On 4 October 2021, the New York Times published the obituary of Pearl Tytell. She had died at her home in Riverdale, The Bronx, on 26 September at the age of 104. Mrs. Tytell had a remarkable history, as you shall read.
Pearl Lily Kessler was born on 29 August 1917 in the Borough of Manhattan, New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was Harry Kessler, a tailor who immigrated from Austria-Hungary, and her mother was Yetta Kessler (née Feigenbaum), who emigrated from Poland when she was 2.
Pearl Kessler went right to work after school and in 1938, she was working in the bookkeeping office of a company in the now-iconic Flatiron Building, at the convergence of 5th Avenue and Broadway just south of Madison Square.
That’s when she met her future husband, Martin Kenneth Tytell (1913-2008), a typewriter sales- and repairman who came looking for a service contract with the company for which Pearl worked. He sold her a typewriter—"I asked for a Royal, and he sold me a Remington,” recalled Mrs. Tytell years later.
Martin Tytell asked Pearl Kessler to dinner, but no date was made for that night so Martin came back the next day and offered, “Come work for me and I’ll marry you.”
“That’s no inducement,” Pearl teased.
Nevertheless, Pearl did go to work for Martin . . . but the marriage didn’t take place until 1943. In 1938, Martin Tytell started the Tytell Typewriter Company on Fulton Street in the Financial District of downtown Manhattan, where a wall sign declared “psychoanalysis for your typewriter, whether it’s frustrated, inhibited, schizoid or what have you.”
Before long, the shop became such an important part of the New York office scene, repairing and customizing all brands and models of typewriters and serving the needs, often idiosyncratic, of the city’s typists, that even the post office knew to deliver mail to the shop addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York.”
Mr. Tytell described some of the stranger requests he fulfilled:
For a well-known mystery writer, I once designed a keyboard with a variety of crosses and bones, and an astronomer once left my office with a typewriter containing a fantastic array of space symbols, such as ringed planets, comets and stars. A few years ago, I had a man ask me to build him a typewriter with question marks—nothing but question marks. . . . I completed the job according to his specifications, but I never did learn what it was all about.
(Could it have been . . . The Riddler?)
The Tytells’ reputation spread beyond New York City and the shop catered to such celebrity typists as writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi’s Honor); journalists Quentin Reynolds (war correspondent), Margaret Bourke-White (photojournalist), David Brinkley (The Huntley-Brinkley Report, NBC), Harrison Salisbury (New York Times), Andy Rooney (“A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” 60 Minutes, CBS), and Charles Kuralt (CBS); Washington, D.C., socialite and political hostess Perle Mesta (“The Hostess with the Mostess”); and political adversaries Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th President of the United States: 1953-61) and Adlai E. Stevenson (Democratic candidate for president, 1952 and 1956).
But that was just the beginning of the Tytells’ adventure in the world of the written—and typewritten—word.
When World War II began for the United States, typewriters needed by the military became scarce because manufacturers had largely converted to the production of other war materiel. Martin Tytell, who in 1943 had joined the army, was asked to convert a load of contraband Siamese (now called Thai) typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to French (preparatory to the D-Day invasion) and other European languages.
(Some sources report that Mr. Tytell enlisted in the Marines, but he himself affirmed that he was in the army during World War II. See his own account, referenced below, of his work on the Alger Hiss appeal.)
Mr. Tytell’s machines were each able to function in several different languages (because the Thai typewriters had 46 typebars; standard American typewriters have 44). In all, there were 17 languages, including, in addition to French, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Danish, and German. They were airdropped to OSS outposts at various combat fronts, but PFC Tytell never learned where.
Ultimately, Martin Tytell developed typewriters in dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects such as Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Korean, Coptic, Sanskrit, and classical and modern Greek.
Mr. Tytell even invented a typewriter with a carriage that moved left to right for languages that are read right to left like Farsi (the language of Iran), Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He’s credited with the creation of the first cursive font—for First Lady Mamie Eisenhower—and the first Teleprompter.
He also designed machines that typed musical notes for musicians and composers and with keyboards adapted for amputees (in two models: one for right- and one for left-handed users) and other wounded veterans and machines for people with impaired sight.
After Martin Tytell was released from the army in 1945, he returned to his shop, where Pearl Tytell had been minding the business (mostly as a rental shop while her husband was away). His work and the special assignments for the military and the OSS, which increased in frequency after the success of the Siamese typewriter conversions, had made him an expert in type faces and their idiosyncrasies and faults.
Then in 1950, the Tytells were introduced to a whole new aspect of the world of typewriters. It changed both their lives and their son’s as well.
Into Martin Tytell’s shop walked a young man who identified himself as a member of the defense team for Alger Hiss (1904-96). Hiss was an official of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations who in 1948 had been accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Less than two months earlier, Hiss had been convicted on two counts of perjury, but was appealing the conviction on the grounds that he’d been the victim of “forgery by typewriter.”
Hiss’s attorney wanted Tytell to prove that his client’s contention was possible by building a typewriter that would mimic the characteristics of Hiss’s Woodstock model so exactly that experts would be fooled. It took Mr. Tytell two years to assemble the necessary parts and build the machine, but he succeeded. Nonetheless, Hiss’s appeal was denied and he served three years and eight months imprisonment on a sentence of two five-year terms.
(Mr. Tytell recounted this entire episode in exacting detail to Harry Kursh, a freelance journalist, in “The $7,500 Typewriter I Built For Alger Hiss” for True magazine in August 1952. It’s posted on The Alger Hiss Story website at http://algerhiss.com/history/the-hiss-case-the-1940s/the-typewriter/forgery-by-typewriter/forging-a-typewriter/ as “Building a Typewriter.”)
Along the way, Martin Tytell became even more expert in typewriter mechanics and type identification and Pearl Tytell became a self-taught authority on typewriter ribbon, paper, and handwriting. In 1951, Pearl opened the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory within Tytell Typewriter.
After Martin and Pearl Tytell hung out their second shingle, they were consulted by police departments, the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of State, as well as city, state, and federal courts. Other clients were large corporations such as CBS, General Electric, Eastern Airlines, Reynolds Aluminum, and Shell Oil, looking into the provenance of counterfeit documents, forged checks, altered forms, or anonymous letters to the CEO.
They were hired by many prestigious law firms to testify in trials and hearings all over the globe as expert witnesses. (That’s usually Pearl Tytell’s assignment; Pamela Tytell [b. 1949], Pearl and Martin’s daughter, said that her “father wasn’t good on the stand.”) Their son, Peter Van Tytell (1945-2020), even testified before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
In a field dominated by men, Pearl Tytell was a rarity. In The Atlantic, Ian Frazier, a writer and humorist who now writes for the New Yorker, described her as
handsome and petite, with unwavering blue eyes and long silver-blonde hair, which she wears in a braid wrapped carefully on the top of her head. For clothes she favors suits in subdued colors or pleated skirts in dark plaid, and neat white blouses with a cameo brooch at the throat. She looks like someone you would believe on the witness stand.
Just to be even-handed, here’s Martin’s self-description: “I have always been on the tall, round and broad-shouldered side.” Ian Frazier took over:
He was wearing a clean white lab coat over a light-blue shirt and a dark-blue bow tie. His head was almost bald on top and fringed with white professor-style side hairs that matched the white of his small moustache. His blue eyes were slitted and wary and humorous, and all his features had a sharpness produced by a lifetime of focusing concentration down to pica size.
Pica is a type size that measures 10 characters to an inch. Its alternative is elite type, which takes 12 characters to make an inch. Typewriters come in one gauge or the other (though when the IBM Selectric was introduced, they could be switched to type in either size so type elements for both pica and elite could be used in the same machine).
Pamela Tytell declared, “Clients often hired my father, but she did all the work.” Pearl Tytell trained her son, Peter, who became a highly regarded document examiner in his own right.
Even after she retired in 2001, Pearl Tytell consulted with her son on his cases. According to his sister, Peter would bring his mother his work: “Every other Sunday,” said Pamela, “he’d show her the cases, and she’d give her opinion.” After Mrs. Tytell’s comments, he’d say, “Boy, some of the things she said, I didn’t think of.”
In testimony to her effectiveness, the prosecutor in one case said, “She was an exceptional witness. She dominated the courtroom. I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.” In a case in which a company had forged documents over which someone had sued, the plaintiff’s lawyer acknowledged that the Tytells’ evidence “was testimony the jury thought very convincing.”
Indeed, many of the cases in which the Tytells presented evidence and expert testimony, the matter never went before a court. A report from the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory would be enough to bring the guilty party to the settlement table. The New York Times reported, for example, in a 1975 suit that was settled in 1980:
When the Tytells found Western Electric had altered documents in order to disprove charges of job discrimination against women and minorities, for example, the company settled out of court, and picked up the lab’s $7,500 tab. “None of their evidence was actually ever admitted into the courtroom,” a spokesman for Western Electric noted. “We conceeded [sic] that we had altered the documents.”
Mrs. Tytell attended New York University in the 1960s and earned a Bachelor of Science degree and then a Master of Arts degree, both in accounting. (At least one source states that it was Pearl Kessler—that is, Mrs. Tytell before she was married—who went to NYU. This could make sense if her degrees were in accounting since her job in 1938 had been in the accounting department of the company.)
In any case, however, this was not the end of Pearl Tytell’s education. She took courses in paper-making and graphology (the study of handwriting); she even lectured at NYU and was a faculty member at the New York Institute of Criminology. The Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory eventually branched out into documents generated by computers and word processors, fax machines, photocopiers, and laser printers.
As always, though, the division of labor, remained the same: Martin Tytell was the expert on typewriters and typewritten documents and Pearl Tytell was the authority on paper, ink, watermarks, and, above all, handwriting.
“I find myself talking to the typewriters sometimes,” proclaimed Mr. Typewriter. “You get so you feel you’re dealing with something that’s alive.” And his wife once said, “Handwriting talks to me. So do typewriters, ink and paper.” One gets the feeling they were the yin and yang of document authentication.
One of Pearl Tytell’s most frequent quests was the unmasking of the anonymous-letter writer, the poison penman. “We get one case a week of poison-pen letters,” she reported. “They can destroy a career, a reputation, a marriage or a whole life.”
One such incident involved a string of unsigned letters received by the patients of a doctor and the parochial school at which he volunteered. In the days before abortion was legal, the letters accused the doctor of performing illegal terminations.
The Tytells had determined from experience that among anonymous letter-writers, many are often middle-aged men and women. Because of one recurring phrase in the letters calling the doctor’s wife “a dirty housewife,” Mrs. Tytell surmised that this letter-writer was a woman related to him. It turned out to be the doctor’s sister.
Typecast as a typewriter repairman, Mr. Tytell played his part and visited the sister’s office. He obtained a sample of her typing and proved her involvement.
The Tytells continued to be on call for high-profile or newsworthy cases, however. In 1963, a little more than ten years after the Hiss appeal, Pearl Tytell disproved the claim by Eugenia Smith (1899-1997) of Chicago that she was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna (1901-18), the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra.
Mrs. Tytell was working for Life magazine this time, and she compared Smith’s Russian handwriting to examples known to have been written by Anastasia Romanova. The document examiner found clear differences between the way Smith wrote the Cyrillic letter е and the way the Grand Duchess had written it. Mrs. Tytell also found other discrepancies, such as confusing the Russian word привить (privit' – ‘inoculate’) for привѣтъ (privet – ‘greetings’).
[The handwriting in question, reproduced in a Life article, “The Case of a New Anastasia” (18 October 1963, pp. 110, 111), is Old Russian, in use until 1918. The letter ѣ (yat – in the phrase “I embrace you’: цѣлую тебя – tseluyu tebya), which has a sound like a e (yeh) in the modern Russian alphabet, no longer exists in Russian; the sign ъ (at the end of ‘greetings’)—it’s not a letter but indicates how the previous letter is pronounced—is the “hard sign” (твёрдый знак – tvyordii znak) and is used only rarely in modern Russian (though it’s still part of the alphabet).]
Mrs. Tytell reported to Life: “In gross appearance alone, the two sets of documents are markedly different. When examined letter by letter, the differences are even sharper.”
(Another, more famous Anastasia imposter was Anna Anderson [1896-1984], on whose story the 1956 Twentieth Century Fox film starring Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner was based. Anderson was ultimately unmasked, however, by DNA tests once all the Romanov bodies were found and identified in 2007.)
Pearl Tytell was also instrumental in the 1982 federal trial of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012), leader of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), for tax evasion. She once again used handwriting analysis, in addition to her knowledge of watermarks and paper-making, to provide expert testimony.
Moon was convicted of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and filing false tax returns and served nearly a year in prison.
(Interestingly, I read Pearl Tytell’s obituary because I wondered if she’d been involved in any of the recent famous instances like the phony Hitler diaries or the George W. Bush letter that scuttled Dan Rather’s career at CBS and the survival of 60 Minutes II. She hadn’t, but her son, Peter, had.
(The 2004 60 Minutes case involved typed memoranda from the files of President Bush’s former Texas Air National Guard commander that purported to show that Bush [43rd President of the United States: 2001 to 2009] had received special treatment while serving in the early 1970s. His National Guard service was the reason Bush, unlike his Democratic opponent for the presidency that election year, Senator John Kerry, didn’t serve in Vietnam.
(After the 60 Minutes segment aired on 8 September 2004, the memoranda’s authenticity was questioned and CBS hired Peter Tytell to examine them. He determined that the documents couldn’t have been typed on the Olympia manual machines used by the Texas Air National Guard at the time and, furthermore, that they’d been written on a computer word processor, technology not even generally available in the early ’70s.
(A 60 Minutes producer and three network executives were fired over the incident—not for complicity in the hoax, but because they’d been careless about vetting the evidence for a segment that made the sitting President of the United States look bad when it aired. They were so anxious to get the segment on the air before Election Day, 2 November, that they let forged documents, false evidence, be presented as factual.
(60 Minutes II, a Wednesday night edition of the long-lived Sunday television magazine program, which had been launched in January 1999, was cancelled a year after the Bush segment was broadcast. Dan Rather [b. 1931], who, in addition to his correspondent’s position at the newsmagazine, was the anchor of the CBS Evening News, left the anchor’s chair in 2005 and the network fired him the following year.)
Typewriters were already things of the past by the 1980s. Proclaimed Peter Tytell, “The new generation doesn’t know what a typewriter is.” Martin Tytell, Mr. Typewriter, retired in 2000; Pearl followed in 2001. Son Peter closed the shop in 2001 and converted the space into an office for the document examination service his parents had started half a century before.
The Tytell Typewriter Company, opened in 1938, was no more. And now, with the death of Peter Tytell last year, so is the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory. It’s not just the end of an era . . . it’s the end of a world—the world of platens and typebars and carriages and inked ribbons and white out and eraser shields and carbon paper.
In the end, what makes Pearl Tytell interesting to me, above the fact that she was one of the few women in the heavily male-dominated field of document authentication and even attained prominence in it, is that, although Mrs. Tytell learned about typewriters from working with her husband in his shop, she deliberately set out to learn about paper-making and handwriting and watermarks and other aspects of document-creation and authenticity in order to make herself an expert in verification. She essentially invented herself.
[When I was in the army and training at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, we had to take a typing course. (This was years before the advent of word processors.) Military Intelligence Special Agents, after all, had to type our reports, the results of all our investigations and activities.
[Our typing teacher was a pretty ancient lady—I’m sorry to say I don’t remember her name after 50 years. She’d been “Miss Typewriter” of 1921 (no joke!). She often instructed us, in all seriousness, that “the typewriter is the agent’s weapon”!
[I didn’t really believe her. I carried a snub-nosed .38 on the job. It fit in the holster better.]
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