From the managing editor, August 2022

Part of what makes me able to do this work is the fact that I can keyboard. We once called it typing.

My mother was a professional typist, working in the Pentagon during World War II after completing formal training at a business school in Asheville.

As a boy in the 1960s, I knew that my mother’s typewriter, an Underwood, was an important possession. It was her tool, though seldom did I see her fingers fly on the keyboard, like Scout hadn’t known Atticus Finch was a great shot with a rifle.

I was the fourth child, so she had put the typewriter away, too busy raising a girl and three boys.

When I was a child she would allow me to pull the Underwood out and set it on the dining room table. She often said it needed a new ribbon, but I didn’t care. I enjoyed the sound the machine made. The rhythmic clacking of my mother’s steady and unerring stroke—when she occasionally sat down at the keyboard—was hypnotic. The ringing of the bell, signaling the need to engage the carriage return with her left hand, was as regular as the impact of the letters on the paper.

I was fascinated with the device. It created words.

Mom was a country girl, the fourth of four—or of six when you count the twins who were born in 1912 but died soon after birth. Mom was born in 1922. She graduated high school in Buncombe County, North Carolina. She had played varsity basketball, and 50 years later took pride in showing one of my daughters how to use the backboard to better ensure a shot was successful.

Completing secretarial school in Asheville, mom heard Franklin Roosevelt’s call for America’s office workers. The president pointed out that the country needed not just soldiers and sailors, but also competent typists, stenographers and clerks.

David Brinkley’s book Washington Goes to War offers a glimpse into the world mom found in the nation’s capital after taking the train up from Asheville.

In Washington she lived in a boarding house filled with other Pentagon workers, all women. Government buses arrived every morning to pick them up, and after a busy day in the typing pool the same buses brought them back. Meals were organized, recreation was organized—everything was organized to help ensure that these young ladies stayed busy, won the war, and avoided trouble.

I imagine there were older women living in the boarding houses, tasked with policing behavior—much like the dorm mothers at colleges in the years before co-ed housing. There were probably door guards, as well.

Mother roomed with another young woman who had arrived from Oklahoma, and when that woman’s cousin—she considered him a brother—came by en route to service in Europe, mom met her future husband and my father.

As a child I recall typing a community newspaper—it was distributed to my grandmother—and a fanciful ‘newspaper’ for C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, as I was enamored by the tales of Reepicheep and the followers of Aslan, the lion.

As a lazy high schooler I saw typing class as a way to easily earn some required credits. I took Typing I and Typing II, learning the proper ‘touch typing’ style on then-modern electric typewriters.

It turned out to not be quite as easy as I had expected, likely because I wouldn’t have listened to my mother’s instruction about finger placement and muscle memory—aspects that trained and guided an expert typist.

Yet, I still have a fondness for that sound of the old Underwood, encased in its rigid, hinged box.

With focus I can still knock out a good 50 words a minute on this MacBook Pro. I know because I just forced myself to type this string of sentences while staring at the wall as I let my fingers flow over the keys.

I made only one error.

I recently asked one of my high school vice principals if he recalled the name of the typing teacher. Neither of us can. She made me a typist, and I appreciate that, but I will forever know it was my mother who made me love typing.

—Jonathan Austin