MEMORY-LANE-L Archives

Archiver > MEMORY-LANE > 2006-01 > 1136146237


From: Walter Barge <>
Subject: Re: [ML] Onion Skin Paper
Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2006 12:10:37 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <3eb92e110601011008h321a4457hb03d8e3abc2925c0@mail.gmail.com>


I can't resist this one. I watched my grandfather sit for nearly all of his retirement years (1942-1957) at an old Remington upright typewriter, writing the history of the various branches of his family and my grandmother's family---both in Northern Virginia. He made several onion skin copies and bound them. I still have one of them and use it constantly in my own genealogical research. Through college and graduate school, I continued to use the onion skin, or sometimes a thinner alternative, for carbon copies for class papers, etc. Eventually somebody invented a carbon--second sheet combination that eliminated the black ink on shirtsleeves and the problem of putting carbon in backwards. When I had almost finished my doctoral work, my mother gave me a Smith-Corona electric portable so I could type my book-length dissertation, but Mom didn't reckon with what a poor typist I turned out to be. So I hired a young woman in our church who was out of work to type it for me. !
She made
an original and three copies of 275 pages with only 11 typos that I could find when I was proofreading it. After she corrected those, she said she never wanted to type again.

I join the thanksgiving for computers and word processors. A poor typist like I am can get by with murder and let spell-check do about 95 percent of the spotting of errors.

I had that old Remington upright for a number of years after I moved here. But someone stole it from my office about two years before I retired. A contemptible thing that was!

Walter




Eleanor Richardson <> wrote:
> I also remember "many moons" ago, when I did some secretarial work, we had
> to make an original copy and 6 or 7 copies on the onion skin....there
could
> not be one mistake. First there were the erasers that were round like a
> wheel, with a brush attached, then came the pencil, one end for the
original
> and one end for the carbon copies, then liquid paper, etc. A couple of
> months ago when I was going through some boxes of "Life's treasures", I
> found my little metal template that I used to use to make corrections. It
> opened a compartment of my brain that had not been stimulated in
years...it
> was wonderful.
>
> Eleanor





Walter S. Barge

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