Type

When I started working in an office in the 1960s there were of course no computers, cell phones, or any of the devices people will be lining up for to buy on Black Friday. There weren't even computer chip calculators. Mechanized adding and subtracting was accomplished with ratchet-type machines whose carriage would move. If the carriage hit the wall because of an extensive calculation, the machine conked out and someone had to come and attend to the Friden 500 calculator. It was now jammed.

Oh, another sign of the times? Women typed. Not the men.

The only people who had typewriters were the secretaries, a job title that has now disappeared.  The 'Gal Fridays' the employment ads would go.

By the late 60s all the typewriters were electric and were IBM Selectrics, with that spinning ball embedded with all the keyboard characters that whirled and spun type across a page, moving as fast, or as slow as you typed. The secretaries dutifully covered their machines at night, to keep the dust out.

Occasionally I typed an address on an envelope, but if something written need to be communicated you hand wrote a memo and gave it to the 'girl'; the girl was the boss's secretary. I never had a secretary. Somewhere in the mess of papers that chronicles my life I even saved a short piece of paper I gave to the 'girl' that requested a vacation day. Imagine, you proofread a one line piece of communication, initialed it, and handed it in.

Occasionally, when I share my age with younger people, I tell them of the strange world where men didn't type. I was reminded a bit of this era by reading the obituary for Lilli Hornig, a woman who worked at Los Alamos on developing the A-Bomb, who has just passed away at 96. Aside form her contributions, the NYT obituary by Sam Roberts reminds us of how long ago WW II was when it is revealed at there are only now about 12 people still living from the 1,500 who worked at the site in New Mexico. Ancient history.

Ms. Lilli Hornig arrived at Los Alamos with her scientist husband in 1943. He was a chemist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, she, a scientist in her own right with a Masters' Degree in Chemistry from Harvard. Lilli's parents were both professional people in Czechoslovakia; her father was a chemist, and her mother a pediatrician. Her scientific pursuits were almost pre-ordained.

Despite her advanced degrees, on arriving at Los Alamos, she was offered a job as a typist. She was there because of her husband Donald Honig, not because she was Lilli Honig, a chemist. Lilli later got her doctorate degree from Harvard in the 1950s.

Being unfit for typing, Lilli wiggled her way into working with her husband on the specifics of the bomb's detonation.  The TV series 'Manhattan' produced by WGN that ran for two seasons, 2014-2015, treats the story of the bomb's development through composite characters, with Benjamin Hickey playing Frank Winter, a character that could easily have been Lilli Hornig's husband, Donald.

The difference is Frank is a physicist, and Dr. Hornig was a chemist. Frank's' wife, Liza, played by Olivia Williams, is a Ph.D. botanist, who does wind up at the switchboard. She has no hand in working on the bomb, but does set out to analyze the effects of radiation on plant life on her own. Her training and curiosity cannot be suppressed.

Reading Dr. Donald Hornig's obituary from 2013, it is revealed that Donald was the last person to actually see the bomb before it was tested in 1945 at Los Alamos. The series Manhattan closes with a group of scientists in the tower from which the bomb is going to be dropped, making final electrical detonation connections, something Dr. Honig actually did.

The 'Manhattan' series ends with the explosion of the test blast. There is is almost a funny line that one of the scientists says when he realizes their work did produce something: "It works." Yes it did.

The series was a good one, and gave insight to the desert, dusty conditions of Los Alamos, and the reproductive activity of its workers that became so rapid that the director J. Robert Oppenheimer starting to insist that condoms he used a little more frequently. The place was starting to burst at the seams with newborns. It was a rabbit farm.

Of the era I grew up in, and the one that preceded it, females were slotted for secretary, teaching, or nursing jobs. High schools had Home Ecomonics courses that taught cooking and household skills, always to the girls.

My own typing "skill" started with a manual Smith-Corona, with a black and red ribbon. I used it to type papers for high school. I still have the typewriter, and once hauled it out when perhaps 30 years ago the computer's printer conked out on us and I resorted to typing a few things on the old Smith-Corona. My daughters, fairly young at the time did ask me what was that thing I've now got plopped on the desk. A relic.

Do you type? We all type. Think-fingered construction workers are seen with SmartPhones poking and scrolling. Gloria, please take a letter.

Type it yourself.

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