As a child, I learned to type on my grandmother's old mechanical Royal. She bought it in college in the '30s and carried it with her through her career (secretary assigned to first the Manhattan Project and then the Secretary of State, then newspaper writer, novelist and English teacher). She could type 150 WPM on a mechanical, and her finger control was so good that even at the end of her life, completely ravaged by multiple cerebral hemorrhages, she could bend the tips of her fingers independently of her other joints. My mother got it when she died, and so that's what I learned on. I'm nowhere near as good as that, but I wish I knew where her typewriter has gone.
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