It was a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex at 205 South Barton Street in Little Rock, with a driveway alongside the house (outside this window), and on the other side of the driveway, an old unfinished cinderblock ruin that had trees and underbrush growing in it--a good buffer zone. I got the old manual typewriter fom my father's office in Pine Bluff. It had belonged to an albino cousin of my father's named Charlie Orto, who worked in the office and is the only person I can recall seeing who wore a green-shaded accountant's visor. He shot and killed himself in the men's bathroom of the office in 1972. One of Charlie's uncles was named Charles also and had also killed himself, in 1925. The connection to my family is that Eliza Orto Trulock, aunt of the younger Charlie Orto and sister of the older one, was my great grandmother. In 1926, she also committed suicide (she shot herself in the heart, according to the newspaper account). I took possession of the Underwood typewriter in 1976, with Dad's permission. I used it to write several unpublished stories and numerous letters, including eight or ten published letters to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette (and two guest columns) in the ten years I had it. I left the typewriter with one of my mother's first cousins (diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic in the 1960s) who moved into a downtown Little Rock apartment when I moved out in 1986. It eventually wound up in the little attic above the carport at my mother's house on Cherry Street in Pine Bluff, but I couldn't find it after she died in 2005, so its present whereabouts are unknown. The desk also came from Dad's office in 1976. It was painted black and I stripped it down after I got it but it remained stripped and unfinished until 1991, when I sanded it and put a clear polyurethane finish on it. I still use it, and also still have the Danish-designed office chair, a gift from my live-in girlfriend at the time, Karen Jo Simmons (now ex-wife). I messed around with electronics more back then, and had a soldering iron, a variable transformer, and a home-made 5 volt power supply on the desk. I don't do electronics anymore, or very little anyway. I got interested in the electron itself, resulting in my becoming less of a hobbyist and more of a researcher. Well, hold on, I guess what I am is a hobbyist researcher! My stack of books now would be about 100 feet tall if I could stack it straight up. In 1984, I already had in mind moving to Austin, Texas, and had visited there twice. I suppose that's the reason for the Texas Monthly magazine on the typewriter. The move to Austin occurred on my birthday in 1987.
Framed people on the wall are Einstein and Bohr in Belgium about 1927, Dmitri Mendeleev, and Isaac Newton.
