Finding Elmer (Part 1)

That's right--Elmer, not Elmo.

The other day--for what reason I cannot imagine--I remembered, years ago, that I'd read some stories in Boys' Life about a worm named Elmer. This was a wise worm. A kid (whose name I couldn't

recall) kept him in a tobacco tin (remember those? my father had some around the house). From that tin, Elmer was somehow able to help him with his homework and other odious tasks. That's all I could remember ...

So, I decided to find Elmer, a task that Google accomplished for me in seconds. It seems there were four of those stories, all written for Boys' Life by Ned Ellis. Here's the list Google found for me:

ELLIS, NED

•  * Elmer Goes To the Party, (ss) Boys’ Life Oct 1966
•  * Elmer Joins the Dropouts, (ss) Boys’ Life Apr 1966
•  * Elmer Works for Santa Claus, (ss) Boys’ Life Dec 1956
•  * Elmer, the Worm, (ss) Boys’ Life Mar 1959

A bit of this was a little alarming. I don't think I would/could have read the two stories from 1966. By October of that year I was teaching at Aurora Middle School; the previous April, I was finishing my senior year at Hiram College. Don't think I was perusing pages of Boys' Life in those days.

But 1956? 1959? Definitely. I was in junior high and high school then--and although by 1959 I would not have been carrying Boys' Life around with me, I think I was still subscribing to it, still reading and browsing when I didn't feel like doing my homework--which was most of the time.

As I looked at the list of Ellis' "Elmer" stories, I didn't remember the one about Santa Claus, so I got on eBay and ordered the March 1959 issue of Boys' Life, the issue pictured at the top of this page. (I was unable to locate a digital version of it online.) When it arrived the other day, I promptly read the "Elmer," realized that, yes, this was what I remembered (sort of), and then spent some time flipping other pages ... remembering.

In March 1959 I was fourteen years old (would not be fifteen until November) and was in ninth grade. That seems a little bit too old for Boys' Life, but I was, let's say, slow to blossom? I was an immature ninth grader (just as I am now an immature Senior Citizen), so I was still reading Boys' Life at home (if we indeed still subscribed to it)--or in the Hiram High School Library, which sat up in front of our large study hall in the top floor of our long-ago-razed Hiram High building. This picture from an old yearbook gives just a hint of the arrangement. You can see a few of the reference books in the front of the room; magazines--including Boys' Life--were in racks whose backs appear to form a wall at the front of the room. That area up there was our entire junior high and high school library.

There were ads all through the March '59 issue for Scouting equipment: tents, lamps, hatchets, knives. There was an ad for Spalding (sporting goods) that featured a picture of Yankee catcher Yogi Berra (my hero at the time--I was the catcher on the Hiram Huskies' team). There were feature stories--about architecture, blimps, knot-tying. Ads for .22 rifles, flutes and piccolos (by Armstrong of Elkhart, Ind.), a running comic strip I'd forgotten called "The Tracy Twins," by Dik Browne, artist for "Hi and Lois." Goodyear Tires, Passover and Easter, a cartoon called "Rocky Stoneaxe," a feature on kite-flying, an ad for Wilson baseball gloves, for pimple treatments. A feature on hula-hooping, stamp-collecting, fishing, climbing a rope ladder, a big ad from Clearasil called "What Girls Think about Boys Who Have Pimples," supposedly written by Kay Rogers, "popular student at Harding High School" in Oklahoma City. (Popular Kay Rogers liked boys who didn't obsess about their pimples but who did something to deal with them--like apply Clearasil, a substance, by the way, which never worked for me; only Time did.) And much more.

I'd forgotten a continuing feature--"Think and Grin"--appearing on the final page. Jokes sent in by readers. And "daffynishions"--e.g., "Permanent wave--a girl making a career of the navy."  Here's one of the jokes:

New Husband: My wife treats me like a Greek God. At every meal I get a burnt offering.

And another ...

Teacher: Give me a sentence with an object in it.
Pupil: You are very beautiful, teacher.
Teacher: What is the object?
Pupil: A good grade.

And, of course, the Elmer story ...


TO BE CONTINUED ...

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II (56)

Fifteen 

30 November 1995

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.

That’s how Chapter 5 begins in Frankenstein. It’s the night that Victor Frankenstein brings to life the creature he has created from assorted parts of dead human beings.

Do you remember why Victor is doing this?

He’s been reading books about science. And getting curious. Then—when he’s seventeen and about to go off to the university at Ingolstadt (Germany), his beloved mother dies. And his passion for discovering the secret of life—first ignited by his reading—now flares into a bonfire with this horrible loss. He throws himself into his scientific studies.

And then in Chapter 4, he writes this: After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

In other words, he figured out what life is—and how to bring dead things to life. (I’d figured out by this time that some of our seventh-grade teachers could have used a few treatments by Victor Frankenstein!)

Anyway, you probably know the rest …  Victor’s creature roaming the countryside, people dying, nothing really working out too well for anyone.

Anyway, I was amused at the coincidence that our Science Fair also occurred “on a dreary night in November”—cold rain, the early dark of late fall. Depressing. But still, the streets of Franconia glimmered with the headlights of all the cars heading to the school. You would have thought there was a football game or something.

When we arrived at school that night, we found that there were so many cars in the parking lot that Father could not find a space and had to drop me in front of the school and then head off in search for a spot out on a side street somewhere.

Inside was an enormous crowd. Not all that surprising, really—the more kids are involved in something, the more people show up to see it. And since everyone in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades had been forced to produce a science fair project, a crowd was guaranteed. Parents (sometimes, in the case of divorces, more than one set per kid), grandparents (ditto), aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters. They all shared two things: they had a relative with a project in the science fair; they couldn’t wait to get out of there.

The judging had already been done that afternoon—but no one knew the results yet. All afternoon we had stood by our projects while the judges (science teachers from other schools) came by our tables, looked over our work, asked us questions (to make sure the project hadn’t been done by Daddy or Mommy or Albert Einstein or the Encyclopedia Britannica), and then filled out rating sheets.

The winners would be announced in the evening. After giving the families and friends an hour to look over all the projects, there would be an assembly in the auditorium. And Mr. Gisborne would read the names of those who had earned Superior ratings—the names of those who would be going to Niagara Falls.

Everyone was nervous, for as the date of the fair approached, just about everyone began to realize that going to Niagara Falls sounded like a good idea … a very good idea. The thought of being in school and having to sit there and watch a tour bus pull away, cruise out of the school driveway—without you—and head for New York … well, that was a thought that more and more kids just didn’t want to consider. And so I witnessed something I thought I would never see in the Franconia school: Kids working hard on a school project.

Typing Class, Part 3

As I wrote the other day, when I met Joyce in the summer of 1969, I was still using the old Sears (awful) typewriter that my parents had given me as a going-to-college gift in 1962. That summer, I had finished my third year of teaching at Aurora Middle School and was back in grad school at KSU, limping toward my master's degree. I had two courses that summer: one in educational philosophy, the other in American transcendentalism (where I met Joyce). Both required papers--and, thus, the Sears (awful) typewriter continued its usefulness, if not its efficiency.

There had been a recent advance in technology to help the fallible fingers of typists: erasable-bond paper. It was coated with some sort of chemical that permitted easy erasures with the rubber end of a common pencil. So much better than the various typing erasers I'd tried over the years, erasers which often put a hole in the paper, or moved the alignment slightly so that when I resumed typing, the line of type looked a little off kilter--as if it had slumped its shoulders in disapproval at what I'd just written. None of the various erasing devices really worked worth a damn.

So ... erasable-bond paper was a godsend. The only drawbacks: it felt ... greasy ... on the fingers; the type sometimes smudged just with ordinary handling; and some professors (curse their bones) refused to accept it (I guess they didn't like greasy fingers, either). Joyce and I used to buy it by the ream at Campus Supply near the KSU campus. (She, by the way, was/is a very swift typist, swift enough that, early in our marriage, I was a little ... what? Threatened? Oh, the insecurity of young men!)

Corrasable, by the way, was Eaton's brand name, and trusty Wikipedia tells me Eaton no longer manufactures the paper--which is good news for those of us who are fastidious about our fingers. I just realized--right this moment, after all these years--that the corr part of it alluded to correction or correctable.  DUH.

When grad-school demands increased on both Joyce and me, we decided, early in the 1970s, that it was time for an IBM Correcting Selectric--which, at the time, cost about $800, a small-to-large fortune for us. Her parents helped us with it, and we got one that looked a lot like the one at the top of the page. And then we had to work out arrangements for ... sharing. During the summers, I would work in the morning and watch baby-toddler Steve in the afternoon; Joyce had the opposite shift. As a result, the typewriter was going all the time. Later, when Steve started kindergarten (1977), his teacher reported this exchange:

Teacher: What do your parents do, Steve?

Steve: They type.

I loved that machine. Errors were easy to fix (an automated roll of sticky tape in the machine just pulled them off); different fonts--including italic--were possible (though it meant stopping the machine, removing the ball, replacing the ball). It was heavy--very heavy--its very weight suggesting sturdiness, reliability, permanence. Supplies were expensive (typing ribbons, correction tape), but worth it.

By the time we moved to Lake Forest College in the fall of 1978, we knew that one good typewriter would no longer suffice (we were both writing, a lot), so, flush with cash after selling our house in Kent, we bought a second one--a black one. And so things went for a few years until, as I've written here before, we bought our first Kaypro II--and then, soon, we had to buy another one because the ... demand ... was so high for the machine. Ever since, we've been a multiple-computer household (one for each of us, a few old ones lying around feeling neglected).

Even though we were thoroughly computerized, we kept one of those Selectrics around for years--mostly because there were always forms to fill out. During most of my second stint at Western Reserve Academy (2001-2011), for example, I used our typewriter almost exclusively to type CommonApp forms for students applying to college. But by the last year or two of my tenure, the CommonApp had gone online, and the typewriter had become superfluous.

By that time, both IBMs were long dead, and I'd bought, online, a Brother electronic typewriter, which I've used a few times (it ain't such a good machine), but which now lives, full-time, beneath the little "typing table" that used to hold my IBM but now holds our wireless printer and assorted junk-in-my-study. Look carefully at the picture at the bottom of the page ... you'll see the end of our typewriter era ...

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II (55)

Later, up in my room, I finally calmed down. I knew I shouldn’t have yelled at my father the way I did … and I was so grateful to him for what he was doing—for not telling the whole town that Gil was sick. I just knew how Gil would hate that, going to school and having everyone stare at him, having all the kids who ignored him suddenly acting like his best friends.

I’d already learned that kids have an enormous capacity for feeling guilty—and then for making public displays of their feelings. I remembered a year or so ago when the word got out that a little quiet kid named Chuck Vivian,[i] a kid no one paid any attention to, had nearly drowned in the Ohio River over the weekend. He was at home, recovering for a couple of days, and at lunch a bunch of kids were making huge greeting cards out of poster board for Chuck: GET WELL! WE MISS YOU, CHUCK! Bright reds and blues and yellows. Huge balloons and exclamation points and smiley faces. And nearly everyone signed the cards, sometimes writing very serious and emotional messages on them. We miss you so MUCH, Chuck! And We all love you, Chuck! And We’re so glad you aren’t dead, Chuck!

It all just seemed so fake to me. And when Chuck finally came back after a few days at home, they had an assembly for him, giving him the card, the band playing, cheerleaders romping around, his parents there weeping, Chuck looking puzzled. (He might have been thinking: What’s all this for? All I did was not drown?!?!) And out in the halls, everyone spoke to him, welcomed him back to school. Chuck was King for a Day (or two).

But after less than a week, he was once again nearly invisible. Just plain little old Chuck, whom everybody pretty much ignored. And everything at school went back to the way it had been.

I didn’t want Gil to have to go through all of that. He liked being anonymous, I know. So I was certain that he didn’t want to have to deal with any of that phoniness, either. If he ever found out what Father and I had done—and I hoped he never would—I thought he’d be grateful.

---

[i] Remember that Charles Vivian was the young man who drowned with Percy Bysshe Shelley in that boating accident in July 1822. Is Vickie aware that there may be a relationship between “Chuck Vivian” and the “Charlene Vivian” whose grave was in the local cemetery? The grave that Gil had found earlier? Or between these two Vivians and the one who drowned with Shelley? Or is Vickie just making up everything?!

Typing Class, Part 2

The sort of Sears typewriter
my parents gave me for college

Miss DeAngelis had us memorize the keyboard: Left hand (ASDF), right hand (JKL;).  Years later, by the way, I learned that one of the factors determining the keyboard layout, dating back to the 19th century, was this: The founders liked it that typists can type the word typewriter by using only that single row--the QWERTY row. Sounds apocryphal--but I like it.

(And BTW ... in my post the other day I said I couldn't remember the brand of portable typewriter my parents gave me when I went to college in the fall of 1962. But I did remember over the weekend. It was a Sears brand (natch--my folks did much shopping there (see an earlier post)), and the photograph at the top of the page is pretty close to what I owned back then. As I said in my post, it was cheap--and behaved cheaply--jamming, etc. But I still owned it when I met Joyce in the summer of 1969, was still using it for my grad-school papers and for school handouts, letters, etc.)

Miss DeAngelis also gave us routine speed drills--speed and accuracy. We weren't allowed to look at our fingers, just the text we were copying. A competitive guy, I knew how others in the class were doing (I could hear the bells ring as they neared the ends of their lines, the slam of the carriage-returns as they moved to the next line), and I forced myself to go fast, faster, fastest. Soon, I was among the leaders in speed, if not accuracy.

Back in 1982, there was a film, Tex, based on the S. E. Hinton novel of the same name. Young Matt Dillon played a frisky high school kid, who, BTW, was taking typing. There's a funny scene in that film when Dillon replaces some typewriter ribbons in his class with rolls of percussive caps--the kind we used to put in our toy cap guns. And then ... in typing class ... bang, bang, bang--a sound that brought laughter in 1982 but would initiate alarm and lockdown in 2014.

As I look at the transcript of my junior year at Hiram High (1960-61), I see that I did well in typing: A average 1st semester; A average 2nd semester; A average for the year. Impressive, eh? I had the same average in U. S. history (don't be impressed: Our teacher, Mrs. Muldoven, was famously generous). The news gets worse: All B's in English. B+ yearly average in German I. B average in chorus. Phys. ed: A-. (I must have failed to wear white socks once or twice--we got graded on our outfits.) And then there's Algebra II. Shall I share? First semester: B! Second semester: D+!  That's not good--but it is a fair symbol for my math lack-of-ability.

Miss DeAngelis also advised the school newspaper, which in those days required quite a production. "Reporters" turned in their handwritten stories, the kids who knew stuff about English edited them (I was not in that category at the time), the kids who could type (I was one of them) then had a task before them. Because we wanted right-justified columns for the stories, we had to type them in columns, putting little numbers at the end of each line to let us know how many extra spaces we needed to insert in the final typed version. See below:

This is a story about how all lines
need to be exactly the same1234
length, so we type little numbers1
at the end of the line to show how
many extra spaces to insert in the
final version of the story. (See1234
below).

This is a story about how all lines
need  to  be  exactly   the    same
length, so we  type little numbers
at the end of the line to show how
many extra spaces to insert in the
final  version  of  the  story.  (See
below).

Computers have made things slightly easier. Anyway, once we had the columns ready, we had to cut them off the sheets of typing paper and paste them to other sheets of paper to do the layout for the paper. Once we finished that, we then had to retype the stories on stencils for the mimeograph machines. (And, yes, the name of A. B. Dick, named for founder Alfred Blake Dick, 1883, mfg. of copy machines and supplies, now defunct, supplied as much glee for adolescents in 1960-61 as it would now.)

Ah, those blue stencils! (Some were green.) The typewriter punched holes in them--but your touch had to be just right. Too light a touch = insufficient holes = pale copies; too heavy a touch = rips rather than holes = ink blots on your copies. And typos were a pain to correct. A. B. Dick sold little bottles of blue fluid; you would dab some of it on your mistake with the little brush affixed to the bottle cap--blow-dry--re-type--carefully, carefully (the repaired spots were not all that sturdy)--then move on.

Headlines required yet another device. You mounted the blue stencil on a

light board (the light from below illuminated the dark stencil) and used a cutting tool (not unlike the shape of a dentist's probe) to trace/cut letters into the stencil following cut-outs that appeared on plastic devices that looked like rulers with letters and other shapes cut into them.

When the stencil was done, you tore the top blue sheet away from its cardboard backing, wrapped it around the drum of the mimeo machine (carefully, carefully), and--at last!--copies! Which then, of course, you had to collate and staple.

I had to go through the same process in 1966-1967 when I began my teaching career and took on the school newspaper at the Aurora Middle School. Below is a mimeographed image of one of our issues of Tabula Rasa (so clever) from Nov. 1968 ...  You can see the right-justified margins, the various headline types we cut into the stencil. I like it that the headline--SCHOOL YEAR STARTS--sits atop the issue for November 18--such news, arriving only about two and a half months after the fact!

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II (54)

Right then I made several decisions.

• I would never let Gil know what I had learned—and I would make sure no one else ever learned about it, either.

• I would work as hard as I could to make sure that Gil got to see Niagara Falls.

• I would spend as much time as I could with him. Starting now and lasting until … well, until he didn’t want me to.

Father was sitting alone in his study later that night. He was in his usual reading chair—a big stuffed comfortable wing-back that we’d found in a Goodwill store after the tornado had destroyed most of our furniture. The chair was so comfortable that I sometimes found Father asleep in it, an open book in his lap—or lying on the floor beside him, its covers spread like the wings of a fallen bird.

Although he had a book open in his lap, he was not asleep this time. He was staring at his bookshelves.

“Father?”

His eyes drifted over to me. “Vickie.” His eyes were wet. “You’re feeling better?”

“I’ll never feel better.”

He smiled, but I could see his eyes mist even more. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you ever will.”

I slumped into a chair across the room from him. “Did you want to talk?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you a favor.”

“I think I know what it is.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” he said. “You want to ask me not to run that article about … about Gil.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I’ve already decided not to,” he said. “My instincts as a journalist tell me that I should print the story …”

“But you decided not to.”

“Yes,” he said. “I made a serious mistake.”

“You did?”

“Yes. I imagined what it would feel like to have that story written about my family.  Journalists shouldn’t do that, you know—put themselves in the place of the people they’re writing about.”

He looked over at me and went on. “But I did. I wondered what it would feel like to read in the newspaper about my own dying child.”

“Gil’s not going to die!” I cried, leaping to my feet. “Don’t you ever say he’s going to die!” And I ran from the room. Somewhere, I’m sure, Death was laughing.

Typing Class, Part 1

Similar to the typewriter my parents owned.

One of my FB friends this week--a writer of YA fiction--posted a note expressing gratitude to her high school typing teacher--of course, by her day I think they were already calling it "keyboarding" instead because typewriters had by her high school days joined the record player and the console radio and the slide-rule on the ash heap of history.

But I, my friends, had typing class in high school--and, like my FB friend, I have realized over the years that it has been the most enduringly useful of all my high school classes. I thought there was a picture in one of our old Hiram High School yearbooks of our typing class, but I just looked--and found nothing. Oh well.  I did find a picture of our teacher, though--Miss DeAngelis. (She was also the advisor for the school paper--I was a staff member (who liked to mess around in class--can you imagine?), and here's what she wrote on this picture in my yearbook: We've had fun working on the paper this year. Who knows, next year we may work! Best wishes to a cooperative young man. "Cooperative"--I like that.)

Miss DeAngelis,
my high-school typing teacher

I took typing my junior year (along with many, many other classmates), and we met in what we called "the typing room" (creative, weren't we?), where there were several long rows of little desks, each with a typewriter sitting on it, awaiting student abuse.

My mother had taught my older brother, Richard, to type, and he was a whiz--and I don't think he took typing in high school; he certainly didn't need to. By the time I was a high school junior, Richard, three years older, was attending Hiram College (and living at home), and one of my sonic/pneumatic memories of that year was hearing him up at the crack of dawn typing a paper that was due later that day. (His room was right next to mine; the sound traveled with great ease from his typewriter to my sleeping ears.) I say "typing a paper"; well, he was also simultaneously composing the paper (oh, did I hate him for that ability!), a skill that served him well in his decades as a journalist (he was the music critic for the Boston Globe for years).

Anyway, I deeply resented the pounding sounds from next door--and, worse, the ringing bell that announced the typist was nearing the end of a line. My sleep was precious to me in those days. I had perfected the art of sleeping soundly until the very last possible moment I needed to get up, clean up, eat up, head out. So thuds and bells were not exactly welcome to me a couple of hours before I needed to arise.

We had two typewriters in the house in those days. There was a small Royal downstairs in Mom and Dad's room (it doubled: study and bedroom); Richard had a monstrous old Underwood in his room that looked much like this photograph. Mom was a great typist, too; Dad was hopeless. Mom typed for him whenever he needed something beyond a page or so. He was a hunt-and-peck guy. Richard was fast and accurate, too--and had strong fingers (which the Underwood required) because of his years of piano playing--yet another insistent sound that routinely roused me from the arms of Morpheus. I mean, have you ever been awakened by your older brother pounding "The Great Gate of Kiev"? It ain't pleasant.

Kaypro II

When I was ready for college, my parents got me a (cheap) portable, too--and I can't for the life of me remember the brand. I just remember that it was cheap; the keys jammed easily; I cursed even more easily. And so began my routine of paper-writing that progressed until the late 1970s when we got our first word-processor, a Kaypro II that forever changed our writing habits. My pre-computer writing steps: (1) take some notes; (2) write a draft in pencil; (3) type draft 1; (4) revise; (5) type draft 2; (6) revise; (7) type/submit final draft. Confession: In undergraduate days I didn't revise all that much, mostly because I put papers off until the last possible moment. But by grad-school days I was using all 7 Steps--sometimes even  more.

(Computers have extended this, by the way, making it far worse for me. It's so easy to make changes that I sometimes have a dozen or more drafts for speeches I'm going to deliver--a half-dozen drafts of book reviews--countless drafts of books I've written ... mounds of book drafts.)

Okay, about that high school class ...

TO BE CONTINUED