Last week, just for antiquity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, I put my paws on something I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t touched in years.<\/p>\n
Ah, the nostalgia! It was fulfilling to experience the freedom, the honest-to-goodness tactile sensation of letting my fingers go where they pleased.<\/p>\n
But lest this seem like the opening scene of a racy novel, let me explain I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m referring to typewriters, nothing more. Coincidentally, the day after I actually typed an address on an envelope (probably the only use for a typewriter nowadays), I read an article in the Sunday Journal about many people who still use the things.<\/p>\n
One of our regular Optic correspondents obviously has opted not to join the word-processor generation; another frequent letter-to-the-editor sender handwrites her submissions.<\/p>\n
Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s go back a while to Immaculate Conception School, in the mid-\u00e2\u20ac\u212250s, when our typing teacher, Sister Mary Helvetica Italica literally escorted me out of the first-year typing class because she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want me taking up space in a room full of beginners. She was wrong, but there was some justification.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
My dad owned an Underwood portable on which I learned to type. But before regarding that as a many-splendored thing, I stress that there were still a number of finer points to typing I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mastered: how to tabulate, how to make corrections, forgetting to double-space between sentences and releasing the shift key in a hurry and causing elevated caps.<\/p>\n
I wanted to learn the finer points, but my first time on the massive standard Royal typewriters in our school lab convinced our teacher I was a trouble-making wiseguy who wanted to show off. It was a reasonable assumption, inasmuch as I typed 55 wpm before entering the class.<\/p>\n
But a simple check of my transcript would have proven my case. That didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work. I sat out Typing I that semester.<\/p>\n
Typewriters weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t easy to come by in those days. My part-time job at the Optic as a reporter for I.C. sports, was helped by the availability of a spare machine where my dad worked, at Werley Auto Co., on Grand, not far from the Optic. Soon, classmates Chris, Charlie and I were submitting most of our homework on typed sheets.<\/p>\n
Once, one of the I.C. pastors, Father Paul Beattie, asked what I wanted to do with my life when I grew up. My answer: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I want to be a typist.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Honestly, at the time I imagined no finer use of manual and digital skills.<\/p>\n
Well, the priest said I ought to use typing as a tool for writing, not as an end in itself. And not long afterward, an earlier classmate, Wilfred Martinez, asked me if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be interested in applying for a job, just like his, at the state hospital in town. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll bet the minute they see how fast you can type, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll put you in the typing pool,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Billy said.<\/p>\n
And so I checked. The supervisor at the time seemed eager to hire me \u00e2\u20ac\u201d first for the summer before my senior year, then full time. But I observed some young people \u00e2\u20ac\u201d most of them blimp-wristed \u00e2\u20ac\u201d at their manual typewriters, plugging away for 15 minutes, taking a minute break, then continuing to type other people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words.<\/p>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe \u00e2\u20ac\u0153carpal tunnel syndrome\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had entered the language in those days, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure the actual condition afflicted many. I never took the job, but somehow ended up doing what our pastor suggested, using typing as a tool.<\/p>\n
Except for then-newish electric typewriters, far too sensitive for my heavy-fingeredness, I never imagined the typewriters could improve much more. The new Royals, for example, with a generous square carriage-return key, the automatic ribbon return and the tab key right next to the space bar were high-tech.<\/p>\n
At the time IBM came out with the Selectric, it appears the old-fashioned keys-in-a-basket machines became obsolete. An IBM representative demonstrated the new machine at the Midwestern newspaper where I worked, and before the demo had concluded, my publisher had ordered a dozen. We were fascinated as we watched that little type ball rotating at blazing speed as it responded to rapid key strokes.<\/p>\n
That flirtation with the ultimate in technology should have ended the chapter on old-fashioned typing machines, but not long after IBM captured the market, the computer revolution came about. So who needs a typewriter anymore? My neighbor and former colleague, Ron Maestas, says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153People ought to save their typewriters in case they need to address an envelope.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
I have generated this entire column on something called the iPad, a device about the size of an issue of National Geographic. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a great go-everywhere, do-everything machine, but typing on it is harder than it seems. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m used to striking distinct keys and key combinations. With the iPad (and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a topic for a future column), it feels as if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m typing on a pane of glass, which I guess I am.<\/p>\n
But I still have affection for the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s model Underwood I bought at an estate sale in Las Vegas. Buying a ribbon for it is virtually impossible, so I settled for any ribbon and performed the messy job of re-spooling it onto the original spools. And it works.<\/p>\n
Old habits die hard. I left full-time teaching of journalism classes a dozen years ago, but even five or six years before that, computers and dot-matrix printers entered the field. I had always required students to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153type all homework, double-space, use wide margins and proofread.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Toward the end of my tenure, typing had already become passe for many students. And technically, they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u0153type\u00e2\u20ac\u009d anymore.<\/p>\n
Regardless, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it a whole lot easier to say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153typed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than \u00e2\u20ac\u0153computer-generated\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? And does anybody proofread anymore? Know they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t; now its called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spell-chequeing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week, just for antiquity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, I put my paws on something I hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t touched in years. Ah, the nostalgia! It was fulfilling to experience the freedom, the honest-to-goodness tactile sensation of letting my fingers go where they pleased. But lest this seem like the opening scene of a racy novel, let me explain I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":791,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790\/revisions\/791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}