Inside Out: Have fingers, can type … sort of maybe

I am proud to say that, despite my advanced age, stunning academic CV, vast experience as a “journalist” (I put it in quotes because the word makes me a little uncomfortable; it’s so … I don’t know …  French) and otherworldly wisdom and humanity, I am not above typing stuff up for the paper.

Often I type the ever-reliable Andy Steinmueller’s typescript submission of weekly Goat Hill events during the golfing season. I type letters sometimes too. Someone might drop off a relevant, local press release on lined notebook paper. Whatever, if it doesn’t come in digitally — which in most cases means by email —  someone has to type up the rewrite. If it’s a news item, that means me.

Most of the copy that needs typesetting goes to our intrepid and venerable community news editor, Archer Brown, who is in a whole other department three feet across the stained rug of our office. She is never rattled by anything, either in the newsroom or on the Legion bowling alleys.

It’s wonderful that Archer’s a bowler because it makes her feel a certain ownership of the bowling columns submitted dutifully by Hans Schmid for many years and, beginning this year, by Jan and Sue Warner. Hans does his by email. The Warners print theirs by hand, which is perfectly fine; we are very glad to have it. Archer types it into our copy system with ease.

As for me, typing isn’t so easy: Four-fingered, squinting, constantly going backwards to correct what I’ve done and humming something soft, sweet and soothing like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as I gently hunt and peck away.

I can crank out copy like a demon but we’re talking about transcribing here, which means not ever having to look at the keyboard. Me, as soon as I realize I am not looking at the keyboard, I’m like Wile E.  Coyote when he chases Road Runner over the edge of a cliff and stops in mid-air, looks down and realizes his circumstances.

In summer, Joanne Sherman joins the crew to help with all sorts of odds and ends at the paper. She does a lot of this typing if I ask her very nicely. The rest of the year Joanne gets to travel around with her husband so I do not feel too sorry for her when she has to type. Anyway, like Archer, she knows how to type. It doesn’t hurt.

My lack of typing skills got me in very big trouble early in my career at Flying magazine, which used to send me to a big aviation convention every year to edit a little daily paper we put out for free distribution at the week-long event. This was just barely still in an era when I did my writing on a typewriter, not a computer, and somebody therefore had to typeset the copy that I and the rest of the paper’s little staff produced.

The associate publisher, a very sharp and funny woman, tapped me to edit the thing. She worked with me as its publisher, coordinating the printing, the advertising, the bills and other things. “This is going to be great,” I said when we started. “I will get the photos and stories together and you can typeset them!”

This lovely woman, with whom I had shared many laughs up to that point, turned a strange color. Her eyes shone like twin head lamps of a steam locomotive. Smoke came out of her ears because she had no stack on top of her head.

I was young and maybe a little stuck in the aura of my parents’ “Mad Men” days. Hey. It made sense. She knew how to type. I didn’t. No personal or political — much less male chauvinist pig — overtones had been intended much less felt. Our friendship, nevertheless, never quite recovered.

A lot of city daily newspaper people long, in the twilight of their careers, for a few years sitting by the pot-bellied stove of a weekly newspaper office, jawing over checkers with some crusty character for a while before looking at the Regulator station clock and saying, “Oh gee whiz, Oscar. I guess I gotta go get this paper together. Come on back in an hour and we’ll finish the game.”

Good luck with that.

Sitting behind me at Sunday’s candidate forum at the school was a very bright young woman who recently graduated from the four-year journalism program at the University of Missouri. She’s trying out as a reporter with us and giving it her all. Forgive me for making a point of this but she really, really knows how to type. She was sitting there with a computer on her lap, live-blogging the questions and answers onto the Reporter website, transcribing the key points just as fast as they were coming from the stage. It was unnerving.

A lot of weekly newspapers, even thriving papers like the Reporter, have sent their typesetters packing over the years. No typesetters at a newspaper is now the norm.

So there are handwritten and typed-up letters and things on my desk every week for the likes of me to tackle.

I’m so thankful for so many things. Archer and her bowling. Joanne and her willingness to stop having so much damn fun and come in and help us in summer without jumping ugly about it. And I’m thankful for young people who know what the heck they’re doing in this changed world and even like it.

And oh …  I do not mean by that I would ever ask our reporter candidate, if she gets the job, to do me a big favor and just type up a little something for me, dear. I need her for the real thing we used to worry about the most in this business: getting the news and getting it right.