Reminiscences of a Touch Typist

Closing of Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School

Is Reminder of Long-Ago Keyboard Struggle

                                  By Edward Shanahan

     As part of my formal education, I’ve been associated with some pretty ancient institutions, such as the Roxbury Latin School founded in 1645, and Harvard College, which opened up 10 years earlier.

    There were brief forays to other educational environs as well, two years at Wesleyan University and a gift year at Stanford University in the 1980s on a journalism fellowship.

     But, we come now to my graduate work, sort of. That would be the week—or was it two weeks—I was a student of touch-typing at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School on Newbury Street in Boston.

    My mind returned to that experience from the long ago days of 1955 when I read the other day that Katie Gibbs, as it was better known then, is scheduled to be closed down by its corporate owner, proprietor of a string of Gibbs schools.

   Founded in 1911 by none other than Katharine Gibbs, the Boston school was one of the better known places of learning for young women whose goal was to go into the workplace as secretaries or to work in the clerical field until they married and stayed home to  raise their children.

    My own mother attended Katie Gibbs where she became proficient at typing and taking dictation with shorthand, worked as a secretary for several years at Boston banks before getting married and having her own children.

    The skills that she learned stayed with her and once her two children were old enough to fend for themselves,  she quickly rejoined the full-time work force, going to work for a Boston bank and then spending 15 years as a executive secretary to a professor of metallurgy at Harvard University. 

    Since my mother had always been enthusiastic about her own experience at Katie Gibbs, when I finished high school and before it was time to take on my summer job, she enrolled me at her former Alma Mater.

   She believed firmly that it was essential that I learn how to type before heading off to college where I would have to write term papers.

   So for a sliver of time, provided with a brown bag lunch, attired in jacket and tie on very hot days in early summer, I’d take the trolley and subway and head off to secretarial school in Boston.

    I recall little of my experience at the school, other than I was the only boy enrolled, and the drill each day consisted of memorization of the home row on the typewriter – A S D F ; L K J  - and absorbing it and its relationship to other letters into my fingers and my brain by endless pounding on the typewriter keyboard of exercises  printed in a large book.

    In retrospect, my exposure to touch-typing was hardly complete, as I missed out on any knowledge of the odd punctuation marks and numerals and how to get to the top row without looking. We only got so far in a week or two. Home row I know just fine and over the years I was able to hammer out my term papers and then go to work as a reporter, a job that relied very heavily on manipulating a typewriter, which I did clumsily.

    During all that time working at newspapers, I made many mistakes in my typing, which, as a reporter in the old days, was enormously time-consuming, because stories were always written with duplicate carbon copies. At the Detroit Free Press each story was actually composed on a book of carbons that produced five copies of each page as it was typed.

    Thus, when I made several mistakes on the original page, I usually had to start over by throwing out the whole book of carbons rather than fixing my mangled words and sentences.

     Don’t try to visualize the details of how this worked, but trust me when I say my poor typing entailed more labor than what I actually expended on the reporting for the story and the composing in my head of what I would subsequently put down on paper.

    The transition to an electric typewriter only made matters worse because more errors were introduced into the copy by my errant fingers hitting wrong keys unintentionally.

     The error component in each sentence and paragraph grew geometrically when I shifted over to the word processor and then the computer keyboard, which is hyper-responsive to rogue touches, even though it is effortless to correct the mistakes.

     And so as I recall my post-graduate work at Katie gibbs, I can only conclulde it was cut too shortnenet and as a result all othe ohours that I have sat at a keyhb oard an d all o t ehw rok I have prouced over the last 50 years might havbe been a whole lott better if I had tryluy learning how to toluchtype.