Pearl Lily Kessler was born August 29, 1917 in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe: her father, Harry, was an Austrian tailor, and her mother, Yetta (Feigenbaum) Kessler, left Poland when she was 2 years old.
In 1938, Pearl was working in the accounting department of a company in the Flatiron Building in Manhattan when she met her future husband. He came to her office to get a rental and repair contract and, while there, invited her to dinner. Although they didn’t go out that night, he came back the next day and told her, “Come work for me and I’ll marry you.”
She soon went to work for him and they married in 1943, when Mr Tytell was in the army.
In 1950 came a major change for the Tytell business.
Lawyers for Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who was convicted of lying to a grand jury about passing secret information to communist agent Whittaker Chambers, hired Mr. Tytell to prove that the printing pattern of a typewriter can be reproduced. At his sentencing, Mr. Hiss accused Mr. Chambers of committing “typewriter forgery” — making the documents appear to have been produced by Mr. Hiss’ typewriter.
Mr. Tytell spent two years building a typewriter that had a printing pattern indistinguishable from Mr. Hiss’ Woodstock model, to prove that the disputed documents could have been made. Ms. Tytell did the research on the parts and characteristics of the typefaces that needed to be duplicated. Their work became the basis for Mr. Hiss’ appeal, though it was ultimately unsuccessful.
After the Hiss case, Ms. Tytell took courses in paper, photographic ink, type styles and handwriting; in 1951 the couple opened the Tytell Questioned Document Laboratory, which became the center of their work and eventually that of their son. In the 1960s, she graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
“Handwriting speaks to me,” she told the Daily News. “The same goes for typewriters, ink and paper.”