I was born and
raised in Milwaukee. Milwaukee was the city where
the typewriter was invented around the time of the
Civil War. Even so, I was a sophomore or junior in
high school before I learned to type.
If I recall, my
teacher's name was Mr. Witte. His name rhymed with
Walter Mitty, a character from fiction who, at that
time, was being played on television by an actor named
Wally Cox. Mr. Witte looked just like Wally Cox, and
acted just like Walter Mitty, on Walter Mitty's off
days. He was short, not very macho, and so the kids
in my class could get away with anything in Typing
101.
In those days,
nobody knew anything about word processors or computers.
Indeed, in my school, nobody even seemed to know much
about typewriters. I still firmly believe that my
school had purchased its typewriters from the original
inventor, or perhaps from Civil War surplus, because,
even now, when I occasionally see an antique typewriter
for sale, invariably it is a much newer model than
the ones we learned on. In fact, once I graduated
from my high school, I never again saw typewriters
like the ones we had in school.
The typewriters
we used had little glass windows in the sides of them.
We surmised that these windows were installed because
typewriters were such a new invention when our typewriters
were made, that people wanted to see how they worked.
To do that, all you had to do was press a key, while
watching through the little windows, and you could
observe everything moving inside. We used to look
in the little windows of our typewriters often. It
was much more interesting than listening to Mr. Witte.
Somehow though,
we learned about margins, and about indenting the
first sentence in a paragraph. To do this on our typewriters,
we had to lift a little lid on the back of the typewriter
where there was a bar with little teeth in it corresponding
to the spaces on a single line of print. If we wanted
to indent our letter five spaces, we counted of five
notches in this bar, pulled out a removable key from
somewhere else on the bar, and inserted the key in
the fifth groove from the left. Then when we hit the
lever that moved the carriage, usually the typewriter
would indent the sentence five spaces. I say usually,
because sometimes someone swiped a couple of those
removable keys. That really made things interesting,
because when that happened, the carriage wouldn't
ring the bell when we got to the end of a line on
our letter. If the bell did ring, you were supposed
to hit the lever and change to the next line in your
letter. If the bell did not ring, we who were watching
our fingers instead of the line we were typing, would
continue blissfully typing on the same line until
we went off the paper. Even then we often didn't notice
that we had typed too far on that line until the carriage,
with our sheet of paper on it, left the typewriter,
and fell on the floor. When that happened, everyone
would laugh (except Mr. Witte) and commence to ring
the bells on their typewriters until the class sounded
like a convention of Good Humor men on a hot day in
July. Generally, it would take Mr. Witte a full five
or ten minutes to restore order, and the student whose
typewriter carriage had fallen on the floor would
have to start all over again on his letter.
Somehow I achieved
a passing grade in Typing 101, and swore never to
touch a typewriter again.
I almost weakened
in that resolve several years later in law school.
On that particular day, we had a professor who told
us that while he wouldn't take off points if we turned
in a paper that was handwritten, he would give "extra
credit" to those papers which were typed. That seemed
fair to me until I thought about it for a moment.
Then I realized that if everybody else typed their
paper, and I was the only one who turned in a handwritten
paper, the results to my grade would be the same as
if he had taken off points for hand written papers!
Thankfully, I conned a dear cousin of mine, who was
a legal secretary, to type up my paper. But it was
close, because, for a while, I seriously considered
taking up typing again, at least until cousin Rosemary
solved the problem for me through her typing skills.
Then came the
computer age.
I resisted as
long as I could. I hired more secretaries for my law
office. I bought the best equipment possible. Still,
gradually the work I needed to get done fell further
and further behind. Finally, after being wooed by
a sweet-talking computer salesman, my partners came
to me with an ultimatum. Our office was going to be
computerized, and I could either get on the band wagon,
in which case they would buy me a computer of my very
own, or I could continue to spit in the face of progress,
and they would get their own machines and leave me
in the dust.
Many of my friends
had already caught the computer "bug" (The term "bug"
is a computer term) and they had spoken very highly
of computers. (My friends even said that "computers
were fun!). So I relented. The firm bought computers.
They even bought one for me.
The first thing
I noticed was that computers, which we are told are
"state of the art", still have a little window in
them, only this window is on the front. Then I noticed
that despite the window, you can't see into the darn
thing to see how it works. (Why have a window if you
can't look through it?)
Despite my misgivings,
I embarked upon the course of learning to use one
of these things, and, just like riding a bicycle (Once
you learn, you don't forget!) the typing lessons that
Mr. Witte labored so valiantly to instill in me, came
back in a rush.
Now, I'm happy
to report, while not yet a computer-whiz, I did manage
to type out this column all by myself. In fact, I've
even ordered another computer to use at home on evenings
and weekends.
Who says you can't
teach an old dog new tricks?
