters produced as evidence showed Seznec was not in Le Havre on June 13, but instead in Brest and Saint-Brieuc. Seznec maintained he had never been to Le Havre, and there was a statement from Brest typewriter agent Joseph Auguste Batude that he had gone to see Seznec in Morlaix on May 30. Batude claimed Seznec had asked him, “if it would be possible to change the American keyboard of a machine for a French keyboard”. Batude testified that he replied, “the operation would be expensive and difficult”. One witness said he saw Seznec boarding a train in Paris on June 13, carrying the typewriter under his arm. “How do you know it was a typewriter?” asked Kahn. “The police magistrate told me,” came the reply, sending the courtroom into uproar. Kahn responded by saying, “The defence might not be buying all the witnesses,” a suggestion the prosecution was.

Seznec's home in Morlaix, where the Royal typewriter was found.

There have been 14 subsequent reviews of the Seznec case, all of which have added considerable substance to the suspicion the case against Seznec was manufactured. In 1948 Yvonne Chapelain de la Villeguérin, widow of Colonel Moreau-Lalande, Bonny's superior during World War I, stated that Bonny told her late husband in 1936 that he “found himself obliged to deposit the typewriter … where it was found [by gendarmes].” Of course, the type in a document supposedly signed by Quéméneur and found after his disappearance matched that of the “planted” typewriter*. Henriette Sallé, mistress of Georges de Hainault, one of the witnesses to the alleged purchase of the typewriter by Seznec, said in 1953 that de Hainault confessed to her that he had given false testimony under pressure from Bonny. Louise Héranval, another witness to the purchase of the typewriter by Seznec in 1923, retracted her testimony in 1993. (*The document related to the sale by Quéméneur of the mansion Traon-ar-nez at Plourivo in the Côtes-d'Armor to Seznec at a very low price.)

Seznec on trial at Quimper, capital of the Finistère department of Brittany.

Bonny (1895-1944) was jailed in 1935 on corruption charges and later became known as a traitor and unscrupulous Gestapo collaborator, the executor of the lower works of the Vichy regime. He was executed by firing squad on December 26, 1944. Seznec's post-war defence, based on later testimonies, showed Bonny had orchestrated the conspiracy against Seznec and was the author of false witness statements presented at Seznec's trial.

Seznec and his wife Marie Jeanne Marc on their wedding day on July 18, 1906.

Guillaume Seznec, born in Plomodiern in Finistère on May 1, 1878, had in 1923 entered into an arrangement with Quéméneur to raise funds for the purchase of seven-seater 60hp Cadillacs left behind in France by American forces after World War I. In 1922 a Breton newspaper ran an advert inserted by a Parisian businessman seeking the vehicles. The plan was to sell the cars to the Soviet Union, which during the Russian Revolution was urgently placing orders in the West for items such as cars (and typewriters). Quéméneur disappeared during a trip from Rennes, the capital city of Brittany, to Paris with Seznec, which started on the morning of May 24, 1923 in a Cadillac owned by a man called Lesneven. Seznec returned to Morlaix on May 28, but Quéméneur was never seen again. Even in the absence of a body, an eight-day trial was held at Quimper, capital of the Finistère department of Brittany, and Seznec was found guilty of the murder of Quéméneur on November 4, 1924. With remission on a pardon from General Charles de Gaulle for good behavior, Seznec returned to Paris on July 1, 1947. In 1953 he was reversed into by a van that then drove off and Seznec died of his injuries on February 13, 1954. Fourteen attempts to clear his name since have all failed.

In December 2018, a 90-year-old Norman woman claimed that her father, Georges Morand, secretly buried a corpse in the village of Saint-Lubin-de-la-Haye at the request of one of his friends, Raymond Lainé. The latter was trying to hide the body of someone he killed in Houdan, where Seznec said he had dropped Quéméneur off at a train station on May 25, 1923, before Seznec headed back to Morlaix. This murder mystery continues to tantalize people in France, and in many other parts of the world.

Queens of the Keyboard: How England’s Royal Typewriter Team Conquered Europe (But Not the World)

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, with the Underwood 5 continuing to completely dominate the United States standard typewriter market, American manufacturers Royal and L.C. Smith started to look elsewhere for increased sales. And the best possible place to look offshore was directly across the Atlantic, in Britain, where home-grown models had failed miserably to compete against American imports. Of course, the Underwood 5 was selling well in Britain, too, but rival US companies still saw opportunities to compete for business there. Leaders in the British typewriter industry were acutely aware of this situation, with both the Richardson and Rimington families planning to introduce conventional frontstroke, visible writers such as the Barlock No 16 in Nottingham (1921) and the British and British Empire No 12s (1923-24 adaptations of the Blick-Bar) in the old Salter factory in West Bromwich. As we have seen in a previous post, another vain attempt was being made in the period between 1919-22, with the Conqueror in Leeds. But the first British typewriter to emerge as truly comparable with the best American makes was the Imperial 50 from Leicester, and that didn’t reach the market until 1927.

In the meantime, Royal and L.C. Smith, recognising possible openings in Britain, were at the same time fully aware that a vital part of Underwood’s successful marketing campaign stemmed from their New York-based team of highly-trained, highly-professional speed typists. In the post-war era, this team was led by George Hossfeld and Albert Tangora, who saw off all challengers to Underwood in the world speed typing championships (that is, until Tangora switched camps to Royal in 1935). To Europeans, however, a “world” championship in which only American typists, and American typewriters, competed, was a bit like calling an American baseball playoff championship the “World Series”. Thus in 1921, at Belle Vue, Manchester, on June 11, in Paris on July 24 and at Holborn, London, on September 15, “international matches” took place in speed, accuracy and carbon work events. The challenging contestant put up the stake, ranging from £50 to £100. The following year, on November 12, 1922, the first properly organised European championship was held at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, but under quite different rules than those which applied in the US (one hour’s typing for professionals). In the early days of the European contests, speed events were mostly contested from five to 30 minutes, and usually only the number of keystrokes were published - making the scores look all the more impressive, but far from comparable with US figures. In the US keystrokes were divided by five to get a word count. Using this calculation, in Paris in 1921, Millicent Woodward typed at 136 words a minute over five minutes, yet in Manchester only at 61 words a minute over an hour.

Royal saw all this coming, and in 1921 established an all-female English speed typing team of its own, based at Oakworth College at Hesketh Park, Southport, Lancashire (“secretarial training for ladies, day and boarding”). The “coach” was Frank Wilson-Wood (1887-1953), who had been an adjudicator in Manchester in 1921 and who had promptly recruited Woodward for his team, even though she was 27 at the time. Woodward and another of the Oakworth team went into a countback to decide the first true European title, for 1000 francs in Paris in 1922, and both went on to be labelled the “Queens of the Keyboard” by British newspapers. The inaugural winner (of a cup which rivalled in size and splendour the US trophy) was Woodward, born in Northwich, Cheshire, on December 4, 1893. Woodward would become Britain’s first fully professional speed typist. She had already travelled to the US to compete in the world championships, finishing ninth behind Hossfeld in 1921. Woodward was one place behind her first main English rival, Robert George Curtis (1889-1936), who used a Woodstock before switching to an Underwood three-bank portable in 1922. In 1920 Curtis claimed to have set a new world record in London at 133 words a minute, but it was only over 30 minutes and well short of what Margaret Owen and Hossfeld had previously typed in an hour. Curtis continued to make similar claims up until 1925.

Woodward and Curtis face off in London in 1921.

Millicent Woodward at her Royal.

Eleanor Mitchell first moved to MAP from Royal.

Mitchell then switched to L.C. Smith.

By the mid-1920s the 4ft 6in tall Eleanor Mitchell, from a family of sideshow people, had grabbed the limelight from both Woodward and Curtis. At the age of 16 she was second to Woodward on a countback in Paris in 1922 and went on to win four straight European championships, from 1926-29. Mitchell, born at Chorlton-cum-Hardy in Manchester on January 10, 1906, didn’t remain loyal to Royal, and later used the French-made MAP and finally gave her allegiance to L.C. Smith. She was using an L.C. Smith when she made a guest appearance at the Burnley Express Typewriting Championship in 1930. Woodward (as Mrs Barlow) died at Sale, Cheshire, on New Year's Day 1962, and Mitchell passed away on November 7, 1984.

Mitchell was overtaken as European champion by Odette Piau (born Angers, France, October 6, 1903), who worked for the League of Nations. Piau also used both a MAP and an L.C. Smith. Footage of the French championships and of Piau typing can be seen at 4min 45sec here:

Even though it was a European title Piau won,

this ad ran in dozens of newspapers across the United States.

A much later European champion was Lore Alt, born on November 29, 1925, in the west of Stuttgart. Frau Alt used an Adler to win the title, and was rewarded by Adler’s then owner, Max Grundig, with a TV set and a tape recorder (for which products he was more known). Alt entered her first typing contest in 1950 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, where she arrived with the typewriter in a fruit box. Alt then won the Baden-Württemberg and German championships, and a world title in Monaco in 1955. Two years later she won the title again, in Milan, then in 1959 in Vienna. As far as I know she is still alive, and can be seen interviewed here.

Lore Alt with then Adler owner Max Grundig and her extra prizes.

Frau Alt photographed last November with the clock she won in Monaco in 1955.