Cheaper by the Dozen

teach it, Billy boy."
    "But do you know it yourself, Daddy?"
    "I know how to teach it," Dad shouted. "In two weeks, I can teach it to a child. Do you hear me? I have just finished helping to develop the fastest typist in the world. Do you hear that? They tell me Caruso's voice teacher can't sing a by jingoed note. Does that answer your question?"
    "I guess so," said Bill.
    "Any other questions?"
    There weren't. Dad then brought out some paper diagrams of a typewriter keyboard, and passed one to each of us.
    "The first thing you have to do is to memorize that keyboard. QWERTYUIOP. Those are the letters in the top line. Memorize them. Get to know them forward and backwards. Get to know them so you can say them with your eyes closed. Like this."
    Dad closed his right eye, but kept his left open just a slit so that he could still read the chart.
    "QWERTYUIOP. See what I mean? Get to know them in your sleep. That's the first step."
    We looked crestfallen.
    "I know. You want to try out that white typewriter. Pretty, isn't it?"
    He clicked a few keys.
    "Runs as smoothly as a watch, doesn't it?"
    We said it did.
    "Well, tomorrow or the next day you'll be using it. First you have to memorize the keyboard. Then you've got to learn what fingers to use. Then you'll graduate to Moby Dick here. And one of you will win him."
    Once we had memorized the keyboard, our fingers were colored with chalk. The little fingers were colored blue, the index fingers red and so forth. Corresponding colors were placed on the key zones of the diagrams. For instance, the Q, A and Z, all of which are hit with the little finger of the left hand, were colored blue to match the blue little finger.
    "All you have to do now is practice until each finger has learned the right color habit," Dad said. "And once you've got that, we'll be ready to start."
    In two days we were fairly adept at matching the colors on our fingers with the colors on the keyboard diagrams. Ernestine was the fastest, and got the first chance to sit down at the white typewriter. She hitched her chair up to it confidently, while we all gathered around.
    "Hey, no fair, Daddy," she wailed. "You've put blank caps on all the keys. I can't see what I'm typing."
    Blank caps are fairly common now, but Dad had thought up the idea and had had them made specially by the Remington company.
    "You don't have to see," Dad said. "Just imagine that those keys are colored, and type just like you were typing on the diagram."
    Em started slowly, and then picked up speed, as her fingers jumped instinctively from key to key. Dad stood in back of her, with a pencil in one hand and a diagram in the other. Every time she made a mistake, he brought the pencil down on the top of her head.
    "Stop it Daddy. That hurts. I can't concentrate knowing that that pencil's about to descend on my head."
    "It's meant to hurt. Your head has to teach your fingers not to make mistakes."
    Ern typed along. About every fifth word, she'd make a mistake and the pencil would descend with a bong. But the bongs became less and less frequent and finally Dad put away the pencil.
    "That's fine, Ernie," he said. "I believe I'll keep you."
    By the end of the two weeks, all children over six years old and Mother knew the touch system reasonably well. Dad said he knew it, too. We were a long way from being fast— because nothing but practice gives speed—but we were reasonably accurate.
    Dad entered Ernestine's name in a national speed contest, as a sort of child prodigy, but Mother talked him out of it and Ern never actually competed.
    "It's not that I want to show her off," he told Mother. "It's just that I want to do the people a favor—to show them what can be done with proper instructional methods and motion study."
    "I don't think it would be too good an idea, dear," Mother said. "Ernestine is high strung, and the children are conceited enough as it is."
    Dad compromised by taking moving pictures of each of us, first with colored fingers practicing on the paper diagrams and then actually working on the typewriter. He said the pictures were "for my files," but about a month later they were released in a newsreel, which showed everything except the pencil descending on our heads. And some of us today recoil every time we touch the backspace key.
    Since Dad thought eating was a form of unavoidable delay, he utilized the dinner hour as an instruction period. His primary rule was that no one could talk unless the subject was of general