Typing Class

I spent my senior year of high school at a new school. My family moved away from our old neighborhood in Philadelphia to a rural Pennsylvania community closer to my father's workplace after he had several years of very long commutes after long days of overtime.

When I finished up putting a school schedule together there was a slot for one more elective but not a lot of options. I selected a typing class. I learned to type and got good at it which turned out to be a very fortunate decision that impacted my work environment throughout my life.

A year after taking that class I was serving in the US Navy and undergoing basic training in San Diego where I was selected to be in the company color guard because of my high school marching band experience. Shortly after that they discovered I could type and that helped me avoid some of the more tedious and obnoxious jobs that were handed out so frequently. 

Later that year I was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago taking classes where I again had the opportunity to use my typing skills to improve my work situation. After finishing my training I was put into a special temporary unit awaiting orders for a ship. Earlier my training was interrupted by the death of my father that required me to take a two week emergency leave to go home for his funeral. After my training I waited in this unit for about three months and during that time because of my ability to type I was assigned as an assistant/gopher to a chief petty officer where I worked in his office typing reports and paperwork for him which was much better than working in the mess hall or grounds maintenance.  Eventually that ended and I went to sea for the next three years.

My typing skills were very much appreciated when I went to college at Temple University in 1974.  It made it so much more efficient to be able to type of a research paper and I had to do a lot of them over the next four years. Knowing how to type quickly was a big plus.

A few years later knowing how to type would help in those early computer days and fortunately the computer keyboard was modeled after the typewriter. I became very good working with a word processor document on the computer. This would be a big help in 1990 when I started graduate school and was once again writing research papers but instead of a typewriter it would be on the PC. Same skills.

Later in my library career I would need to be constantly writing reports and such. Knowing how to type and use the computer for communicating emails made my job more effective and once again those skills learned in that long ago high school class I registered for in 1968 made my life easier.