Writing Machines & Guys Named Bill

Another old soldier -- and prolific writer -- made it through one last Memorial Day, if not quite to D-Day. The New York Times and Associated Press report that William Manchester died yesterday (June 1). Someplace on my uncle's bookshelf is my passed-along copy of Goodbye Darkness, Manchester's account of his years as a Marine in World War II, which he gave me as a thank-you for some office help. I hope one part of that "help" didn't do any harm.

In the early 1980s at Wesleyan University, he was writer-in-residence and I was working downstairs behind a door that said "Telecommunications Center," trying to decide if I was a journalist or an anthropologist or a technologist. (I eventually found a path down the middle.) As a grad student turned AV-geek, I did a few minor jobs for him, the last of which inspires this memorial note, with the others worth a few sentences to set the stage.

One of my strongest memories is of the ancient Underwood typewriter on his desk, and his telling me he had a matching one at home. He was that attached to the keyboard layout and feel. Those were the right machines to pound out biographies of Kennedy, MacArthur and Churchill.

My first "call from Bill" assignment, via my boss Bob White, was simple: Manchester wanted some audio cassettes duplicated; no fast-dubbing allowed. These had to be top-quality real-time copies, so I listened while they played. The tapes were all old songs, World War II classics like "We'll Meet Again," and "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover." "They're for Bill Shirer," Manchester told me later. For those two old soldiers (with old typewriters), I'm glad I engaged in a little pre-Napster copyright infringement. I hope the songs brought back memories that fit into a book somewhere.

The second call was, "Do you know anything about telephone answering machines?" I had to admit to knowing very little, but I walked into his office and noticed two things: The machine's lights were on, and the carpet was clean. Yes, the cleaning crew had knocked a telephone wire loose at vacuum-cleaner level. I plugged it in; the machine worked, and I felt like a wizard. (Ten years later I remembered the experience when half of a magazine newsroom's Appletalk network was down one morning. Clean carpet; same problem -- and I was a minor hero again.)

Now that I was clearly a technology whiz, Mr. Manchester had one more assignment for me. The phone call went something like this:

"Bill Zinsser tells me I ought to try one of these 'word processors.' Do we have them?"

It was 1983, and the "word processor" Zinsser had been using down at Yale was an IBM Displaywriter. He wrote a book about the experience, including the startling discovery of what could happen to a day's work when the machine crashed. A technical support person's best advice was, "re-type what you did this morning." She seemed surprised to learn Zinsser was "writing," as he put it in his book, "from out of my head."

© Copyright 2009 Bob Stepno. Last update: 7/27/09; 3:57:29 AM.