Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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I did reasonably well in most of my high school classes. I wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but I wasn’t the dimmest either. Some of the math courses, maybe trigonometry and geometry, were the most challenging.
Our math teacher, Nell Kleopfer, was always talking about something called “pi.” She said that it was a number I could use to solve all kinds of problems about circles – things like the area, diameter or circumference. I still remember the number for “pi.” It is 3.14159. But in the 70 years or so since I took that class, I have never had the need to find the area or circumference or diameter of a circle.
Of course, you never know when I might have that need, so it’s good that I remember that number, even though I have forgotten how to use it.
Another subject which was a little difficult for me was physics. Some of those physics problems could give a kid a real headache … like if you drop an apple from the top of the Empire State building, how far will it have fallen after eight seconds? Weren’t questions like that awful?
But the high school course I had the most trouble with wasn’t any of these courses that required a mathematics skill. It wasn’t Latin or Spanish, nor was it any of the social sciences. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it an academic subject. You may not believe this, but it was typing. That’s right – TYPING.
It had nothing to do with our teacher, Mrs. Claire Strickler, who was the wife of our art teacher, John Strickler. She taught a group of “commercial courses,” and she was a good teacher. I think my problem may have been kind of a hand-eye coordination thing.
For starters, when I went into that classroom on the first day, there were all those typewriters, maybe 20 or 30 of them, and all the keys were blank. How in the world did they expect me to type without the letters on the keys?
Then Mrs. Strickler pointed out a large chart on the front wall. It was a drawing of a typewriter’s keys with the letter printed on each key. She said I was supposed to look at that chart to find out which keys to press. Then I had to locate the key on my typewriter and press it. Surely there must be a better way to learn to type.
To make matters worse, there were groups of keys that were to be used with each of my fingers … even my pinkies. I had watched my dad type for years. You wouldn’t believe how fast he could type, and he used only two fingers on each hand, plus one thumb to hit the spacebar.
I thought that would be a better way for me to type, so I started doing it that way myself. But when Mrs. Strickler saw what I was doing, she didn’t seem to like it, and I had to switch back to her method.
In the first week or so of that course, I was one of the slowest typists in the class. At the end of the year when we finished the course, I had improved quite a bit, but I was still one of the slowest.
Today, Instead of typing, I dictate into my computer, and it types it out for me. It makes an awful lot of mistakes, however, even more than I made in Mrs. Strickler’s typing class.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at williamboyd514@gmail.com