The Typewriter Collector and His Favorite Newspaper

This past weekend was action-packed with a soccer game, two baseball games, an ultimate frisbee game and a photo shoot from a helicopter (we'll come back around to those on future blogs.) One of the highlights of the weekend for me, was attending a banquet Saturday night with my mom. It celebrated the 100th Anniversary of The University Star - the student newspaper for Texas State University. It was like a big family reunion seeing past staffers, who are my extended family of aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins, and now, nieces and nephews. My father, Jeff W. Henderson was the faculty advisor for the newspaper from 1974 to 1999 and had quite a legacy with both SWT (now Texas State) and TIPA (Texas Intercollegiate Press Association.) My sister and I grew up in the student newsroom and on the road with TIPA conferences. We saw, first-hand, the digital evolution of print journalism over the past thirty years. From the late 1970's giant typesetting machines (Big Bertha) that spit out columns of text that then needed to be cut and waxed onto physical layouts, to the late-1980's clunky Radio Shack TSR80's (Trash 80's) that prefaced the highly computerized journalism as we know it today.

From the Collection
My father collected typewriters. Me, my mom, and my sister usually add "bless his heart" after that statement. His formative Journalism years involved manual typewriters. He had a true love for these machines and over the years had collected a nice range of models and styles. Yes, my mother is a very patient woman. Dad's love for such equipment even extended to the TSR80, and later, all models of Macs/Apples. I would argue that the Trash80 and early Macs were alien-looking in contrast to the architecture and elegant keys of say, a 1940'-ish Remington Standard, but I also reserve the right to be nostalgic about them when I'm seventy. Always fascinated with mediums for mass communication, Dad had just signed up with Facebook before his death and I'm pretty certain that he would have been blogging and tweeting by now had he remained with us.

Visual Memories
After Dad's death last June, my mom thought it would be good to find new homes for some of the (many) typewriters, but we, also wanted some mementos of them, too. So my husband, who happens to be a commercial photographer, agreed to do some studio shots of the collection. Not long after Dad's passing we got word that the University was changing the name of the Star staff scholarship to be named in honor of Dad. We decided then to do a collage of some of the typewriter images as an "art print" to help raise additional funds for the scholarship. Two of the prints were in the silent auction at Saturday night's banquet. Several attendees mentioned to me and my mom that they were bummed to have been out bid on the prints, so now we have decided to offer them through my husband's web site (click here) and all proceeds will continue to go toward additionally funding the "Jeff W. Henderson University Star Staff Scholarship."

What's Next?
If you are in the field of journalism, especially those of you who are Jeff W. Henderson's past students and colleagues, I feel certain that Dad is still cheering you on to have fun with it and to fully be a part of what's next for the field.