Love in the Time of Typewriters

Jones resigned as editor-in-chief of LEGITE in my junior year 1982-83. Finding no one else who loved to write and was willing to slave and toil to create something decently readable, the editorial board and the school administration chose me to take his place.

Nothing really changed, as far as I was concerned. I still had to do the same tasks I had been doing as associate. That means I had to cajole, plea, beg people like McAbs, Ping, Soc, JunTabs, Leonel and others to write just about anything they could think of, then follow them up repeatedly, then edit and type their work on a stencil, then ask the graphic artists to draw anything on the empty spaces, then operate the mimeographing machine. And toil I did for two years.

There were no computers. We hadn’t even seen one, not even in sci-fi movies. But it was during this time when Fr Khing allowed us to use one of the Olivetti typewriters donated by a German foundation. The massive typewriter was placed in the new publications room, beside the library. It was adjacent to the testing room where I found old filled-up psychological testing materials, some from years back, which contained several sentence completion tests. I read answers to the questions and wondered how naive I was in high school, only to realize that actually I probably would have answered those questions in the same way I did. I also read some of our classmates' responses, laughed  at their answers, and realized that I was not alone in my naivety.

During my spare time and after editing the write-ups, I would type them on a folded sheet of legal paper. The fold on the paper would indicate the column width and I would know when to start another line. The number of characters per column and the number of lines used per article should just be enough to fill a space allotted for the article. So I had to do a lot of editing while typing.

Once finished, I would re-type them to a stencil, in 2 columns, leaving some space for Jones, and occasionally Bobong, to draw something pertinent to the article. Errors were corrected using the pink-colored liquid correcting ink. Jones and I would then do the mimeographing. And the finished product would then be distributed.

It was a labor of love, but we all enjoyed doing it.

(nox arcamo)