November 8, 2026

Touch Type

In grade seven–what we called “junior high” and is today referred to as “middle school”–we students were given a choice: shop (metal or woodworking); or typing class. I chose typing, along with one other boy and about 20 girls. (It was the early ’60s, when there was still a gender bias that assumed many women would one day work as secretaries.)  The other boy told me he chose typing to meet girls. I chose typing because I wanted to be a writer.

The typewriters were, as I recall, large, grey Underwoods. They had blank keycaps so you couldn’t cheat by looking at the keys. The first drill was learning the home row. I remember the chant: “A-S-D-F   J-K-L-SEM (for semi-colon)” repeated over and over. And I’ll never forget the clattering of two dozen typewriters, the ding of the margin bell, and the swish-clack of the carriage return.

It was so much more useful than the one mandatory half-semester I spent in shop class. To show for it: a poorly constructed box to hold my LPs and a wire fish meant to look like the very artful ones my parents brought back from a Caribbean vacation but instead looked a four-year-old had made it.

In fact, typing class was was perhaps the best choice I made in all my years of elementary and secondary school. It served me well through a career as a writer of newspaper and magazine articles and books. Who knew, back then, that one day there would be smartphones and texting that my big, clumsy thumbs found impossible. So, today, while anything I do on a keyboard is a breeze, I’m one of those old guys hunting-and-pecking with one finger on my iPhone.