Drop off at college sparked stories

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Sept. 2, 2004. In the last few weeks, many parents had the experience of dropping their child off at college for the first time. As much had changed between Jack going to Earlham and taking his daughter Sally to Indiana University, even more has changed in the last two decades. The idea of a typewriter is more quaint than ever.

We were awful.

There we were, taking Sally down to Bloomington for her freshman year at Indiana University, and all we could talk about was what it was like — a million years ago — when our parents had taken us off to college.

You could hardly blame us. The contrasts were so obvious, it was impossible not to comment on them.

There was laundry for one thing.

When I headed off for college, one of the odd things I took along was an aluminum, expandable box. Its intended purpose: To send laundry home.

Safe to say, it was never used.

I found the laundromat within the first ten days, and despite the usual problem of turning some underwear pink when washed with a red sweatshirt, I did OK.

Then there was the matter of computers.

When Connie and I went off to college, a computer was something larger than a garage. Today, it’s smaller than a ream of paper.

Its pleistocene era equivalent was something that we today quaintly refer to as a “typewriter.”

I didn’t have a typewriter when I set out for college.

Why? Because my parents were old enough that a typewriter was still classified on the edge of “new-fangled” technology. It was something for offices, for professionals, and certainly not for wooly-headed college kids.

Trouble is, my first week as a freshman at Earlham I was told that I not only had to produce a paper based upon a book I was supposed to read, but also that the course demanded that I have five extra copies of the paper available for classmates in a study group to read.

That sounds easy in 2004. Just hit “5” in the number of copies when you print the document.

But in the typewriter era, it was something else again. One copy for the prof and five copies for other students meant six sheets of paper and five sheets of carbon paper jammed into the carriage of a typewriter.

And I didn’t have a typewriter. Few of us did. And those who did soon found themselves sharing with the rest of us. Since many of us were taking the same freshman classes, that also meant that we learned some very basic lessons about the allocation of resources.

Six simultaneous copies of a paper also had a direct impact upon the quality of our scholarship.

None of us who lived in the land of borrowed typewriter time enjoyed the luxury of multiple drafts. We’d do our best to collect our thoughts, build an outline, and then compose.

But when each keystroke goes through six sheets of typing paper and five sheets of carbon paper, it’s almost as if you are chiseling your essay in stone. Bam! A letter. Bam! Another letter. Bam! A typo!

Typos, of course, were a bad thing.

So most of us used a product called “Corrasable” bond paper. That meant we could erase the typo on the top sheet, the one the professor was going to see.

But for the copies, we tended to economize with regular paper.

The result was that the prof might understand what the heck we were trying to say, but our classmates were in the dark. (Sometimes, I think I’m still using the same method of writing today.)

The stories rambled on and on. I’m sure I actually heard Sally’s eyes rolling at one point.

But that’s OK. She can get her revenge when she takes her own kids off to college many years down the road.