Millions of words in the rear-view mirror

My original typewriter, awaiting restoration (GoFundMe, anyone?)

 Words come easily to me. I've been fortunate to make my living composing them. As my retirement day (Dec. 31, 2025) approaches, I'm counting them down. 
 In my newspaper career, I averaged about 300 bylined stories per year. Reckoning all the unbylined stories I composed from called-in events, I was turning out over 100,000 words per year. That would be 2.5 million words in 25 years at The Greenville News,  The Anderson Independent, the Columbia Daily Tribune, and The Missourian.

 My pace has relented at Samaritan's Purse, but I can confidently estimate 50,000 annual words for almost 27 years, or 1.3 million.

 Books are 100,000-word projects. I've written two centennial histories: LeConte Lodge: A Centennial History, and Mountain View United Methodist Church. I'm thousands of words into my next project, The South's Best Ideas / How the Great Depression Wrought America's Favorite Parks. The Stoneman Gazette is book-length, so we'll call it 100,000 words.

 Then there are my memoirs, the rest of my blog and the two iterations of my Mount LeConte blogs (LeConte Log and the more elegantly named LeContest.com). Not to mention my quarterly county high-pointers column in the Highpointers Club journal, Apex to Zenith, nor my daily contributions to USA Today's old-timey Around the USA column. 

 So these fingers have pecked out close to 5 million words. Maybe 25 million keystrokes. 

 Here I offer 1,200 more, typed free of charge for your amusement. 

 "Ma" Ashley was my typing teacher at T.L. Hanna High School. I'd like to dedicate my prose to her memory. Mrs. Ashley bore with me in after-school practice sessions, wielding a yardstick as she insisted on proper military posture—feet flat on the floor, wrists off the table. 

 The star students in her typing class were piano players. We had a piano, but I never took lessons, and we didn't have a typewriter at home. But all the after-school practice paid off, and in a race, I could crank out 100 words a minute. My daughter Marta is twice as fast. 

 I bought a couple of cheap typewriters, a lightweight portable that I found in a pawn shop in Columbia, S.C., and a heavyweight desktop model that I used at the University of Missouri. 

 When I started my newspaper career in Anderson, they assigned me to a 1938 Royal Magic Margin model, with a defective F key. We typed our stories on reams of newsprint, and I was known for typing several paragraphs and then ripping off the copy and starting over. It was wildly satisfying to complete a paragraph, hear the end-of-line bell, and sling the carriage return bar. We used bottles of rubber glue to paste our prose together, whiffing all the way.

 When we finished a story, we typed 30 or ###, which was a code that the composing room understood to mean "THE END." 

 It was a noisy business. The Associated Press teletype clattered endlessly with wire stories and pre-internet alerts: "BBN: NO-HIT ALERT: Nolan Ryan has a no-hitter through seven innings."

The ECRM terminal

 By the time I returned from college, Anderson's newsroom was computerized. We had ECRM terminals that had a speaker under the keyboard to imitate the busy sound of a typewriter. 

 It was a poor and annoying imitation. It was also simple enough to raise the hood on the terminal and clip the wires to the speaker, which probably short-circuited the entire system.

 The old manual typewriters were retired into the attic. (Hey, we might need them someday, if computers turn out to be a dead-end fad.)

 Anderson's newspaper office had a suspended acoustic ceiling, so there was no attic, just planks placed through the steel roof girders, where the typewriters were shelved.

 For years, staff meetings were held in that room under those typewriters. The building rumbled when the printing presses ran, and I wondered if those dusty 40-pound bombs might rattle off their perches and plunge through the ceiling tiles onto unsuspecting journalists below. When the newsroom rebelled against our managing editor, we might have eliminated him by poising an old typewriter over his seat.

 As far as I know, the typewriters are still up there today in the derelict newspaper building, mouldering on the edge of the Rocky River swamp.

 I didn't want my dear old typewriter to rust up there in the rafters. So before I left Anderson, I rescued it from the attic and brought it home to rust under our basemen stairs. For my retirement, I want to get it restored. 

 Maybe I'll type an old-fashioned book on it someday. 

Hey, Hey, It's the Monkeys

 Have you heard of the Infinite Monkey Theorem?
 It was a prehistoric vision of AI. What if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters? Eventually they will type out every literary possibility. Shakespeare? "Wherefore art thou?" The King James Bible? "Verily!" Bill and Gloria Gaither? "Because He Lives." The headlines in the Stoneman Gazette? Blame malnewstrition!
 The odds are infinitestimal. An Arizona man named Shane Lewis Stone pondered his 48-key keyboard and figured the odds against a monkey successfully typing his name was 1 in 38 septillion. That's 38 followed by 24 zeroes. And that's not expecting proper capitalization or punctuation. Even on the planet of the apes, it seems there will be work for editors.
 Out of my millions of words, the odds were pretty good that a few of them would win awards, and there might have been more if I had been more diligent about entering contests.
 The South Carolina Press Association gave me a plaque in 1992 for a column about Smitty Danielson, an irrepressible Greenville High School coach whose football teams went 0-22:

 This is an Easter Story of a coach with an all-too-perfect record. In 31 years of teaching at Greenville High School, Smitty Danielson has only once been absent from a day of class. In two seasons of coaching football, though, his teams never had a Good Friday.

 My finest lines passed almost without notice. Please let me recite a couple of passages here. 

 Once I wrote a story about Lonzy Jenkins, a visually impaired athlete at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, who was recruited to run for the state champion cross-country team at Spartanburg High School. 

 Lonzy trained at Croft State Park, a former Army training base. He ran shoulder-to-shoulder with a guide runner, but he also was able to run shoulder to shoulder in another sense, as he followed the lateral bevel of the graded dirt roads. He explained to me that he had a sixth sense that enabled him to correct his own course, keeping his steps between the shoulders of the road, safely out of the ditches. 

 Lonzy inspired my first burst of poetry: 

Shoulder to shoulder,
That's how he goes.
With wings on his heels,
And 20-20 toes.

 I had a similar inspiration when working on a book about the birth of national parks in the Southeast. My generation remembers barn roofs painted with the slogan, "See Rock City," advertising that you can see seven states from Tennessee's Rock City. That was an overstated myth, but at least you can see the first national military park in the Southeast: Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. But did the dramatic cliffs of Rock City and Lookout Mountain have the makings of an actual national park? 

Rock City is nice to see,
but it’s not quite Yosemite.

 When words snap together like that, I think maybe I could have been the next Paul McCartney: 

Michelle, my belle,

These are words that go together well.

 Or at least a monkey, if not a Monkee like Michael Nesmith:

Theater is life.

Cinema is art.

Television is furniture.