Memoir: My High School Typing Teacher Saved My Navy Career

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My High School Typing Teacher Saved My Navy Career

Memoir by Curt Smothers


Mrs. Digby was my high school typing teacher way back in 1959, and I owe her a lot. I took her typing class for three reasons: 1) I didn’t want to take Chemistry; 2) I loved to write, but my penmanship was really bad; and  3) it was an easy way for a nerdy guy with glasses -- me -- to socialize with girls—who made up the overwhelming majority of the class.


What I remember most about Mrs. Digby was that, despite her small stature -- barely over five feet -- she was as tough as any drill sergeant and she insisted that her students learn the keyboard by touch. If she caught you looking at your hands, she would sear the flesh off you with her acid tongue.


We had to rest our fingers on the (blank) home keys of our Royal manual typewriters and wait for the drill cadence:


“j u j, space; don’t watch your hands, space… Curt! Eyes on the textbook. You keep watching those hands, and I’m going to make you wear the funnel the vet put on my dog to keep it from licking its wormy hind-end!” (The girls all laughed. So much for my romantic dreams.)


Nevertheless, what was kind of a fun semester in a class with no homework turned out to be the most valuable skill I learned in high school. I enlisted in the Navy shortly after graduating and promptly ignored my dad’s advice about volunteering. The company commander announced about five days into my recruit training that the battalion office was looking for a typist.


I reported to the battalion commander’s office and demonstrated that I could type “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” at top speed on the oldest manual typewriter that I have ever seen. I think it was an Olivetti, and it was to a shiny Royal as a beat-up VW is to a Mercedes Benz.


I became the battalion yeoman (clerk) and spent my nine weeks of recruit training as a clerk typist and messenger while my fellow recruits marched, did physical exercise on the drilling field and marched some more. I typed Mrs. Digby a thank-you letter, and she wrote back: “Don’t forget: keep your eyes away from your hands! And keep writing! You always were a very good writer."


After I left boot camp, the Navy sent me to the Yeoman school in Bainbridge, Maryland. Mrs. Digby was proud when I told her that I graduated first in my class, and I was rewarded with a three-year tour of duty at the Navy Headquarters in London, where everyone wore civilian clothes and got extra pay for living expenses on the local economy.


Ah, three years of living in the heart of London during the early ‘60s was about as good as it gets. There I had better luck with the girls than I did in Mrs. Digby’s typing class (probably because her tease about the butt-licking dog hadn't made it to the shores of Great Britain yet). In fact, just a few months into my tour in London, I met the woman who would share the next 50 years of her life with me.


Over a half-century and a 25-year Navy career have passed and my English rose and I are still together. We have grandchildren and great memories, and I would never have met her had it not been for Mrs. Digby’s typing class and her skills as a mentor and teacher.


There really is a connection between Mrs. Digby’s iron Royals and the QWERTY keyboard on smartphones, which really aren’t all that smart, because you have to use -- and watch -- your thumbs.


With all due respect to Mrs. Digby, I had to quit keying in two spaces after a period. I also have to glance at the keyboard from time to time to find the escape or function keys. I’m glad she’s not here to yell at me.

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