Pre-1990’s College Nostalgia that Today’s Students
Will Never Know Firsthand (Unless They Find a Time Machine)
By Susan L. Lipson
The Stacks: That’s
what we called the top floor of the oldest library on campus, reached by climbing
skinny metal staircases, where serious students studied silently among stacks
of the dustiest library books and the ghosts of students past. The multisensory
experience of leafing through heavy, hard-covered tomes in the dim light among
crowded, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; hearing whispers and the sound of turning
pages around the shelf corners; smelling the mustiness of yellowed pages
longing to be aired out; and feeling the thin, onion-skin paper of delicate old
books, in this once-revered section of the campus library—is this experience lost
forever to college students of today and tomorrow, who now crouch over
computers at cubicles, listening to music through headphones, in the new campus
library world?
The smell and sight of
correction fluid (which we called “white-out”) as it dried on translucent
typewriter paper: Sour-smelling as it wafted upward into the nostrils, the
dabbed white spots dried brighter and more opaque than the paper they covered. You
blew on the painted spot so you could quickly resume typing, but if you didn’t
wait long enough before rolling the paper backward on the typewriter roll—into
that perfect spot so the letter key would strike in the right place, aligned with
the other letters around it—then you’d end up seeing not a crisp black letter
over your whited-out spot, but an embossed-looking smudge. And then you’d have
to clean the typewriter key, before starting the correction process again—with
patience. Such “simple” methods of revision hardly encouraged multiple drafts!
The Delete key of today’s students was but an imaginary invention in a science
fiction world.
The DING at the end of each line of type: After hearing the happy typewriter bell, nothing beat that joyful release of hitting the carriage return to slam it to the left side of the typewriter and start typing another line. This sound, if not in front of you, could regularly be heard through the thin dorm walls.
Cut and paste editing.
This involved using scissors to cut a misplaced paragraph out of an essay,
and cut a spot in another place to fit in the passage like a puzzle piece. Then
you either taped or glued the puzzle piece into its new spot in the essay so
that you could make a photocopy on a Xerox machine (we all called it “xeroxing”
then). The copy would come out with a faint outline around the inserted words,
which you would then dab with “white-out” to disguise the inserted section
before making another copy of the “clean” page. If you didn’t learn from
hastily typing over not quite dry white-out, then you might have also
discovered that outlines became gray smudges on copies AND left white smears on
the glass surface of the copy machine!
Word Limits on Essays:
You either counted words with your index finger, bleary-eyed, and had to
recount in the middle if you lost your concentration, or you estimated based on
the typical number of words on a standard, double-spaced page with one-inch
margins all around—margins that you set manually on the typewriter carriage, and
sometimes fudged a bit when you realized you exceeded the word limit but had no
time left to edit and retype.
Grade Postings: They
were literally posted on a bulletin board outside a professor’s office, which
meant walking there, sometimes in lousy weather, just to eliminate some of the
waiting time until the transcripts were mailed to your mailbox—that’s MAILBOX,
not INBOX. Instant gratification wasn’t a Thing yet.
Carbon copies: You
know that line on your email in today’s world, that says “cc” so you can
simultaneously email the same message to another person? Those letters stand
for carbon copy, which used to be created
by inserting a sheet of black-inked carbon paper (one side inky, the other clean
to the touch) that you inserted between two sheets of typing paper before
rolling the three sheets into the typewriter carriage (the “carriage” was the
round, scroll-like thing that the keys tapped against, in case you’re from that
other planet called ComputersOn). Typing on the top sheet caused the ink in the
middle to imprint the identical letters on the bottom sheet, like some
old-fashioned checkbook registers still do today (mine does, of course).
Dictionaries and
Thesauruses: Those big books full of words and definitions and etymologies
and sample sentences that we always kept beside us while writing essays. They
would help us spell words and find more powerful substitute words, and
sometimes we’d even get sidetracked by other interesting words on the page and
even add more to our vocabulary. Fancy that! Dictionaries and thesauruses also made
good, albeit hard, pillows when we’d find ourselves snoozing in the library
during an all-nighter. Furthermore, these word-finders didn’t require an
internet connection.
Encyclopedias: These
multi-volume hardcover books provided the information now usually found by
students on Wikipedia; however, the encyclopedias were supposedly fact-checked
and not able to be edited by any reader who deemed themselves more of an expert
than the reference book writers.
Mail in the dorm
mailbox: As we entered our dorms, we’d stop to check out mailboxes in the
lobby for letters from home or elsewhere, maybe even for a bill.
Dorm rooms had wall
phones. A missed call was missed. No answering machines either.
Rather than go on and on with this nostalgic brainstorm, let
me explain the catalyst. An 11-year-old student, in the middle of completing a
writing assignment during my workshop, paused to reread, then frowned. He looked
up at me from his notebook and commented, “I wish paper had built-in
spell-checkers.” I pointed to the dictionary, and he groaned. Then he added,
“And I wish it could cut and paste lines, too.” I offered to get him scissors
and some tape. He shook his head, sighed, and started rewriting the page.
I replied with a chuckle, “You are so…two-thousands.”
And then I realized that we are already way past 2001, the
year that my college classmates and I thought of as the year of a space
odyssey.
I finished that lesson with this advice to my student, “Just
remember, when you’re a dad someday, that your kids will make fun of the
‘old-time smart phones’ that they used to have before your kids began simply
dialing their arms.” We exchanged smiles.
Imagine my surprise when I opened Facebook that same night
and saw on my Timeline a link to a video that showed a new bracelet that turns
your inner forearm into a cell phone! So much for “old-fashioned.”
(This essay also appears, along with some essays not found here, on
