“If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you’re typing faster than your mind is working.”
— James A. Michener (1907 – 1997) American writer of more than 40 books.
– – – – – –
The doctor’s waiting room was full. People of all ages were sending and receiving messages on cell phones, but never making eye contact with each other.
It looked like a preview of the next horror flick coming soon to a theater near you. “Night of the Living Device Zombies.”
“Hello” I said to the man I sat down next to. He glanced my way and went back to his phone without missing a thumb tap.
The “thumb typers” amuse me, remembering that I, too, once typed with just two digits. It was a well-known hack for those of us who cut typing class in high school. We called it “hunt-and-peck.” Instead of thumbs, hunt-and-peck utilized two index fingers. The system served me well until I learned to use three fingers, then graduated to four. I’m up to about five fingers now.
I learned on a real typewriter. Few of today’s thumb typers even know what a typewriter is, let alone ever seen one. Seriously. Case in point. A young student, seeing my grandfather’s old manual typewriter in my office recently, asked, “What is that?”
“It’s a very old computer,” I said attempting to keep a straight face.
“Wow,” was his response. “Does it still work?”
“No,’ I said sadly. “It needs a ribbon.”
“A what,” he asked?
My dad’s father, S.V. Aldridge, retired in 1954 from the Cotton Belt Railroad, which today is part of Union Pacific. The railroad was his sole lifetime occupation, one he embarked on in 1901 at the age of 13 as a rail crew laborer. The last 24 years of his 53-year career were spent as a section foreman with an office in the small depot that sat between two crossing lines at the intersection of Quitman and Mill Street in downtown Pittsburg, Texas.
When he retired, the typewriter went home with him, where he showed me how to type my name on it as a youngster. Slowly using one finger at a time.
An added delight, sheer magic to a kid, was pushing the metal tab that changed the type from black to red.
After he died in December of 1967, I became custodian of the old black Underwood with gold lettering and pin striping.
During the almost 60 years I’ve owned it, it has shared space in my home office alongside a parade of computers from a first-generation Apple Mac in the 1980s to the current MacBook Pro laptop I’m typing on as we speak. Sometimes using six fingers.
In its day, however, the old manual typewriter was just as revolutionary as computers are today.
Current keyboards are exactly the same as they have been since 1874, when Remington updated the layout by introducing the “QWERTY” keyboard, so named for the sequence of keys that begins the top row of letters. Therefore, the typing class exercise that is older than I am, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back,” employs every letter of the alphabet typed the same way, whether on a 19th-century typewriter or a 2026 digital device.
Come to think of it, the typewriter was one up on the computer. It had its own built-in printer. Multiple copies? No problem. You do remember carbon paper, don’t you? Plus, power outages and dead batteries were never a problem. A typewriter required neither. Software updates? That was a new cushion for your desk chair.
And obsolescence was never an issue. My grandfather’s 90-year-old machine has never required the first software update. In fact, it would produce documents just as well today as it did back then … if it had a new ribbon.
Quaint, but just a relic of the past, you say? Hold on. Just like vinyl records that came back from the dead about the time their obituary appeared in print, brand new manual typewriters began appearing on the market several years ago. Specialty retailer Hammacher Schlemmer rolled out one that honestly made it sound like the “newest thing under the sun.”
And speaking of honesty, I came clean with the young man I teased about the old typewriter being a computer. I did caution him, however, to beware the fearful fate too many thumb typers fall into.
“Never type faster than your mind is working.”
—Leon Aldridge
– – – – – – –
Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2026. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
A Story Worth Telling 