OH, THAT TYPING CLASS!

The Dean of studies of my high school walked into typing class while we students were clacking away. Our fingers halted. “May I have your attention,” he hesitated and looked at our upturned faces.  In a commanding voice he announced ” Miss Chambers will no longer be your instructor. She has resigned her position.” He gave us time to soak in the news, then added, “Continue your assignments as usual,” and left.  That was spring, 1951. I was a senior.

When had Miss Chambers last been in class?  We girls chatted all the while, remembering how plain she appeared. Her red curly hair and freckled face was a lasting memory.  Later in the day the rumor spread: she had married Mr. Edwards, the barbering teacher. We marveled that our Miss “Missing”Chambers, had caught herself a husband!  

No one suspected anything. Each week the new assignments appeared on a side chalkboard. Typing was an independent study. Once we’d learned the keyboard (I still hear the cadence of “a s d f space j k l semi-colon) we completed assignments and handed them in. No speed test, as I recall. 

Mother urged my sister and me to be independent from early age. She often told us,“ When you get to high school, take typing. It’s the best course you’ll ever take and use forever.” That was one of the directions she gave us along with “Get a pilot’s license so you can travel the world” and “Don’t get married until you’ve traveled.”

Manual upright typewriters  - - usually Underwood or Royal - - came equipped with black cotton ribbon. We groaned when an error was made. That meant rubbing out the error with an eraser with as few smudges as possible.  Making copies in those days? A nightmare.  Between two sheets of white paper you placed a piece of thin carbon paper with the shiny side facing the second page. When an error occurred, groans were louder:  one to three erasures, depending on the number of carbons used. Each page corrected at one time. We were unaware at the time someone was busy inventing a correction fluid that would ease our woes.

That inventor was a single mother in 1951 who had typing erasure problems with her electric typewriter at her job. Tired of the smudges she made using the carbon ribbon, she became inspired after watching window painters eliminate flaws in their work. She devised a method and two years later with tempera paint she bottled Mistake Out, which with improvements was renamed in 1958 Liquid Paper.

Today in our using computers, all we have to do is “delete” and rewrite. However easy this is, I’m glad to have learned on a now-outdated typewriter.