Daddy and the Typewriter

My Dad's birthday was this past Sunday. He would have been 88.

Daddy was a shy man, and somewhat backward in some ways

because of his upbringing in the hills in Arkansas,

but he was a faithful and loving father to us.

It's not about his character that I am reminiscing this week

(his character and values were always very transparent and very high),

but I am thinking of the day (way, way back then and long ago,)

he brought home from the local pawnshop

a "gift" for my sister and I.

 

(ok this is not an actual pic of our typewriter.
This is a pic I took of FDR's typewriter when we were in NYC
Ours wasn't quite the antique this is ;-))
 

"I bought this typewriter for you girls. I want you to learn how to type.

Before you get married, you will need to get a job,

and I want you to be able to work in an office."

To a reader in 2012, that would seem

a very "male chauvinist statement and way of thinking."

But my Dad, the son of a sharecropper in Arkansas,

was brought up in a time and place where you worked the farm,

married and raised children, sent them off to a little one-room school

that went no higher than the 8th grade,

and said children then followed that example, repeating the cycle.

After his service in the Army during WWII, he married my Mom

and began to work the land as his Dad had before him.

They then moved to Oklahoma hoping to better themselves.

He worked for a steel company in Tulsa that built oil derricks.

Weathering the heat and the cold out on that steel daily for over 30 years,

he knew the hardships of manual labor and,

while that never would have been our lot as females,

he wanted us to have an easier time of it than he and Mom.

A high school education was what Dad believed would see us through

until the day we married

because sending us to college was beyond their means.

So each year when we made up our school schedules,

we were encouraged instructed to take

"every business course that our high school offered"

because he believed we would receive the

equivalent of a business school education.

This was a much better hope than for the females from his hometown,

as jobs were not only scarce, but limited to such as the local dime store,

canning factory, or chicken factory.

(These jobs were not dishonorable, but there wasn't much future in them

not to mention the ickiness of tearing chickens apart daily).
I will spare you a picture of that!!!!

So I submitted to my Dad (MOST unwillingly, I might add).

I DID NOT want to learn to type, the typewriter was a HATED OBJECT

and I really could not explain to you why.

It is a mystery to me, but, a very strange thing happened

in Mrs. Sweeney's typing class as I typed aaa, lll, sss, kkk,

over and over keys clanking against the typewriter ribbon.

Return - DING!! ;-) 

I began to win the speed tests again and again.

It then became a competitive thing to me.

(What is even stranger to me now is that our children learn this "skill"

at such an early age now that it makes me laugh that I was 15

when I learned to type and was so proud of myself.)

Shorthand, office machines, business law, etc. all became classes that I loved

and excelled in bringing much higher my average in school than before.

So where am I going with that?

I am so thankful to my Dad that he had the foresight

to want me to learn how to take care of myself in life.

Being hired right out of high school by a company

which hired me strictly for my skills

(there was no job open at the time I applied,

but the VP told personnel that they "should not let a 'girl' like her go.")

My experience led to much better jobs and learning as I went until a later time

when I would be trained as a paralegal for the law firm I worked for.

As I grew more mature, my desire for learning increased

and I began to take classes at the local community college.

But, more importantly, there came a time when it became NECESSARY

for me to support myself.

And when that time came, I had experience and stability so that

I didn't have to scramble around and try to find where I belonged.

The position that I was in at my time of necessity was a springboard of learning

for other opportunities to come in the future.

Thank you, Daddy. I believe with all my heart that the Lord guided you to "gift" us

with a simple little machine that would be a tool to gain access to resources

so that we could "gift" others with even better things.

One last thing about this little typewriter.

I taught my sweet Mom how to type on that typewriter.

She had to leave school at age 16 to help on their farm.

So after raising her kids, she studied to get her GED

and worked for many years in the Education Service Center

and with special need students in one of the high schools.

She was so proud of her achievements and loved going to work

and the interaction she had with the youth.

You understand that pride more when you know

before she married my Dad she was employed:

Yep - chicken factory and canning factory!