In Memoriam: Meg Jones | Reporter | Raconteur | Friend to Many

 

Meg Jones with Skyriter Typewriter
Photo by J.A. Jablonski (c) 2018

Two years ago Meg Jones, reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and I met up at a coffee shop on Milwaukee's East Side. I had something to give her: a typewriter. Not just any typewriter, a Skyriter. The Skyriter was popular with journalists and war correspondents due its small size, portability (only 9 lbs including its metal case), and reliable action. In the 1970s, the case was updated to a soft-sided thing so that reporters, writers, and travel writers could tuck it under their airplane seats.

Meg Jones was both journalist and war correspondent. I admired the heck out of her and regular read her stories in JSOnline. I wanted her to have her own "reporter's typewriter." Five years before she'd already typed on the very machine I gave her, though she might not have remembered it that day in January 2018.

Meg Jones typing on a Skyriter Typewriter in 2013
Photo by J.A. Jablonski (c) 2018

I used to collect typewriters. In 2013, Meg contacted me. Somehow she'd heard about me and these machines. I posted about that interview here. This is how I described how it came about:

"She googled typewriters AND Milwaukee, and my post about last year's Summer Solstice Type-In came up.  Like any reporter worth her salt, she tracked me down and asked if she could call.  And like a good librarian, I said, "Sure, I have lots of info you could use for a story." 

Meg called, we talked for about 30 minutes.  Then, offhandedly, she asked, "So how many typewriters do you have?"  "Well," I says, "about 25."  Then came that amusing nano-second pause and Meg asked, "Would you mind if I came over to your house to see them? Oh, and could I bring a photographer?"

It was a lovely afternoon's conversation. Meg was delightful and completely interested in everything. Talking to her was like talking to an old friend. She said she liked to make her own short report videos on her phone and might I please type something for background noise. (That's her typing at the end with me holding her phone over her shoulder.)

Her JS Online Video

From 2013 on we'd run into each other now and then, usually on the way in to a Brewers game at Miller Park. She was a serious fan. She'd stop for a friendly chat but then promptly motored off with great intent. She wanted to see everything game-related: batting practice, pregame, everything! One got the feeling that life itself was that to her: to be seen in total.

She was so excited to receive the Skyriter--wanting to know where it came from, if anyone had used it for writing before her. I had to admit that I'd gotten it via eBay and didn't know. We followed each other on Twitter then, and exchanged snail mail addresses to correspond, and for the couple years since she sent me her holiday letters. They were a blast to read! She SO enjoyed her work, her travel, and the people she met. They were travelogues in and of themselves.

Back in September Milwaukee's own Boswell Books hosted Iranian novelist Salar Abdoh for a conversation about his latest book Out of Mesopotamia, in which Abdoh discussed the "endless war" from a Middle Eastern perspective. Meg Jones was the host for the conversation, and oh my, was it fascinating. I've watched a lot of book launch interviews and this was anything but. Abdoh and Jones were of a kind and clearly respected each others' war reporting experiences.

Salar Abdoh Virtual Event for Boswell Book Company
Host: Meg Jones | Runtime: 59 min

Not too long ago I got another of her letters. She told me what she'd been doing and where she'd been of late. Then she thanked me again for the Skyriter. She had it on display in her guest bedroom, she said.

Meg Jones' obituary is here. You can hear her vibrancy, her joy, her professionalism throughout. And you can hear how much she will be missed by her colleagues and friends.

Rest in Peace, Meg. Rest in Power. Thank you for what you gave us all. How you will be missed.

Leaving a place, leaving a space

Image from Pixabay

Growing up, as one of 10 children, personal space was at a premium. There were only 3 bedrooms so we--5 girls and 5 boys--typically doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled up, depending on how many children were in-home at the time. At one point, I shared the largest of the bedrooms with all 4 of my sisters: 2 bunk beds and one single. It didn't look like the above image, but it certainly felt like it.

As the 2nd youngest girl child, though 7th in the lineup, I didn't have much say in which bed was to be mine. For a time I had the bottom bunk and it was heavenly. It meant I had a space--below--to put my stuff. Said stuff was minimal and consisted mostly of a few library books, toys, and shoes. But it was my space and it was a glorious thing to my young self and much treasured.

Image from Pixabay

At some point, and I don't recall why, I got shifted to the upper bunk. There went my private space. Space and privacy are at a premium in a large family. I am sure my siblings felt as aggrieved as I, but one copes. 

Something stuck with me from that experience, though. I developed the ability to make a space my own, no matter what the space configuration, size, or duration and no matter what small amount of furniture I could cobble together from yard sales, Goodwill, or hand-me-overs.[1] An 8x8 foot dorm room in grad school became a haven that I filled with my books, a typewriter, a bike, a guitar, a small (contraband) kitchen setup, and such art as could be tacked to the one open wall without nails. 

 
My first all-my-own apartment was in Washington D.C., in the Turkey Thicket neighborhood of Brookland.[2] It was in a building like the one at the right. It had one bedroom, a skinny bathroom with a rusty tub, a galley kitchen (that was the home of a fair colony of cockroaches), radiators that hissed and clanked, and two wonderful rooms with beat up wooden floors: the small dining and living rooms. There were safety bars on the windows (which didn't stop someone from throwing a kitchen knife through a back porch window one night) and, for a while, a drug dealing duo lived in the flat above. (I recall one evening hearing a knock-down fight up there with lots of yelling. I opened my door to yell at them to keep it down, only to see two of my students fleeing down the stairs, utterly terrified.)

Some 30 years later, some many apartments and two houses later, I retain the make-the-space-good-while-you-have-it mentality. I did this for 2019 where, for most of the year, I worked at a local university. Yesterday was my last day there. I'd been striking the set for a few weeks, bringing home small things I could hand carry: books, pictures, a flock of dinosaur toys. Here are a few pics from my starting weeks to the end.

One of my favorite pieces of "art" was a framed image of Star Trek's Spock, a promotional poster I saved from my D.C. days when I was an assistant manager for the now defunct B. Dalton Bookseller. The poster was for the then, newly published Spock's World, by Diane Duane. [3]

 

The text below the framed Spock is from Duane's book:

“The spear in the Other's heart
is the spear in your own:
you are he.

There is no other wisdom,
and no other hope for us
but that we grow wise.

-attributed to Surak”

The day before my last day--after the wall art had been removed, the dinos taken home, the books donated or returned to my home library, and the curtains taken down--my colleagues threw me a small goodbye party. I'd never had one before; it was so kind of them. 

There are two pieces of the cake left. We'll have them tonight.

___________________________________

Images

[1] Floor Plan. Image from Pixabay 

[2] DC apt building 

[3] Spock's World cover from Abe Books

 

A First Day and a Last Day

Image source/credit

I got a phone call yesterday afternoon from someone I used to work with some 30 years ago.  She called to tell me that someone we both had worked with back then died unexpectedly of a stroke she'd suffered a few days ago.  Her name was Lisa. And although I rarely thought of her in the many years since, I have always cherished her for the gift she gave me shortly before I left the job.

She called me into her office and said she needed to tell me something.  What she told me was that many of my colleagues were finding it difficult to work with me; that I was too full of myself, basically, and that I needed to chill out. She had more to say, describing a few incidents to show me what she meant.  I sat there, stunned and embarrassed.  She was blushing and quiet too as she spoke; it wasn't an easy thing for her to do.

She was right.  I was all that and probably more.  I was young and full of the arrogance a young person can have before they realize there are other people in the world besides oneself. I still blush thinking of our conversation for I still have moments of arrogance. 

Many other things have happened since then to temper my temper and teach me how use my skills for good, but more, and very much because of Lisa, I am more humble and careful with people.  She gave me a gift of a mirror, a mirror I still carry with me.

So today is a day of remembering Lisa and feeling grateful for what she did for me that day. 

Gratitude is a powerful thing.  

L.S.

Requiescat in pace et in amore.

A Clipper Sails West

Image source/credit

Aye, she was a bonny lass and when she set off, sails unfurled and wind-filled, a sigh escaped my lips; I would see her perhaps nevermore.

Which is a fanciful and literary-sounding way of saying, one of my typewriters moved on to another home.  Even better, however, in this transfer, a new Typospherian was born!

Friend and Colleague in all things mad and wonderful, Hoja, visited this weekend.  We call these get-togethers our Art Days. Some days art is made; some days we look at formal art; some days we talk story making and world building; and some days we simply play.  This weekend we did it all! 

A visit to see the 30 Americans exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was rich, complex, sobering, and deeply moving. 

 Milwaukee Art Museum, Quadracci Pavilion, 2002. Credit: John Hursley.

(Left) Nick Cave, Soundsuit 
(Right) Iona Rozeal Brown, Sacrifice #2: it has to last
(after Yoshitoshi's 'Drowsy: the appearance of a harlot of the Meiji era')
[from the MAM 30 Americans Exhibition Gallery]

We also drove North to visit the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; located in Sheboygan, WI. There were two large installation pieces that had the both of us laughing, sighing, and looking so very interested that the museum guard kept a very close eye. We signaled that we would not touch by keeping our hands in our pockets or behind our backs (but, ooooh, we so wanted to touch the works!).

One exhibit, titled Emery Blagdon: The Healing Machine, filled a large room. 

 Installation view of Emery Blagdon: The Healing Machine at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

(All images courtesy John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin)

Emery Blagdon, “The Healing Machine”
(installation view John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2012) (detail),
(c.1955 – 1986), dimensions variable. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection.

[From the exhibition website]

"Emery Oliver Blagdon (1907-1986) grew up on the Sandhills of Nebraska. The intense lightning storms of the Great Plains were a source of wonder for Blagdon, who pondered the immense power of lightning and other natural energies.

In 1955, Blagdon inherited an uncle’s farm and found he had a place to explore his interests as he chose. Having watched both his parents suffer terminal cancer, he hoped he might discover a way to heal pain and illness. Blagdon believed that the earth’s energies might be put to just such a use. He believed they held the inherent power to heal, and he set about making a “machine” to properly channel these powerful forces.

A pastime of bending hay-baling wire into geometric forms grew into a consuming passion for making increasingly complex constructions that incorporated salvaged copper wire, metal foil, magnets, vials of earth, waxed paper, and myriad other substances and materials to collectively charge and heighten the machine’s power. In the early 1960s, Blagdon began installing his fabrications in a barn on the property, later building a workshop with an adjoining shed designed to permanently house the entire machine.

Blagdon ultimately created a complex art environment in which paintings and mixed-media sculptures comingled with mineral elements and electrical conductors. Sufferers of pain or illness were invited in to let the unseen forces work magic. Blagdon called his project The Healing Machine, a work in constant progress wherein he fashioned, arranged, adjusted, and added to the complex installation every day for the next thirty years.

Blagdon’s Healing Machine, comprised of roughly 400 individual elements, is part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center collection. This exhibition presents individual components as well as an installation evoking the original shed environment."

(John Yau has written an expressive review of the exhibit. You can read it here.)

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

The second piece -- Rush to Rest, by New York artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen -- was massive and filled the two largest gallery rooms of the museum.  

 Image source/credit

A near life-long resident of Wisconsin, one of my keenest pleasures has been to see the wintertime ice formations along the Lake Michigan coastline.  Kavanaugh & Nguyen captured not just the vibrancy of the shapes but the deep emotional qualities of frozen movement.  The image above simply cannot capture the grandeur of the work.

[From the exhibition website] Artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen (NY) discuss their new work, Rush to Rest, part of the Uncommon Ground exhibition series at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, April 12–September 22, 2013. Video produced by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

[From the exhibition website] "Rush to Rest, by New York artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, is a response to the colossal seasonal ice sheets that take shape on the Sheboygan lakefront in winter. This immersive installation is not a literal rendering of the accumulated ice pack but rather an aggregate of its physical characteristics. Rush to Rest exaggerates the mass and color of the frozen expanse as well as the tangible manifestations of wind and water that generate it."

NOTE: When "Rush to Rest" closes Sept. 23, the exhibit will be dismantled and recycled.

In the evening, back at home, there was talk of typewriters.  Several times over the past few years I have offered a machine to Hoja.  This time she took me up on the offer and asked if she could try out several to get a feeling for their "personalities."  So I laid out several on the dining room table for her to test drive.

 

  

The Skyriter (bottom, lower right) was not part of the offer, but I wanted her to try that one as most of my friends who spend most of their time on computer keyboards find it the easiest to type on initially.

In the end, she decided on the Smith Corona Clipper.  I was able to locate a near-era user's manual for it in my typewriterly stash, and also threw in a learn-to-type book and new ribbon.  

As you can see, Hoja was delighted!

 We welcome her to The Typosphere!

RECEIVED: A Typer-ly Postcard and Commentary

Ever since the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article about my modest typewriter collection came out two weeks ago, I've received a number of inquiries and comments from folks who have wanted to share their typewriter stories.  Some of those will be posted here as I get them written up.  So it looks like "The Wardrobe" will be very typewriter-focused for a while!

I'll start things off with this fun and thoughtful postcard I received once upon a time from my friend Hoja.

 

Professor Remington Makes the Front Page!

Above the fold!

 

One does not often get the chance to say it, but here I go: I made it to the Front Page this morning! 

A few weeks ago I received an email from Meg Jones, reporter for our local Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  She'd seen the recent NBC News item on the resurgence of typewriters and became curious about the typospherian scene here in Milwaukee. Right outside the offices of the Journal Sentinel is a plaque commemorating Christopher Latham Sholes, she told me: "Of course I was interested!" she said.

"The first typing machine created by Sholes, a Wisconsin state legislator and editor at the Milwaukee Sentinel in the 1860s, was wooden with piano-like keys. He continued to work on the invention, refining the typewriters manufactured at Kleinstubers machine shop, one block north of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel building." [from this morning's article]

(I didn't know that Sholes was an editor for our local paper back then! Somehow I feel this typewriterly obsession of mine has come full circle.)  

She googled typewriters AND Milwaukee, and my post about last year's Summer Solstice Type-In came up.  Like any reporter worth her salt, she tracked me down and asked if she could call.  And like a good librarian, I said, "Sure, I have lots of info you could use for a story." 

Meg called, we talked for about 30 minutes.  Then, offhandedly, she asked, "So how many typewriters do you have?"  "Well," I says, "about 25."  Then came that amusing nano-second pause and Meg asked, "Would you mind if I came over to your house to see them? Oh, and could I bring a photographer?"

That lovely little request turned into one heck of a fun few days.  I got out ALL my machines, something I'd never done.  We put an extra leaf in our dining room table and I was able to get almost all of the machines onto it (3 had to go on the sideboard).  We put up the Professor Remington billboard and a small display of typewriter-related 'accessories.'

Mike De Sisti, Multimedia Picture Editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, came by one afternoon for still shots and video.  He seemed to enjoy seeing the machines as much as I enjoyed showing them! I had fun watching him do his job as well. (I used to do in-class and in-office video work of my lectures when I taught for the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences, so I was curious about the cameras and other technology he used for his work.)

 The green dino on the right found a new home that day too!

The topic of collecting came up.  It got to be a joke for the entire day that while I had these many machines I resisted being called a collector. "The only other thing I've actually, intentionally collected," I told Mike, "is plastic dinosaurs." (In my next life I want to be a paleontologist!)  So I was delighted to hear that Mike's 4-year old daughter is a BIG dino fan! WooHoo! I'd found the perfect recipient for a tall stuffed dino I'd gotten almost 20 years ago in California. Watching Mike leave our flat, with all his camera equipment hanging all over him and the dino tucked under his arm is definitely one of my more special memories of that afternoon.

 Hanging with The Media, a.k.a. Mike De Sisti

[From Mr. De Sisti's Pulitzer Center profile] "Mike De Sisti has been the multimedia picture editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for four years. He oversees multimedia production and training, shoots general still assignments and works on the picture desk as a picture editor. His love of video storytelling started when he was 9 with his first 8mm camera. He has documented several major professional sporting events, including the Super Bowl and the MLB All-Star Game, as well as several presidential races. De Sisti graduated in 1996 from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale with a fine art photography degree."

Mike recently took this and these other photos of the Canada Goose who chose to build her nest this year right on one of our main downtown bridges! You can see more of his work for JSOnline here.

Meg Jones stopped by later that evening. Having googled her beforehand (I'm a librarian, recall, we love to know stuff!), I knew what she looked like and that she'd done some fine work on Wisconsin soldiers and veterans. What I didn't know was what a delight she is to talk with. We chatted for almost two hours, and she got to play with some of the machines. 

As someone who does not do well talking and taking notes, I was impressed by Meg's easy style of interviewing.  She had a small notepad (yes, just like you'd think a 'real' journalist would!) and wrote without much looking at her pen and managing to keep up a friendly and curious flow of conversation all the while. 

I was especially pleased to show her the Smith Corona Skyriter and Facit TP1, both machines favored by journalists.  (In the video for the JSOnline story, the machine she is using at the end is the Skyriter.)

Meg Jones checks out a Smith Corona Skyriter.

Meg Jones in a much more dangerous situation.

[from this JSOnline article] "Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Jones sits atop a sandbag bunker to transmit photos, story and a weblog from the roof of Patrol Base Olson in Samarra, Iraq, in 2005."

See the complete article, "Meg Jones' work in the trenches is honored." at this link.

You can look over some 100 or so items by Meg at the JSOnline at this link.

Rather than swipe all of Meg and Mike's good work, I am going to send you over to the story at the newspaper's site to read the tale, see all the very cool photos, and watch the video. Click on the image to see the article.

Hats off, and many thanks, to Top-Knotch reporter Meg Jones and Ace Photographer, Mike De Sisti!  I had a blast that afternoon and now my Mom gets to brag on one of her kids!

_____________________________________

p.s. The Oliver 5 referred to looks like this:

 Image source/credit

p.p.s  And the NBC News video, in case you missed it: