Anyone here remember Blue Chip Stamps? As the economy sinks deeper into the tar pits, I've been waiting for them or something of the sort to return…maybe S&H Green Stamps, which were the big deal for a time. I have a dim memory of my mother getting Green Stamps at some of the local merchants and pasting them into the little booklets. She was saving up for some item that cost eighty zillion stamps and she had acccumlated around thirty zillion of them.
Then one day, all the places she shopped were suddenly converting to Blue Chip Stamps! It was a crisis and a half, fueled by rumors that the Green Stamps empire was going under. Whatever was going to happen, it was obvious she was never going to get the eighty zillion Green Stamps so she hurriedly raced through the catalog, picked out a lower-value item and hurried in to get it. I think it was a pair of tweezers or something that valuable. The scene at the Redemption Center that day was like in It's a Wonderful Life when everyone is storming the bank, trying to get their money out before it fails.
Meanwhile, she began rebuilding the family nest egg, amassing Blue Chips and gluing them into their little booklets, saving up anew for whatever she hadn't been able to get with the Green Stamps. She finally got it, whatever it was, but it was a lot of work.
Then, around 1966, she used Blue Chip Stamps to get me my first typewriter — a blue Olivetti-Underwood Lettera 32. It looked a lot like this. In fact, it looked exactly like this…
I remember a brief moment of horror when we got it at the Blue Chip Redemption Center, which was located on Pico Boulevard near Westwood, right next to the Picwood Theater. The catalog just said "Underwood," which was an old, reliable brand of typewriter…and that's what my mother thought she was getting me. She turned in her books of Blue Chip Stamps, all of them pasted in so neatly. Then we waited for the instrument of my future career to come down the conveyor belt, out from the mysterious back room where all the Blue Chip goodies were kept.
We were unaware that Olivetti, an Italian company, had recently acquired the good old American name of Underwood…so when a box emblazoned "Olivetti" rolled down the belt, she felt baited-and-switched. And for a moment there, I feared that my new typewriter would only type in Italian, which would have meant I'd have to end every noun in a vowel. The clerk at the Redemption Center assured us that it was not an Olivetti. It was an Olivetti-Underwood…and sure enough, there was the name "Underwood" in teensy letters on the carton. We were both skeptical but I carried it home and the darn thing did indeed type. In English.
You couldn't touch-type on it. The keys required too much pressure to respond to anything but forceful thrusts of index fingers. But then I didn't touch-type back then, back before I learned the skill in high school. It's funny. Back then, Typing 101 was kind of a joke class…like a glorified Study Hall. It was something your counselor stuck you in because everything else in Period Three was full and he had to put you somewhere.
In fact, at University High, the Typing classes were even held in the same room where you'd sit if you had a period of Study Hall. Upon reflection though, of all the hours I spent in classrooms at Uni, the ones I spent learning to type have probably come in handier than any others. I almost never have to balance a Redox equation these days and I can't recall the last time I was asked to dissect a frog. It's been at least a year. On the other hand, I type every day of my life, sometimes for most of my waking hours. In fact, I'm typing right this minute, thanks (in part) to Blue Chip Stamps. If they ever make a comeback, I'm going to see if I can pick up another Lettera 32. Whenever my computer crashes, I yearn for that machine.