Not My Type
The Source
I first thought it was a joke, but Dad claims it actually happened. The two gals walked by his kitchen table, saw his typewriter and one of them said, “What is that?” It made us all feel old. My father has kept a journal/diary/memoir for many years and his files contain dozens of pages of his musings over the years. Since he took up residence in one of Cedarhurst’s executive suites my brother took him his typewriter. In case these memoirs are worth big bucks some day we want to keep him writing. He said that a couple of the crack Cedarhurst staff were working in his room when they saw this strange object from days gone by. . . a typewriter. They were flummoxed. The first typewriter with any commercial success was invented in 1878 by Christopher Latham Sholes and a couple of friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. However, Mr. Sholes quickly disowned the machine and refused to recommend it to anyone. Inventors had been turning out models with variable success since the 16th century but it was American business and the need to turn words out quickly that caused companies like Remington, IBM, Olivetti, Royal, and Smith Corona to start mass producing the rascals. The first ones were expensive but when someone invented the “shift” key the price went down. Up until that time typewriters had a separate keyboard for uppercase letters. That’s a lot of buttons. The earliest typewriters were decorated with floral patterns since it was assumed that only female secretaries would use them. Mark Twain claimed that he was the first important writer to submit a work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to a publisher, but off course Twain and the truth were often strangers. I can remember being dragged grudgingly into the almost-computer age as my friend Tom Burrus harangued me about buying a word processor. He claimed that since I spent most of my life behind a keyboard that this new-fangled invention would save me loads of time. I put him off as long as I could then gave in and purchased my first word processor which was put out of date by the computer in approximately the following week. I have no idea how many computers I’ve owned since then, but I’m a long way from that blank Smith Corona back at Perry High School. Perry offered a typing class and pretty much everyone took it. Our teacher was Mr. Esley Sisson whose mantra was, “They pay me to teach kids, not like them.” He wasn’t an ogre but I’d hardly describe him as being a barrel of laughs. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing him smile. Our Perry typing room contained about twenty desks, each with a standard manual typewriter. Then up in the front of room, sitting there like an orphan pig was an electric Smith Corona. It scared kids. All you had to do was touch a key and it would strike. Its only drawback was the fact that there were no letters and numbers on its keys. . .all blank. As a beginning typist there was no use looking down at your fingers because all you saw were four rows of blank gray disks. Mr. Sisson assigned me to the electric. He said that I’d scored the highest on the speed test and that the electric would challenge me. I think he may have made that up. In fact, he told my mother who taught down the hall, “I think I really got Kenny today.” Translated this meant, “Your son is a smart aleck and I showed him.” And it was shortly after that when Mr. Sisson challenged me to a duel. He said that he could type faster than me with fewer errors and I took him up on it. It was quite an occasion. Of course with only 80 kids in our high school a dogfight was quite an occasion. Our superintendent, Mr. Heck, was called in to be the official timer. Do you really need a master’s degree to poke a stopwatch? The class was gathered around and our basketball coach, Fred Witham, was running a small gambling racket with a good deal of lunch money bet on the contest. We both used the electric, first Mr. Sisson then me. I won. In all honesty, being a typing teacher doesn’t mean you can type fast. It wasn’t really that hard. Fast-forward about twenty years. I was taking my Triopia 8th-graders dressed as clowns through the Barry Nursing Home, and there in a quiet corner sat Mr. Sisson in a wheelchair. A nurse said, “Talk to him, but he doesn’t respond all the time.” I leaned over and touched his hand and said, “Mr. Sisson?” He looked up at me beneath a pair of very heavy eyelids and didn’t crack a smile when he said, “You know, you cheated.” The two Cedarhurst gals in Dad’s room could probably run circles around both he and I with their thumb typing skills but I really wonder if they’ve have had as much fun.