Hot Ink and Cold Steel

By Gordon Hopkins So, let’s talk a little about marketing.How do you choose a spokesperson? If you go to all the trouble of making a nice product, who do you want to sell that product? Ideally, you want someone super famous whose super famous face will draw attention to your product and make people immediately want to buy it. (Whatever it happens to be.)If you can’t afford Keanu Reeves or Miley Cyrus (and, in all probability, you can’t), your next best bet is to get someone who uses a product like yours and, therefore, comes across as an authority (accurately or not).That is why chefs are an ideal choice to hawk pots and pans. That’s why basketball players sell athletic shoes. So, who do you get to be your spokesperson if your product is a typewriter? Why, a reporter, obviously.That brings me to the very machine I am typing this very column on: a 1958 Cole Steel portable. It is not especially well-regarded among modern typewriter enthusiasts. I’m not sure why.It is actually a rebranded version of a 1950s model made in West Germany called ABC. (Isn’t that name a bit “on the nose” for a typewriter?) It was relabeled for sale in the U.S. by the Cole Steel Equipment Company, which made office furniture and cabinets.Cole Steel was considered an “off brand.” If Smith-Corona was Coke and Remington was Pepsi, then Cole Steel was Bob’s Cola.It was only sold for a few years and never really made a big splash. It offered nothing new at a time when every typewriter manufacturer was scrambling for that next great innovation.Mine is not in the best shape. A platen knob is missing and there is a crack in the base.Nevertheless, I am quite fond of this little typer. It is a good, solid machine and types a nice, clean line. It is also beautiful, with a teardrop shape and metallic green paint job. It looks like a sports car.All in all, I find using my Cole Steel a satisfying typing experience. I guess I’m not the only one. While researching this fine machine, I stumbled across an old ad which featured testimonials from, not one, not two, but three reporters.The most famous of these is undoubtedly John Cameron Swayze. He worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Journal-Post. He worked in television and radio and eventually became the news director for NBC. His true claim to fame, if it can be called that, was as spokesman for Timex watches. His famous catchphrase, “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!” has been parodied so often that young people today recognize they saying without having any idea who said it for what it actually means.Oh, he was also the sixth cousin once removed of Patrick Swayze.The second was Charles Kenneth Banghart. All I know about him is that he was a radio and television reporter and, when he died in 1980, he got a very nice obit in the New York Times. It may not sound like much, but it’s more than most of us get.The third, Quentin Reynolds, was a World War II correspondent and associate editor at Collier's Weekly.Reynolds is probably most famous for a lawsuit. I won’t get into the details because, frankly, the events that led up to the suit are mostly a chain of tit-for-tat exchanges in print between Reynolds and another journalist, Westbrook Pegler, a somewhat odious editor that once praised a racist lynching and concluded his support of interning Japanese Americans during WWII with, “and to hell with habeas corpus.”Pegler claimed Reynolds was a coward and pro-Communist and wrote in one column, “Reynolds was a war profiteer, a social climber, and a man who bent to tie his shoelace when the check was presented in a nightclub or restaurant.”He also accused Reynolds of being a nudist (really).Reynolds asked his wife if he could sue. She is said to have replied, “I'd have divorced you if you didn't.”Accusations of cowardice stung particularly hard for the war correspondent. At the trial, Reynolds’ attorney called to the witness stand a string of famous war-time journalists, including Edward R. Murrow, Walter Kerr, Ken Downs, Lionel Shapiro and John Gunther. Every one told tales of Reynold’s bravery under fire.Reynold’s defense team called 28 characters witnesses altogether. In contrast, Pegler’s attorney did not call one single character witness. Why? According to Reynolds’ attorney, “There isn't another writer that has a worse reputation for inaccuracy, indecency, for recklessness, for malice, for hatred, for viciousness, for besmirching people's characters and destroying them.”Ouch.Long story short: Reynolds won. The jury awarded him $175,001. It was the single biggest judgement for a case of libel to date.I guess my point is, when Quentin Reynolds says, “I've tried them all, American and foreign. It's a Cole Portable for me…It's lighter, faster, cleaner,” you can believe him.

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