Me and Maggie McGee

In my high school sophomore year, I took a typing class. My typing teacher was an elderly woman named Maggie McGee. She had been teaching in that same small school in Riddle Oregon for about a hundred years, so it seemed. Which was impossible, because she was only in her 60’s at that time. She was a big boned battle-ax of a woman, not fat, but solid and tall, and prone to wearing a hair net and big-heeled and big-toed black shoes that clomped as she walked.

We were all afraid of her. She was a stern taskmaster and put up with no silliness, idleness, tardiness, student conversations unless it was with her, gum chewing, other bad behavior or disrespect. We believed if we displeased her too greatly she was capable and willing to gut us with her large needle pointed scissors that seemed always near to her hand.

In those days, we had no computers or keyboards, and just four electric typewriters in the classroom. The other 20 or so were the manual type. For my younger readers let me describe how a manual typewriter worked. You had to load paper into the carriage by aligning it behind the paten, a rolling pin like cylinder, and then turn the paten so as to pinch the paper in the carriage and roll it up to be behind an ink laden ribbon. You typed a letter by depressing the key sharply enough to cause the arm with the letter engraved on it to swing up to strike the ink ribbon and transfer ink to the paper in the shape of the engraved letter. Making a successful keystroke required that the key be depressed at least an inch and a half. With each keystroke the carriage would shift one letter’s width to the left while at the same time the ribbon would unwind the same distance on one side of the roll and wind that same amount on its other roll. As the carriage reached the right margin, which you set manually with a locking slider on the carriage, it would cause a striker to hit a little bell. Hearing the bell was your cue to reach up with your left hand to pull the return lever to the right, thus sliding the carriage back to the right, also causing the paten to turn one line width and advance the paper by that much. It was possible to type past the margin setting, so the idea was to set it wide enough that you could type a few more characters after hearing the bell ding if you were not at a good place to break the word with a hyphen. Typing in those days was physical effort and you had to get your hands and fingers in shape to do very much of it. Believe it or not, some of my fellow students, boy and girls, could type 100 words or more in a minute on these old manual machines.

Here’s a bit of trivia. Did you know the most common keyboard we use today is called the QWERTY keyboard? It gets its name from the fact that QWERTY are the first six left most letters on the upper letters row of the keyboard. You probably also have wondered why the keyboard uses its odd arrangement of letters; why not arrange them alphabetically? The answer is that the inventors of the keyboard, like the electric typewriter inventors before them, were simply copying the arrangement of letters of the old manual typewriter. All those who learned the touch-typing method, which is what I learned is Mrs. McGee’s class, spent untold hours practicing and developing muscle memories with the original typewriters’ letter arrangements. The electric typewriter vendors, and after them the keyboard makers, didn’t want to make buyers angry by making them learn a new key placement arrangement. You probably are now asking why there was such an odd arrangement to begin with. The answer is, in the original manual typewriters the keys were arranged briefly in an alphabetical order, but the typists got so fast that the keys would collide and bind up, sometimes rather spectacularly. The typewriter folks solved this problem by putting keys for letters that tend in many words to appear next to or near each other into positions that made it hard for the typist to press them at the same time. In other cases, they put them far enough away from each other to slow the typist down just enough to allow the keys to clear in their travel to the paper. Look at the position of the E and the D on a keyboard, for example. These two letters are often next to each other in words. In the touch typing method you use the same finger to type them, this insuring that they can’t collide at the ribbon.

Back to Maggie and football. They are related.

We were practicing for the last game of the year, in late October. The practice field was muddy, as it often is in Oregon in late fall. In those days, we wore one-inch spikes on our shoes to help grip the soft ground. I was on defense against our varsity offense. The coach called a stunt and I shot the gap into the backfield just as they handed off to the halfback. I messed up the tackle, however, and ended up on my back with my arms wrapped around his ankles. He pulled a foot loose and stepped back, with his cleats planting firmly into the helmet bars in front of my face. He pushed off, using my face as a starting block. The bars broke off and his cleats gained purchase and traction on my face.

As soon as he was gone, I rolled over and got to my hands and knees. I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, and frankly the pain was severe. In my right eye I could see the blood as it ran off my nose onto the ground.

Lesson number one: if you are a coach, don’t do what one of our assistant coaches did on that day.

“I see we have our bloody nose for the day,” he announced, somewhat cheerfully.

I know he wasn’t happy that I was hurt, and, even though he didn’t know how badly hurt I was, he was just trying to make light of it in that manly sort of way that men affect.

He came up to me and squatted next to me. “Let me see,” he said. I turned my head to look at him.

“Oh my god,” he gagged, staggered off a dozen feet and vomited.

You can imagine how that filled me with confidence.

Yet, I was calm and not in shock. Which is weird, I know. One of the other assistant coaches gathered me up and took me to the locker room to arrange for medical treatment. On the way, I asked him if he would ask the team to move where they were practicing. As I explained, I had just read in my dad’s science magazine how they were now able to do eyeball replacements, and maybe they could find my left eyeball in the grass and the doctors could put it back in. He gave me a funny look, which I saw out of my right eye, but didn’t say anything.

Arranging for medical treatment consisted of him dumping me on a bench in the locker room and going to the school office to telephone my mom and dad to come get me and take me to the hospital.

As it happened, Maggie McGee was in the office when he came in. She asked him what he was doing there; didn’t he have practice? He told her that I was hurt and he needed to call my parents. She asked where I was, and he replied that I was in the boys’ locker room. Was anyone looking out for me, she inquired. Not at the moment, he responded.

The locker rooms were at the end of building next to the gym. You could get into them by entering doors from the rear parking lot or by going through the gym. I heard her shoes clomping through the gym the minute she entered it. I knew precisely who was coming. We all knew that sound. I heard the first door to the outer room open and more clomping. The inner door to the locker slammed open, and here was Maggie McGee clomping down the four steps in the locker room proper. Naked wrestlers, just off practice, scrambled for cover. A few lightweights dove into lockers, others made it to the two toilet stalls, and the rest slid into the showers. Maggie cared not at all.

She took one look at me, and walked over to the towel stack on the table next to the showers, grabbed two clean towels from it and walked right into the showers. Naked wrestlers cowered and tried to cover up. She simply walked up to the first shower that was running hot water and soaked one of the towels.

She came back to where I was sitting. There she firmly grabbed my jaw to make me hold still, and proceeded to wash the mud and blood from my face. Amazingly, she scrubbed aggressively at my left eye socket. It hurt like hell. I soon realized that the reason I could not see out of it was that the entire area was packed with mud. As soon as I realized my eyeball was still where it should be, I exclaimed in delight, “Hey, I can see!”

“Of course, you silly boy.” Maggie said. “Now hold still.”

Once she had me mostly cleaned up, and had fetched another couple of towels to hold to my still bleeding face, she announced I had to get out of the football gear and into my street clothes. Once we found my locker, she proceeded to help me remove my pads, and uniform, even kneeling down to untie my cleats and pull them off. I sat finally in nothing but my jock strap while she handed me my underwear and then discreetly turned back to my locker to get my other clothes while I slipped the jock off and the underwear on. Normally, I would rather have died than be in that position. Oddly, I didn’t care, and was so grateful for the help that I might as well have been 3 years old again and Maggie my mother.

She helped pull on the t-shirt over my head, get my feet into the legs of my jeans and knelt to help me put on my shoes, much as she had helped take off my cleats. After I was dressed, she led me out the back door to sit on the bench next to the parking lot and wait for my parents. She waited the whole time with me, not saying anything, but just sitting there next to me.

Next stop for me was the hospital, which was located 30 miles away. The doctor had always wanted to be a plastic surgeon, and he was good, so he took his time and made many small sutures to minimize the scars. One laceration ran from the inside corner of my left eye along the lower bone socket for almost two inches. That took about 20 stitches. Another laceration was in my left upper lip. It went clear through and into the gum of my teeth. That took about eight stitches on the outside, another four or five on the inside and another two in my gum. The third laceration was in my right upper lip, almost in my cheek. Again, it went completely though and into the gum. All told, I think it required another 14 or 15 stitches inside and out and in the gum. Two of my upper front teeth were bent back into my mouth. The next day I saw my dentist who pulled them back into position and we hoped like crazy they would heal into place. They did.

One little complication was very uncomfortable. Once I got home around 11 o’clock at night, I wanted nothing more than a shower. I still had dried mud and blood all over me. I could not breathe through my nose because there was so much stuff crammed up my nostrils. I took that shower, and in the course of it, blew my nose strongly. I immediately felt something wrong in my face. I jumped out of the shower and looked in the mirror. I watched my left cheek start to blow up like a balloon. I could feel the pressure that was causing it to inflate.

It turns out that the spike that had gouged down my left eye socket had actually pierced through the bone and cartilage of my nose. In effect it punched a hole into my sinus. The surgeon had missed it, and in sewing such tight and small sutures, had effectively sealed my skin like the seam on an inner tube. When I blew my nose, I created a huge amount of pressure in my sinuses, which reacted by pumping all the fluids in my sinuses out into the layers of my cheek.

I had so much pressure that the next day when we went back to the doctor, he was reluctant to put a needle into my check to drain the fluid for fear that it would explode like a balloon would if you poked it with a pin. You know, rip the cheek in several directions when the pressure released. The remedy was for me to sleep sitting up for almost a week and let the body reabsorb the fluid naturally.

Lesson number two: do not tell the patient that if he lays down the germ ridden snot in his cheek will rush to his brain and he will die a terrible agonizing death. Who could sleep in a chair thinking that once he was out he might lay down without knowing it?

The accident happened on a Thursday. I missed school on Friday. I went back on Monday. I looked like something out of a horror movie, all black sutures and bruises and swollen face. I was a gruesome sight. It looked impressive to me and the other guys, but I discovered that girls were no more disposed to me as a result. It didn’t help me out one little bit in that department if you know what I mean.

Mrs. McGee smiled at me once we were assembled in her class that first Monday. She said to me, “Michael, dear, if typing causes you pain or discomfort, just say so and you can be excused from the exercises, but do try to follow along with the lessons.”

“Yes, Mrs. McGee. I have noticed that even the smallest movements are quite painful.”

“Of course, dear,” she replied. “You just sit quietly and heal.”

I was golden!

How sweet was this deal? I noticed my classmates giving me dirty looks, albeit envious ones, as they typed N, V, P, Q over and over, then did speed exercises.

The other thing about Maggie McGee was she loved Don Ho and his only hit song: Tiny Bubbles. She had a portable record player in the classroom and would play the record over and over and over. It seemed the better her mood, the more she played the song.

Tiny bubbles in the wine
Make me feel happy
Make me feel fine

On Friday of the second week from my accident, Mrs. McGee asked me at the beginning of class how I was feeling. Having gotten my stitches out that week, the bruises being mostly gone and the swelling all but relieved, I realized my good run was probably over. I didn’t want to push it, so I gamely advised that I thought I was back to being able to type and resume my normal activities.

“That’s just wonderful, dear!” she exclaimed. “Because, you know you are two weeks behind, and need to catch up. So, starting next Monday, please present yourself in this classroom at 7 am and we will review and go through all the classes you have missed since your unfortunate accident.” She smiled at me like the Cheshire Cat and then went on with the lesson.

Every morning for the next two weeks, I sat at one of Maggie’s typewriters and did all the lessons I had missed. She was right there with me, smiling and encouraging and threatening to gut me with her scissors if I acted up.

Did I mention that I hate Don Ho?