John McLoone

Many young men in their formative years took time in their school schedule to learn worthwhile pursuits.

Me? I learned to type. I was fastest on the keyboard in my class.

Other fellows learned to weld, hammer a straight nail, router and draft plans. Some people ventured into the new concept of computer programming. The young version of me saw no future in that. Where would that ever take someone in the future? The joke was on all these other guys because I could hammer out 100 words a minute on a manual typewriter by the time I hit college. Surrounded by a gaggle of future administrative assistants, I was a site to see with my fingers adeptly hammering those keys.

The teacher was a taskmaster with a mean streak. If your fingers weren’t on the home row, you were going to get his ruler on the back of your hands. It was like if Bobby Knight would have taught typing.

Who thought typing could be stressful? It reached a breaking point one day when the teacher grabbed a young man who obviously didn’t share my vision that typing was the future by the shirt collar and tossed him up against the wall. My classmate had about six inches of height and 50 lbs. on the teacher. He picked the teacher up and vaulted him into a row of lockers. The teacher slid to the ground; his ego clearly deflated.

The teacher was stunned but perhaps knew he had pushed too far. All of us junior typists were at a maximum stress level, as we moved up from the home row and worked to bring numbers, then symbols onto the typing paper fed into our machines. We could only do so much. I admit I had even ventured so far as to tap out such things as #@$* and this teacher is really acting like an $@!$%&*!!. I promptly ripped the page out of my trusty Smith Corona and fed in another sheet before I was sent to algebra with bruised knuckles.

In the aftermath of the altercation, the teacher chose not to involve administration, wisely. What could he do? He had a roomful of students ready to type witness statements that he started it, and I could have had mine done before the principal walked in the room. Eventually, cooler heads prevailed. Justice had been served, right there in that typing classroom.

The teacher remained a taskmaster, though he refrained from employing the discipline by force. In retrospect, we may have all come out of that semester not typing at our full potential, but we were no longer associating the keys in front of us with fear.

In retrospect, I learned a lot of life lessons in those few formative months. First, I learned that being the fastest typist did nothing to impress the girls in the class, who outnumbered the boys four to one, not even when I could hit that final return a split second after the “ding” and have my paper flipped, fed back in and be back to work in mere seconds. It was impressive, at least in my mind.

Second, again in retrospect, I should have paid more attention in shop class.