To Harry Baker From Goody Gootch, With Love

Long, long ago – half a century, more or less – and far, far away from where I am this minute, Harry Baker taught me to do what I'm doing this minute – touch typing. I've been thinking of him every day lately, and wishing I'd paid more attention, because I'm trying to do for the South African teachers I'm working with what Mr. Baker did for me. I'm trying to teach them to use computers, which means I'm trying to teach them touch typing. And let me tell you: Not so easy.

I've got tools Mr. Baker never dreamed of. I've got personal computers and typing tutor software and video projectors. But what I don't have is Mr. Baker, who knew how to get the job done.

I took two semesters of touch typing in summer school. It was the thing for college-bound students to do -- take typing in the summers so they could squeeze in an extra academic subject during the regular school. I was particularly interested in typing because I was going to be a writer. And I got even more interested after the first class started – mostly because Cindy Morris was in it, and I had a wild crush on her, even though she was two whole years older than I was – not so important as I contemplate my 65th birthday next week, but a pretty big deal when I was 15 and couldn't even drive yet.

We were in class all morning, with one 15-minute break (we would all pile into as many cars as we had and race out to the A&W for root beer, then race back to the high school). I wish I could remember what Harry Baker did in that class as well as I remember the back of Cindy Morris' neck (her hair was short, light brown). I wish I could do it for Sophy and Segofatso and Dilwe and the other students who struggle to compress their hands into that peculiar bunch-fingered knot that lets you get all eight of your digits onto the home keys what Harry Baker did for me. But I'm struggling.

I think of myself as a pretty good typist. When I sit down at the keyboard to show my students how it's done I can dazzle them. I close my eyes tight and reach out for the computer keyboard and find the right keys by touch (thank you, Bill Gates or somebody, for those little bumps on the F and the J) and then start talking and typing what I'm saying. And they're amazed. They should be. It's a neat parlor trick. And I should be pretty good. After all, I made a living at it for nearly 45 years, writing millions of words for newspapers and magazines and books and Web sites and company newsletters and marketing brochures. I put my fingers down on the home row of hundreds of keyboards from Royals and Underwoods to IBM Selectrics to Apple Macintoshes and IBM PCs, and most recently on a tiny little HP Compaq netbook computer with a keyboard so small it feels like I'm typing inside an ashtray.

I've still got a lot of those millions of words. I've got boxes of clips from the publications I wrote for, and I can Google up more virtual boxes of Web pages any time I want. But there is one thing I wrote that I'm afraid is gone forever. It may live on, in fact, only in Mr. Baker's memory. During one of those summers in the typing room at Salem High, I took my eyes off Cindy Morris long enough to write an assignment. The class was typing a newspaper, a tricky assignment, because you had to justify the columns, which is easy to do on a PC, but meant you had to count each line and figure out how may extra spaces to insert between words on the typewriter. I volunteered to write the advice column for the newspaper, and I turned out “Goody Gootch's Advice to the Lovelorn.” It was probably exactly what a 15-year-old boy who was trying to be funny would have turned out, but Mr. Baker liked it. In fact, for the half-century since, whenever I've seen him, he's called me Goody Gootch.

So thanks, Mr. Baker. And just how do I get these people to keep practicing JMJ JNJ JUJ JHJ until they can actually do it without looking at their fingers?

Love,

-- Goody Gootch