I almost missed celebrating World Typing Day. That would have been sad, as typing has been important to my life and career. But maybe how I became a typist is a story worth telling.
As a teenager in a small town in western Oklahoma, each new school year hit me with this: how do I get out of Physical Education (PE)? Wiser heads than I assumed I would welcome participation in athletics throughout my schooling. But with health struggles and no athleticism, PE classes were an agony of my failure and other students’ bullying.
Until typing gave me a way out.
Typing was part of the school’s “Home Economics” curriculum. “Home Ec” classes also included Gregg shorthand, cooking, home budgeting, sewing, etc., because girls were not expected to participate in athletics to the same degree we boys were. But even though Home Ec was meant for girls, whoever enrolled in the classes could take them. But what boy would choose any Home Ec class, given a chance to display noble athleticism on the playing courts and fields of our little town?
I would. And I couldn’t get in fast enough.
I wish I had been Mrs. Crowder’s star student, but I was an indifferent typist at first. We met in the school’s only upstairs classroom. Other students could easily track Mrs. Crowder’s nerd as he climbed the stairs amid hoots, catcalls, and cries of “Sissy!”
I shrugged it off. I tried to get to class early so I could take a seat at one of the authoritative Underwoods. I loved the authoritative hum when I switched one on. I worked through the simple, repetitive typing exercises until I could convert a page of typed content into another
page of typed content. I got as far as Typing II and must have learned
something. I was gifted a brown Sears Communicator II electric typewriter by
proud parents. And, I eventually got employment.
Later, with an empty bank account, I took a semester
off college and worked as a motor route driver for the Daily News of
Indio, California. I picked up stacks of newspapers, rolled them up with ink-stained fingers like a stack of oversized blunts, secured them with greasy rubber bands, tossed
them into the back of my truck, and nosed down the super-heated desert highway towards
the Salton Sea. My motor route took me southward, down the coast of the
Salton Sea to the town of Bombay Beach. Along the way, I’d stuff newspapers
into kiosks and tubes and toss them into the
yards of trailer parks and other retirement-suited homes.
The
Salton Sea has a story worthy of the telling. It's here. Likewise,
Bombay Beach is quite a Bohemian community these days.
The job got me outdoors rolling my Datsun through the alleys, roads, unmarked streets, and highways of the California desert. It also got me two flat tires: an expense that consumed virtually all my pay. I went back to the office after the second flat.
“I can’t afford this job,” I told my boss. “I’ll spend all my money on tires.”
I wish I could recall his name. The wiry fellow with a mullet and a wisp of a mustache taught me my first lesson in good
management.
“Wait here,” he said and disappeared into the bowels of the
newspaper’s production departments. Some minutes later, he returned.
“Can you type?” he asked.
Could I type. The kid who’d once turned a “Sears Best” Communicator
II electric typewriter into a pile of smoking ruin. (Actually, the typewriter filled with dust which expanded when heated, causing the action to freeze. I would then borrow Dad's black, narrow-carriage IBM Selectric.)
“Yes,” I said.
Boss conducted me to a tiny, windowless conference room and
left me there with no explanation. The room had a small table, chairs, and an
electric typewriter. I waited until a blond woman came in and gave me a typing
test.
I did poorly. I was nervous, my fingers were stiff, and my
anxiety meter was off the charts. Gingerly, I handed my sheaf of freshly typed papers
to the young blond woman. She took them silently and began grading. After
several minutes she looked up.
“Take it again?” she asked.
I did better the second time. My fingers were warmed up and
limber, and I relaxed a bit. This time, she spoke while she graded my paper.
“The first test, you did 88 words per minute. This second
one, you’ve done 115.” Then she looked up. “You need 35 to qualify.”
“Qualify?”
She got up and left. Just down the hall, I heard a door open followed by urgent, muffled voices. She returned with the tall, lanky Arkansan who managed the paper's Production team.
"We need a typesetter,” he said.
Within minutes, I was conducted down the hall to the clattering Typesetting Room. The room had
three typesetting consoles that produced paper tapes with holes punched in them
(an early form of computer storage), and a large proofreading
console with a tape drive and a monitor that showed one line of type at a time.
They put me to work that moment on proofreading, and I set and edited type for the newspaper for six months. When I resumed school, I got a job setting type for my university’s Instructional Materials department. After graduation, I found work as a typesetter for a printing company. When typesetting as a profession evaporated, the victim of word processing, I learned that, too.
Looking back from the twilight of my career, it’s amazing what I’ve gained from typing. The skill is transitioning as typing migrates to mobile device keyboards, and I'm not sure my skills are weathering the change that well. But learning to type has more than paid off my minimal investments.
If I could go back in time, what would I tell that skinny kid stumbling up the stairs to Mrs. Crowder's Typing class?
We'd have to find a new place to meet. The school building burned to the ground a year after I left. Mrs. Crowder's Underwoods pelting down through glowing red embers onto the hallway below.
He figured things out eventually, without my help.
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