Touch Typing
Andrew M. Sereysky ’67
It was the afternoon of November 9, 1965. Hockey practice had ended and after a long walk up the hill from the rink, I showered and headed off in the dark to typing class, which was then held in the old Tuck Shop under the School Building. There were about twenty of us in that class, each wishing he were somewhere else — anywhere else. We pounded out the keys to the count of our teacher, an older woman that the School had brought in from the outside. Hunched over our typewriters, we would peck out A-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A, to her repeated commands. Then, she instructed us to place cloth napkins over the keys to really test what we had learned and to be sure we could type without looking. “L-D-L, L-D-L,” she called out.
As we struggled to locate the appropriate keys, the lights flickered and went out. After a brief commotion, the class came back to order and the teacher, without missing a beat, continued her cadence of letters, and we continued typing, all the while being cautioned that now the real typists would become apparent, since it was pitch dark in the room.
Five minutes later, bedlam broke out, and class disbanded. We all had reached our maximum level of abuse. But decades years later, I have no trouble remembering where I spent the beginning of what has since become known as the Great Northeast Blackout.
