Cop Car's Beat

Cross that off our bucket list

Never in 84.5 years have I been exposed to the inside of an ambulance or an emergency room (ER). Well, I could say that until this morning. I proved that I am too stupid to live*.

For the past two months, Hunky Husband had been anticipating the air show at McConnell AFB, up the road about seven miles from us. I tried to convince him that we were not "up to" doing the air show bit these days. Did I stick to my guns? Of course not! (I told you that I am too stupid to live.) HH kept talking about it and was convinced that, even if I didn't wish to accompany him, he would go by himself. (Mind you, that among the thousands of cars parked in open fields on the base, he had no hope of finding his car once he walked away from it.) Oh...see that? I can blame HH. Well...not really. I am supposed to be the caregiver. Had I been such a push-over with the girls....

I got a brilliant idea. Knowing that today's forecast was a high temperature in the low 90s and that tomorrow's high temperature was/is to be in the mid 80s, I told HH that we would go early this morning, before the heat set in, to do the static displays. We would return at noon, tomorrow, for the flight shows - scheduled to begin at 1pm with the Thunderbirds flying at 3pm. Oh, yes. Tomorrow is forecasted to be a bit cooler.

HH didn't sleep well last night, so I let him sleep in. (Add one more to my poor decisions.) We arrived at the AFB at about 10am. I made good note of where we were parked so that I would be able to find HH's car upon returning.

We walked over hill and dale (mostly succeeding in dodging gopher holes) to arrive at the inspection gate (think TSA screening) and flight line displays. We spent 30-40 minutes among the static displays. (HH refused drinks when I asked him, and I did no better. We had been told that there would be hydration stations scattered around, but we didn't see them. And we had been allowed to take in empty, plastic water bottles, but no liquids.) Some news coverage photos may be found here. I thought the crowd quite small, but we had arrived relatively early on the first day of a 2-day, 6-hour per day event and would not have seen the largest attendance.

We start our tour of the static displays with one of my favorite aircraft, the A-10 Thunderbolt (referred to, lovingly, as the Warthog) and my very favorite guy (referred to lovingly, as Sweetheart or Hunky Husband.) Taking photos was absolutely point-and-shoot as the bright sun prevented my seeing the view screen.

The next photo shows another golden oldie, a Northrop T-38 Talon trainer. HH chatted with the pilot - comparing flying in the T-38 to flying in a B-52. The T-38 is a really graceful aircraft used as a basic jet trainer. If I recall correctly, it was basically the same aircraft as the Northrop F-5A Freedom Fighter.

According to Northrop Grumman Aircraft, "Every T-38 Talon built by Northrop Grumman was delivered on time, at or below the contract price and with performance as promised. The final T-38 was delivered to the Air Force in 1972."

Next up is a Cessna O-2 Skymaster (lovingly called the "Oscar Deuce").

The next photo shows buildings on the far (western) side of the parallel runways that run, basically, north-and-south. The building indicated by the arrow is the hangar that houses the 184th Wing Air National Guard. HH spent many years as a "weekend warrior" in that building.

At the head of the line of large (heavy) aircraft was the redoubtable, Lockheed C-130 Hercules, one of the most useful craft in USAF, to me. It was one of the models that we analyzed (at Tyndall AFB), setting requirements for repair of bomb-damaged runways & taxiways. It has a short take-off roll and is rugged!

Next comes another aircraft that we worked with on the Rapid Runway Repair Program, The McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender. AFAIK the KC-10 is the largest tanker flown by the US military, although I don't recall how it compares in payload to the Boeing KC-33A that may still be flown by a mid-Eastern country.

All three of the tankers/partial tankers shown in the next photo are Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers. If you wonder why so many tankers were on display, consider the mission of the USAF components at McConnell AFB.

From McConnell AFB In-depth Overview:

Mission

The 22nd Air Refueling Wing is the host unit at McConnell AFB and part of the Air Mobility Command. The 22nd ARW is one of the Air Force's three core tanker wings. The Wing's fleet of KC-135 and KC-46 aircraft provides in-flight all-weather aerial refueling for U.S. and allied military aircraft, as well as airlift for global reach projection of troops, equipment and supplies worldwide. The Wing's 17 squadrons (16 at McConnell, one at Pease Air National Guard Base in New Hampshire) combine for a force of approximately 3,500 active duty military members.

The base is Total Force, hosting the 931st Air Refueling Wing Air Force Reserve and the 184th Wing Air National Guard units.

There are two areas of concern in the next photo: 1) the small blue and gold biplane, a Stearman Kaydet ("The Kaydet, [a] two-seater biplane introduced by the Stearman Aircraft Division of Boeing in Wichita, Kan....") and 2) an array of large aircraft; left-to-right, the Boeing 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter Dreamlifter, an unidentified Boeing-made plane (I'm guessing a Boeing 777, commonly referred to as the Triple Seven), a McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, and two Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers.

Toward the end of our walk-around, I wanted to walk to the north end of the apron (adjacent to Runway 1R) to get a photo of the Boeing Dreamlifter that was on display. HH had been dragging, so I thought nothing of it when he sought shade under a C-17 wing, urging me to go get my photo and come back for him.

The next few photos show some of the previously listed large aircraft, the nearest being the McDonnell Douglas/Boeing C-17 Globemaster III. At this point in our tour, HH opted to shelter in the shade of the C-17's nose while I wandered on down the flightline to photograph the rest of the large aircraft.

The next photo shows a Boeing 747-400 Large Cargo Freighter Dreamlifter which uses McConnell AFB runways a few times most months. A behemoth, it accommodates the fuselage section of Boeing 787 aircraft. It is also used for other transport needs - at a high price, I'm sure.

Upon my return to the C-17, I found HH patiently waiting.

 

I was going to tell HH, "Let's go home." We had done our bit and it was getting too hot. The closer I approached HH the more it became apparent that he had a problem. He told me that he felt lightheaded, so I tried to help him sit on the concrete, but he was too wobbly and uncoordinated to do that, so I called in the two Emergency Medical Technicians who were just feet away with their bicycles. They helped him sit, then lay back.

The show was over for HH and me. I asked the EMTs (note one of the two who were standing with their bicycles quite near HH) to summon a golf cart to take us to HH's car so that I could drive him home - with a stop off at the Emergency Room (ER) that was just three miles on the way toward our home, as they insisted. It was too late for that. The EMTs started HH on a drip of saline solution and summoned an ambulance. In the hassle of getting HH taken care of, I myself passed out. [An EMT thought my heart had stopped, so gave me CPR, but I think he just could not find my pulse** - as has happened in my past 70 years, on occasion.] We ended up sharing a suite at a downtown Wichita hospital ER. We were not held long when our EKGs and blood workups turned out "reasonably normal". 

Dudette arranged for Wonderful GrandDaughter to be the first to greet us at the ER, even before Dudette arrived. (I had called Dudette during our transport phase. HH and I were in separate ambulances because neither ambulance would accommodate two stretchers. Our dear neighbor Adam, an EMT, accompanied HH on his journey.) WGD and Rachie found HH's car (amazingly astute women, eh?) and arrived at our home before we arrived via Dudette's car.

All is well that ends well. We are fine and thankful to the whole village of people who helped us when we were down and out.

__________________________________

*    I am told that making such mistakes does not let me resign from caregiving by ELAINE M. ESHBAUGH, PHD in You Are Going To Mess This Up.

** Back in 1983, I flew to Kansas City to be with my mother and dad when Mom was having double bypass surgery. At one point, in the recovery room, I summoned a nurse when Mom started struggling. During the nurse's ministrations, having feared that Mom was dying, I started going into shock. Telling Mom that I would be right back, I walked a short distance away where I sat on the floor and immediately lost consciousness. I came to with a physician holding either wrist, one saying to the other, "I'm not getting anything, are you?" They couldn't find my pulse and, knowing that my mother had previously had surgery to correct a congenital defect, thought that I might also have a defect. They gave me oxygen for a bit and I was fit enough to fly myself back to Wichita a few hours later.

Hunky Husband's Hitchhiker

Hunky Husband mowed our lawn, this morning, then took a nap before lunch. As I was cleaning up the kitchen after lunch, HH walked in - with a hitchhiker on his shoulder. It didn't wish to hold still for its portrait, but I was able to get several good photos of the hitchhiker, which I'm calling a Walnut Caterpillar. As we have several large, old walnut trees in our woods (and a few small ones in our yard), this is not an unusual find for us. How it hid on HH for such a long time is beyond my ken. HH had no idea of its presence until I picked the caterpillar off of his shoulder.

I had seen a Walnut Caterpillar Moth clinging to the doorframe of the door into the house from the garage, early this morning, but it didn't occur to me to take a photo of it - and it is no longer there. I'll substitute a photo that I found at Texas A&M: Extension Entomology.

ADDITION of 8/30/2022 7:00am - more on Walnut Caterpillar

I took the time to dig a little deeper online and found the following photo on Kansas State University Research & Extension. I like the photo even though it isn't sharply focused because it shows a grouping of Walnut Caterpillars that includes younger and older specimens.

North Carolina State University has the most comprehensive set of relevant photos. Not only has it posted individual photos of younger and older specimens, but also the next photo showing a pupa.

A good resource that I found was . That's a mouthful! It may be accessed at Moth Photographers Group. Finding the resource surprised me. The only thing I ever learned at Mississippi State University was in a hands-on course in laying up composite materials - at their Advanced Composites Institute. (I'm the "no moustache" person next to the tall guy in the back row. We students were a scroungy lot, but the instructors wore ties!)

ADDITION of 8/30/2022 10:12am - on Stu's Oak Processionary caterpillars

Stu's caterpillars are interesting critters. Unlike our Walnut Caterpillars that, at least around our place are not numerous enough to constitute a real threat (thus, I turned loose the caterpillar that had latched onto HH), parts of England and Europe are home to too many Oak Processionary Caterpillars. I found the following photo and paragraphs at Wildlife Insight. 

Oak Processionary caterpillars

on 22 MAY 2020

Oak Processionary Moth caterpillars create amazing patterns when resting in large numbers on the trunks of oak trees. They’re also fascinating to watch when on the move, walking head to tail in a long processional line, hence their name.

However, these caterpillers [sic] have a darker side. They are a growing threat to oak trees as well as a potential health risk in parts of south east of [sic] England.

These were sighted on a tree trunk by Emily Kirt while taking a walk in Kingston upon Thames, Greater London.

The origins of Processionary moths in London are thought to be from eggs imported on timber from the continent where they are a common pest. Small numbers of moths also arrive annually along the south coast as migrants from other European countries such as The Netherlands and France.

As with other invasive pest species from abroad such as The Gypsy Moth and Box Moth caterpillar they seem to be on the increase and spreading in parts of southern England.

Other caterpillars can be seen in the Moth caterpillar galleries and Butterfly caterpillar galleries . Other hairy caterpillars can be seen in the Hairy caterpillar gallery.

B-52s make noise

More than any other system in the world, the Boeing B-52 has provided meaningful work and recompense to Hunky Husband. To a lesser extent, it provided meaningful work and some recompense to me, my having spent a couple of years working on B-52s. The embedded video (nearly 10 minutes), below, was first seen by me at JUST AN EARTH-BOUND MISFIT, I - self-described as "...A "SUCKER" AND A "LOSER" WHO SERVED HER COUNTRY IN THE NAVY." It has been years since I've seen an operational B-52 in person, so this is a nostalgic trip for me. I think the last that I saw was on my way home from work one day - and I've been retired for over 18 years.

 

High Flight - Four United States Air Force (USAF) Boeing B-52H Stratofortress bombers, part of the 23rd Bomb Squadron nicknamed the 'Bomber Baron's', of the 5th Bomb Wing, normally based at Air Force Base Minot in North Dakota, USA, arrive at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, UK on 18th August 2022 for the third USAF 'Bomber Task Force' deployment of 2022 at RAF Fairford. This film shows the final 3 aircraft landing.

 

[Keeping it light, this morning...] I hasten to add that, as a former member of the Naval Reserve, I never knew of a B-52's landing on an aircraft carrier. Additionally, I did the loads on the B-52 landing gear in about 1974, including the wing tip protection wheels (it took a lot of vector rotations to get there), but did not include a carrier landing condition!

 

The following embedded video (nearly 21 minutes) of the same event - but including aircraft in addition to the B-52 - was found when I went to YouTube to embed the above video.

 

 

CobraEmergency - Cold War-era B-52H Stratofortress bombers of the US Air Force arrive in the UK to join NATO forces in Europe. Several passenger & cargo planes also assisted with the deployment. The bomber planes landed at RAF Fairford, a standby airfield for the US Air Forces in Europe. It's the only bomber base of It's [sic] kind in the continent and therefore key to the United States European Command area of military operation.

0:00 - Introduction

0:13 - Atlas Air Boeing 767

1:20 - Kalitta Air Boeing 747

4:35 - US Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster

5:45 - Ministry of Defence Police

6:20 - US Air Force Boeing B-52 Stratofortress x4

20:11 - Outroduction

Recorded: August 18th, 2022

Happy New Year!

New Year's Day, 1958 - Hunky Husband & Cop Car's original wedding at CC's parent's home - attendees were immediate family members, only.

Photo by Haney, Kansas City MO

Wayback to 6/19/1992

My photo scanning efforts keep taking me back into the past. One of the sets of photos that I scanned, this morning, reminded me of an event on 6/19/1992: a huge hailstorm. The following entry is from Wikipedia.

19 June 1992

Wichita, Kansas, USA

Two batches of severe thunderstorms, occurring within 6 hours of each other, dumped hailstones up to 4.5 in (11 cm) in diameter across Sedgwick, including the city of Wichita, and surrounding counties in south-central Kansas. Over 10,000 homes were damaged. The hail left wheat fields in a near total loss. Estimated property damage totaled $500 million with crop damage at $100 million. The thunderstorm episode ranks as one of the worst ever to hit Kansas.[7]

Back Story

In early 1990, our son-in-law, WichiDude, contacted me to let me know that Cessna Aircraft (for whom I had worked 1975-1981) was hiring engineers. At the time, although Hunky Husband and I had remarried in 1988, I was still living in Albuquerque, NM (working in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA) while HH was in his 32nd year with Boeing. By late March, I was making the long drive from San Francisco to Albuquerque, pausing a bit in Albuquerque to process out of my job there, and making the long drive from Albuquerque to Derby, KS. I put in my (2nd) first day of work at Cessna on 4/9/1990. Well and good. HH and I were once again stuffed together into the house in the that we had had built in 1968 - which he still owned and had continuously occupied since that time.

Life is not that simple. Came May, 1991, Boeing sent HH to work in Philadelphia, PA. Fine lot of good it had done me, moving back to Kansas! The hailstorm hit while HH was working in Philadelphia.

Although I normally worked on the west side of Wichita, on the day of the storm I was working on the east side. Thus, my brand new 1992 Ford Taurus SHO car did not take the brunt of the hailstorm as did tens of thousands of cars that day. [The SHO required only the replacement of a small strip of weather stripping on one window - a $100 charge.] For years following the hailstorm, cars drove around our area of the country looking as though they had been systematically beaten with a ball pean hammer.

When I drove home from work a few hours after the storm it was a different matter. The streets, sidewalks, and yards of Derby looked as though they had received a few inches of green snow. The hail had shredded and beaten the leaves to a pulp, mixing them in with the ice of the hail. Some of the streets had been plowed and most of the ice had melted by the time I drove home. Below are more photos of our yard from that day.

In the photo, below, my tire tracks were made after the kind, younger couple who lived across the street (their house is shown in the photo) helped me clear the tangle of limbs that had blocked the drive.  (That kind gesture rather injured my feelings since I was a mere 54 years old at the time and felt perfectly capable of clearing the mess, myself. Rest assured, however, that I accepted their help graciously. Now, 29 years later, I would jump for joy at their help.)

The grass was surely green, but the photo (below) does not show it. The green on the ground in the photo is shredded leaves from our big, old trees. Note that our creek, running between our green yard and the house in the background, is high enough for the water to be seen. I take it that the lawn mower belonged to, and was in the yard of, our nextdoor neighbor. Our mower was in our shed.

Many of the trees along the banks of the creek lost limbs. The creek was overflowing, not only from the amount of water that resulted from hail melt, but also from the clogging of the waterway produced by downed limbs and trees and other debris from the storm.

I'll wind up the post by embedding a video shot during one of the storms that day. The video runs about five minutes, but only gets informative at about 50 seconds in. It appears to me that the videographer was fortunate in missing the brunt of the storm. (Street/highway signs make it easier to follow his path - if one is familiar with Wichita.)

"This video is part of the Tornadoes Kick Media stock video collection from Tony Laubach. To license this footage, please contact Tony Laubach at the email below or through YouTube or Facebook."

 

NOTES:

1. At the beginning of the day, all of the trees around our neighborhood were fully leafed out. It was the stripping action of the hail that bared the trees behind our house in the top photo.
2. In the same photo, to the right of the driveway and above the sidewalk one may see a patch of bare dirt. That is where I had a large maple tree removed just a few weeks before the hailstorm. It had suffered major damage in a windstorm.

Ah, yes, the good old days

Since nothing exciting is going on around here - still - I share a photo that I found online. (I don't recall what I was looking for or where I found the photo). It reminds me of the "Good Old Days" when everything, so many people claim, was perfect - except - we were engaged in World War II, we had no indoor plumbing, and I had already lost two siblings, one of whom could possibly have been saved with penicillin. A friend from our small town had been shot down in China, suffering a broken back in parachuting and unable to communicate with the Chinese peasants who came to his aid.

"What" I hear you ask, "...does Fred Emery [the parachutist] have to do with an early-day telephone switchboard?" Well...Fred's mother, Nettie Emery, was "our" switchboard operator. On rare occasion, if I behaved myself, Nettie allowed me to "help" her at the switchboard in her parlor. Ah, yes, the good old days!

ADDITION of 12/20/2021

1954 August or September - Missouri Air National Guard Summer Camp Communications Center - Casper, Wyoming

Equipment from back-to-front: Field Switchboard (hidden), Commercial Switchboard (staffed by Hunky Husband), and Teletype

It isn't apparent to me what the fourth airman, the only one with his airman's stripe showing, is doing. HH had written the date and place on the back of the photo, along with identifying the four airmen. I believe this to have been HH's first deployment for training in the Air National Guard as he would probably not yet have reached the age of 18 when the photo was taken, his birthday being in early September. (His parents would have had to sign a waiver for him to have joined at age 17.) HH no longer recalls much about most of his Air Guard service of 11 or 12 years.

Penny pinching through sewing

There are some things that I learned to do as a child because we were, in a word, poor! In addition, things were rationed as part of the WWII war effort when I was ages three to seven, making it prudent/necessary for us to "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without". One of the things that I learned to do was to re-make clothing (usually to fit a different person, physically and to their liking) and/or to repair it. This became such an ingrained habit that, though I dislike sewing, I still do it. I was wandering down memory lane in this vein because of a comment string in which Bogie and I engaged on her blog about jeans, wearing jeans out, and the fashion that people have been following of buying pre-torn/shredded jeans at outrageous prices.

1940s

In this photo of me and my brothers from 1943, I am wearing a fetching creation made from sacks in which our flour had come. Although my mother did not sew (Dad's mom taught me how in about 1943-1946), she always found a woman who was clever with a needle to make my dresses and gym suits. Nearly all of my dresses were made from flour sack or feed sack materials until I entered 8th grade, at which time Mom bought me three store-bought dresses.

The above photo was taken at the time my parents bought their first home, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Behind us kids you can see our brand new home with a truck parked in the driveway. That was the truck in which Elder Brother (EB), our parents, and I had lived through the winter as Dad worked as an electrician in construction at various Army Air bases throughout Texas. Younger Brother (YB) was too young to travel with us and stayed with our maternal grandparents on their farm in southwestern Missouri. EB attended 1st grade in at least five schools in Texas before enrolling in a Tulsa school. But I digress.

In addition to wearing feed sack dresses, I took custody of EB's outgrown overalls - which I hated. 

One saving trick in which most of us females, young and old, indulged was adding a ruffle of (usually, cotton) lace to the bottoms of our skirts, making it appear that our petticoats were peaking from beneath our skirts. We got another year's wear from a dress or skirt, that way - more than one year for adult women.

I still use a pillowcase that the late Expert Seamstress made out of a flour sack for my mother, using fabric from Mom's collection, in 1993. I gave the rest of Mom's collection to a friend for use in quilts some years later.

1950s

I was fortunate that one of my mother's five aunts had a daughter a few years older than me. When we visited them in Arkansas in about 1951, the daughter gifted me with some of her outgrown dresses - and my first pair of heels (which gave me a corn that dogged me until I retired in 2004!) These hand-me-downs, I really liked and I felt so stylish when wearing them. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no photos of me were taken wearing any of those clothes.

During the 1950s, my own sewing spanned from making my own school clothes to making baby clothes for Dudette (born 1959). At one point, I used the same chiffon fabric three times in making myself "formal" gowns to wear to dances in 1955 (age 17), 1956 (nearly age 18), and 1958 (age 20). I have no photo of the original dress - a one-shouldered style that I made to wear to a dance at my old high school's winter dance when I was "home for the holidays" in 1955. I do remember that my date was still a junior in high school, but we had been friends for years and ours was a date of convenience. A few months later, I tore that dress apart and used left-over fabric to make a full-skirted, strapless dress for a college dance.

In the winter of 1958, I tore the above dress apart to make the final iteration for that fabric into a halter-style dress to wear to the Military Ball. I had talked dance-shy Hunky Husband into attending and had even made a trip to St Louis to pick up his Air Guard uniform. That was a ball to remember!

We lived in the downstairs apartment of a two-apartment "house" (that would, today, be condemned). It included zero insulation and water pipes that readily froze in winter temperatures. The morning of the dance, we arose to a temperature of 8 degrees Fahrenheit. We couldn't draw fresh water nor could we flush the commode. This at a time when I was still experiencing "morning sickness" during my pregnancy with Dudette. It was dreadful! 

I don't recall how in the world we managed to clean up for the dance; but, I suspect that we walked to the campus and used the facilities in the camera club's darkroom. The darkroom was in the basement with, and across the hall from, the amateur radio club's "shack". At best, I found no way of washing my hair. In the photos, taken in the "shack", one can see that I was not at my prime. Expert Seamstress had helped me do the beading on the midriff of the dress.

We had a great time at the dance. HH was so nervous that he burned a hole in my skirt with his cigarette. To follow up on that act, he promptly spilled his soda on the dress. In later years, we did a fair amount of dancing - but only when he was fortified with libation! (One exception HH made: He would dance with our daughters in our living room during their school days.) That dress found its final assignment as a dress (repaired, of course) worn by the daughter of our babysitter after we moved to Derby KS.

ADDITION of 11/8/2021 - A real seamstress

In her younger years, HH's sister Helen intended to become a fashion designer. She had the talents for it; but, life intervened. She became a professional chef and business owner instead of a fashion designer. At any rate, below are two of the ball gowns that Helen designed, made, and wore when she was 18 and 19.

Answer to the small puzzle

The image in A small puzzle was a part of a page scanned from Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, Volume 4; F.E. Compton & Company, Chicago IL, Printed in 1923. Below is a different cropping of that scan, providing the answer. (The article from which it comes is about inventions.)

Below is a scan (both sides) of the receipt given my grandfather when he bought the set of encyclopedias.

As children, my brothers and I browsed through Grandmother's encyclopedias, frequently. For the past 20+ years, they have been at my fingertips when seated in my reading chair. After all, much of what I look up has not changed since 1923. BTW: The purchase of the encyclopedias predated electrification of their house by about 10 years. Grandfather died in 1933 and I believe that Dad wired that house (and the wash house) shortly thereafter.

More on typewriters

Royal Portable Typewriters for English Language Typing

Joared wrote in a comment to Roberta X made me do it of the keyboard layout of her Royal portable typewriter. I encouraged her to send me a photo of the machine and will post it if Joared has the time/energy/inclination to send one (or more). Until then, I am posting (below) a touch-typing guide that I found online, within an owner's manual. The manual is for a Royal Quiet Deluxe from 1952 which model did not include a separate key for "1" as does Joared's machine. (For those too young to know or to have used such a quaint machine, typists typed a lower case "l" in place of a "1" - which isn't too bad when using a font with serifs such as "l". I'm not sure whether Joared's machine includes that key because it is one year newer than the model addressed in the manual, or whether she bought a more expensive machine.

 

Typewriters for German Language Typing

Thanks to Stu for providing links to a couple of interesting German language typing websites. The photo, below, was found at Stu's link to his own website Eunoia, which posting has comments that include mine that predate some of the information in my own postings on typewriters.

Another view of a similar typewriter keyboard is found at Dreamtime (stock photos).

Note the QWERTZ layout as Stu wrote about in his comment. (I note a difference in the "upper case" ß since, in the photo (above) it seems to be a colon rather than a question mark.)

Here in Germany, we have a bigger alphabet,
the standard is QWERTZUIOP and the Y is bottom left.
U Umlaut is to the right of P
To the right of L we have O Umlaut then A Umlaut
SZ which looks like a Beta is below the question mark.

During the Nazi era there were also separate keys for the SS and for the swastika.

BTW: To access "cut copy and paste" German alphabet letters such as the eszett (ss), ß, I used the GYPU website.

IBM Executive Typewriters for English Language Typing

Other than the Smith Corona portable, about which I wrote in the previously linked posting, the only typewriter that I owned was purchased (used) from a shop in Albuquerque NM during the mid-1980s. It, an IBM Executive (photo of a machine similar to mine, above), made really gorgeous copy! The look of the finished page was enhanced by the proportionate spacing of the letters ("i" took one space while "W" took five spaces, as I recall), by the sans serif font (illustrated in the image, below), and by the machine's using a carbon ribbon (photo below the font image) rather than an inked ribbon. 

I really liked that machine; but, when I moved back to Kansas, knowing that it would be difficult to squeeze my household goods into Hunky Husband's already fully-furnished house, I gave the IBM Executive to Elder Brother and his wife who, at the time, lived in Santa Fe NM. He may/probably does still have it.

Roberta X made me do it

I mentioned in the next previous post, More of this and that - early October, that unlike my new computer keyboard which forces use of the left index finger to input a "6/^", I had been accustomed to using my right index finger for that key. I asked what was "standard" touch-typing for that key. In her comment, Roberta X (RX, henceforth), wrote that her '1942 U. S. Navy touch-typing chart shows finger choice for the "6" key (only!) as "optional" for left or right index finger.'

RX rightly reminds me that, over the many years since Elder Brother and I bought our portable typewriter (in 1951 or maybe 1952, I'm not really sure), the upper case numeral keys have changed. On the 1950s keyboard, the upper case "6" (I have to re-input each of the 6s because my fingers aren't paying attention!) was an underline, "_".

Although I was unable to find the graphic that RX referenced, I did succeed in finding two touch-typing charts (images, below) put out by Smith Corona, the company that made EB's and my portable typewriter. I'm pretty sure that a similar chart was included with the typewriter, explaining my habitual use of my right index finger for the "6" key (yes, I hit the 7 key, AGAIN!)

 

Below is an image of a manual portable typewriter quite similar to EB's and my typewriter - down to the case. [Alert: The rest of this paragraph should be viewed as "not necessarily so". Please see ADDITION at the end of the posting. CC] The only real difference I see is that the label on our typewriter was "SCM" followed by the company name in script. I don't recall whether the company name was Smith Corona or Smith Corona Monroe. I can find photos of "SCM" logos online, but I can find no mention of the company's having gone by Smith Corona Monroe, so I suspect the label included the former of the two.

Thanks, RX!

ADDITION of a few hours later: SCM

So much for my memory. It is like scrambled eggs. Perhaps I would have made more headway in my SCM "research" had I not remembered (incorrectly) that the "M" stood for Monroe - one of the Smith brothers. The "M" was for Marchant. I found History of Smith Corona Corp. which provides the following information about SCM.

Smith & Corona became known as Smith-Corona in 1946 and in 1953 was renamed Smith-Corona Inc. During the postwar years, the company worked to meet the challenge of the newest technology, the electric typewriter, which began to dominate the market in 1948. In 1955, Smith-Corona introduced an electric typewriter for the office. The result of a decade of research, the new machine featured a scientifically sloped keyboard fitted to natural finger movements, more controls in the keyboard area than any other electric typewriter, and automatic repeat actions on all keys. Continuing to branch out into other areas, Smith-Corona merged with Marchant Calculators in September 1958; the resulting company, Smith-Corona Marchant Inc. (SCM), became world renowned as an aggressive and diversified corporation.

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....In 1985 Smith Corona was incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of SCM Corp., and the following year, the London-based conglomerate, Hanson PLC, acquired SMC Corp. ....