PEA RIDGE — At the Pea Ridge Historical Society Museum downtown, we have several old manual typewriters, a few on display, others waiting for cleaning and reconditioning. I am remembering that in about 1954 or ’55 I was learning to type at Pea Ridge High School. Louise Ash was our typing teacher. She was beloved by everybody in the class. Our typing room, as we called it, was the middle room off the north side of the old auditorium/study hall. All our typewriters were manual typewriters. Electric typewriters were just coming into use, and at that time electrics were much too expensive for us.

Many of our typewriters were made by Remington, fairly new machines and in good shape. The Remingtons had a low, compact, modern design. I had to be different, so I used one of the older Underwoodtypewriters. It was of the old upright, open design, in which you could see all the operating rods, the swinging type bars, springs, margin latches and so on.

It was a primitive looking thing, but it worked well. I could type up to 45 words per minute; but on speed runs if we made a mistake there was a deduction from our speed rating. I always made lots of mistakes. The worst part, for me, was that I would be rattling along, rat-a-tat-a-tat, steady as you go, then I would fumble my rhythm and the type bars would end up locked in a jam. Having to ease those type bars out of a jam deducted considerably fromyour speed.

Even in these days of computer word processing, I still make those same typing mistakes. But with the computer keyboards a miscue just shows up on the screen, and you don’t necessarily mess up a good piece of typing paper. I’ll be buzzing along, and all at once my fumble finger will hit two or three keys at once, and I’ll get two or three unwanted characters into my writing. I recall my first experience of typing on an electric typewriter.

The keys were very sensitive to the touch; nothing like the feel of our old manual machines. With a manual machine, sometimes my fumbling didn’t show on paper because I hadn’thit the key hard enough.

With an electric typewriter, though, the least touch caused it to snap to, putting all kinds of stuff on the paper that you didn’t want.

I thought I’d never get used to the electrics.

To correct mistakes, we might get a fresh sheet of paper and start over. Or, if the typing didn’t need to be all that neat, we might use some correction fluid that was brushed over the mistake like white paint.

Once it dried, we could reposition the carriage and type over the mistake to make it right. It was a real advance in later years when typewriter correction tape was invented, then correction tape cartridges. Some machines even had correction tape reels much like the regular ink ribbon reels. The computers make it easier these days - we can usually fix our mistakes before weprint them.

I remember that Miss Ash had a few discussions early on about typewriter history and how the keyboard key arrangementscame to be standard. Interestingly, even today’s computer keyboards still use that old standard QWERTY key arrangement that we used in the 1940s and 1950s. Of course a few characters are in different positions and the computer keyboards have function keys that the old typewriters never had. My old classroom manual Underwood typewriter had the quotation mark on the 2 key. You did a Shift 2 to get the “ mark. On today’s keyboards, that quote mark is usually on a key to the right of the L. So, basic typing hasn’t changed that much; but I notice that we don’t talk about typing class any more; we usually speak of keyboarding andword processing. But now, phone texting has invented a quite new way of typing - a pretty awkward one if you ask me!

Back in the days of thePea Ridge Academy/College, in the 1800s, when they didn’t have typewriters at all, penmanship was a very important business course. A “good writing hand” was much prized. After all, business records had to be legible and neat. Bank records, financial ledgers and legal documents had to be readable and accurate.

When I was in the fourth grade, I got a C in penmanship. That was 1949. I don’t remember much attention to penmanship after that.

I wonder what old Professor Roberts or Miss Nanny would have to say about our average penmanship today?

Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/24/2010