It was an ordinary transaction. Someone paid some money on account. The clerk recorded the payment and wrote out a receipt.
It was April 1, 1911, just another day in a small prairie town. My great-grandfather came in to the local general store — grandly calling itself a department store — and paid $30 on the $50 he owed.
I suppose he and the clerk chatted, perhaps about the weather, maybe wondering how seeding conditions were shaping up. While they talked, the clerk dipped a straight pen into an inkwell and filled out the receipt. Somehow, that receipt ended up among protective layers of paper packed around glass negatives of family photos. What caught my eye was the elegant, flowing handwriting that turned a store receipt into a work of art.
Today, keys would be punched on a computer, plastic would slide along a slot and a printer would spit out a receipt that would contain all the pertinent information, although I defy anyone to find the date quickly amid all the codes and gobbledygook. It’s a far more efficient system, and I’m not saying we should turn back the clock, but something has been lost.
Although handwriting is still part of the B.C. elementary school curriculum, our education system doesn’t place as much emphasis on penmanship as it used to, and it’s easy to understand why. But penmanship in 1911 was what computer skills are today. A neat and legible hand, with acceptable speed, was an important asset in finding a job then.
Today, good handwriting, I think, is more a mark of good character than it is a job skill. Having said that, I hope my character is not judged by my handwriting, or I might end up in prison.
Oh, they tried (to improve my handwriting, that is, not put me in prison). I think my penmanship drove several teachers to an early grave. How I hated those sessions of making endless loops with just the right wrist motion as they tried to set me on the path to legibility. It just didn’t take.
We were allowed pencils only in Grade 1. We thought we were big shots in Grade 2 when they gave us ink bottles and straight pens, but it was disaster for me. My pens always dripped, and my writing was a mass of blobs and streaks. Later, ballpoint pens took an instant dislike to me and would insist on leaking in my shirt pocket.
When I was 12, the family got a typewriter for Christmas, and I rejoiced. So did my teachers — they discovered I was literate. Typewritten papers were not the usual thing then, but no one objected when I typed my essays and homework.
From then on, I couldn’t live without a typewriter. Until computers came along — I embraced them joyfully, freed forever from the need to be tidy when I wrote.
I can’t imagine being a journalist in 1911. I would have had to write columns and stories in longhand, which would then be set in lead type, one letter at a time, by someone who would insist on legible handwriting. I would probably have been quickly pointed to a different career.
Good handwriting is not the essential it once was. The computers can do it all for us. In the past, people’s personalities could be analyzed through their handwriting. Now we’re judged by our choice of typefaces, which brings up a topic best left for another discussion, except to note that flogging is too good for people who misuse typefaces, and there are many of you.
A search this week for a misplaced item turned up something I had forgotten about — a fine fountain pen presented to me as a memento for an occasion I can’t seem to recall. It has yet to be filled — I think I fear the mess I would make — but as I hefted that pen, I imagined myself writing a flowing, beautiful script.
Most of us couldn’t live without computers, at home or at work. They are part of modern life. But a handwritten receipt from more than a century ago raises keen regrets at not doing a better job with those bothersome loops and whorls.
