Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

What is this about quitting after 51 years of columnizing, just because a piece of equipment has died?

After 51 years, you’re getting nicely warmed up. That long ago I was writing lettitors, egged on by Joseph P. Halwachs of the Citizens Public Expenditure Survey, a tax-watchdog group New York State.

Typing was still cumbersome for me. I had not taken typing in high school because we Academic Course students didn’t. (Even Chuck Boller didn’t. Did you ever watch him type?) College-bound students expected to hire someone to type college papers for them. Professionals and business people would always have others doing the typing, it was assumed.

I had learned keyboarding as a Western Union tie line agent. All upper case, three lines of keys, something like our familiar QWERTY arrangement but also different enough that a typewriter felt quite different.

I was married to someone who had attended business school before working for Western Union, and he could type like a demon. Whatever needed to be typed got typed by him. He sounded like a stock ticker, with a steady rhythm, and was absolutely accurate.

After a stint lobbying and running political campaigns, I took to newsing, having been recruited by the Buffalo Courier-Express. They wanted me to phone in my news from the hinterlands. I was a correspondent for a little while, then had a county bureau to manage.

Initially my instructions were to call in and describe the stories I had to whoever answered when I asked for Western New York. That person would then give me to dictation, and I would recite my “notes” or raw information to someone who typed as fast as I can speak, which is a little faster than a Gatling gun. Then that material went to Rewrite, to be polished into proper news style, also with great speed.

Often I would be calling from a phone booth, having come out of a court room or a county legislature meeting or from the scene of an accident. Sometimes I would call from home after speaking with a news source. So I figured it made sense to just give them information.

But after a few weeks my usual editor, Frank Byron, told me I didn’t need to “bother with” the first tier dictation or rewrite. Turned out I had been dictating news stories right along, without thinking about it. Lede in the first graf, more details, context and background falling into their slots as I spoke—news style.

Probably that was because I had been a news junky, from when, as a pre-schooler, I perused my grandfather’s TIME magazines when he passed a batch of them on to me every few weeks.

Before working for the Courier-Express I had assumed that most news was typed out the way my mother produced her Portage Report for the Reporter Argus, or it was yelled into a telephone as was done by a Jimmy Stewart character right after he commanded, “Stop the presses!”

Film was delivered to Main at Goodall by a bus that made the daily trek. But copy had to be phoned, to get there right away.  I was aware that it was customary for reporters to write their stories out before phoning, but that didn’t seem to do anything for my news reporting but slow it down, so I just composed stories as I spoke.

Then came the Xerox telecopier-transceiver. It combined features of a telephone and a thermal copier, a transmitter and a receiver. It took packs of heat sensitive paper and was hooked to a dedicated phone line. To send, I made a phone connection, then placed sheets of typed copy in the machine one after the other, and it converted them to sound, which was converted back to images of text at the other end. Everything was double spaced. A page took four or six minutes to transmit, depending on the quality of the connection. While one sheet was being sent I could type the next.

Other papers I have worked for have gone through metamorphoses of the way copy and photos were captured for them and transmitted to them—news-tech changes all the time.

With the telecopier-transceiver I was back to typing, using and abusing a series of big electric typewriters: an Adler built like a tank, an IBM Executive (proportional type). These had huge reels of carbon film rather than regular ribbon.

My first typewriter with correction tapes was a Silver Reed, probably made in China. It had interchangeable daisy wheels (or marguerites, as the French would say) and could be used as a Diablo-type printer when hooked to a computer. Times Herald and Bradford Era required dictation, then faxing, then email attachments.

What I use now when I “type” or keyboard is, by all measures, easier than any previous method I have used, including handwriting, with the possible exception of when I just dialed the paper and dictated. The other method I use now is about on a par with calling a paper and talking a story at someone: it is Dragon, the software-enabled dictation system you see in commercials, marketed by Nuance.

There was a little learning curve and the system had to be trained to the user’s speech pattern, in earlier versions of Dragon. The curve is almost flat, now, and the training is minimal.

Many people of a certain age believe that learning to use a computer is mind-bending, with gotchas lurking at every pass. Maybe that was true years ago, but it isn’t now. Computers are smaller, simpler, less expensive, not vulnerable to failure. Howie would master all he needs to, with no trouble. But if he just doesn’t want to, that’s his right.

Still, he might want to write his memoirs! He might want to put together the collected writings of Howie Gustafson, and an illustrated fly-tying manual, and a history of Swedish settlers in the area. I know how he could do that, and it wouldn’t be at all difficult.

Or he might want to use a solid-state recorder or a videocam, and just talk his recollections into it.

What I refuse to believe is that, with Howie, the rest is silence. I know he has more to tell us.