I suppose I should have a computer. I'm a couple of years from 80, and so far I've made it without a computer, but the Computer True Believers, a type I keep running into, really get on me whenever I say that my life goes all right without having a computer.
Had one once, or at least one was in my office when I was still teaching in the School of Journalism. Damn thing wouldn't work. By the time I got the monster going I could have typed off three letters and handed them to a secretary who knew how to use a computer.
How would my life have been better had I had a computer for, say, 25 years? I could have put this column on a home computer, I'm told, and it could have gone directly to the system at the Journal-World. That way I'd have missed my Monday morning conversations with Chuck Woodling and my other friends here. I wouldn't have been able to sing "I Must See Annie Tonight" to Ann Gardner.
People tell me that my radio program texts could have been free of errors. For what? I can read those programs aloud with all the editing I've done. I rather like seeing the changes I've made. I learn from them. People tell me a computer could correct misspellings. I'm tempted to tell them that (careful, now, stay modest) l've been a champion speller since the fifth grade.
One CTB told me that if I were hired to teach journalism at KU today I'd have to use a computer. Why? To teach journalism history? OK, I concede that I'd have to have a computer to teach reporting or editing. I could no longer teach the copyreader marks. On a computer if you have a word that needs to be capitalized you just capitalize it. Those three little underlines have gone the way of 78 rpm records and reel-to-reel tape recorders.
E-mail? Let's see, if I had had e-mail 20 years ago could I have sent that eight-page, single-spaced Christmas letter to those 800 students? Maybe. If Jefferson and Adams had had e-mail would they have corresponded that way? Would those historic letters have been preserved for us to read today?
At our family reunion my nephew Mark, a CTB, told me how he has been able to check back through that massive Genealogical Library of the Mormon Church to learn about the Picketts for generations back. I'd like to read some of this stuff, but I can always check with Mark (if he'll write to me putting the letter in an envelope that requires a stamp).
Information. Is that all we need? I want more than information; I want insights, opinions, judgments. If I had had a computer when I started my radio show in 1973 I could have plugged in all the information that right now sits in books, tapes, phonograph records, and my brain. Right now, at least part of the time, my brain is holding up. A friend needed songs from "The King and I" and "White Christmas" and my brain told me right where to find them.
My "computer" facts consist of thousands of file cards that I've amassed (usually with great pleasure). If you need to know whether I have a particular version of "All the Things You Are" I just go to the drawer and pull out the card. A friend needed Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Someone needed some stuff about the Scopes trial. I can find Herb Morrison's report of the Hindenburg crash in seconds. These are all filed, and, so far, they're recorded in my fuzzy head.
Would I have to have a computer if someone wanted to hire this ancient person? Maybe. I hear there are KU professors who require assignments from the Internet. Lordy. I used to tell people that I could teach my classes with chalk and a blackboard, or out on the grass. Admittedly I wouldn't have had the splendid recordings of old songs, John Daly reporting the death of FDR, Edward VIII abdicating, George Hicks telling about D-Day, Neil Armstrong on the moon, Joseph Welch putting down Joseph McCarthy so beautifully. I had all these things available before computers invaded the world.
Well, I could buy things on the Internet, make my Social Security and credit card numbers available to all hands, tune in on some pornography, and get all the information that I have in an encyclopedia two feet from where I sit each evening. And there are all those games to play, the games my grandson Daniel seems to be playing every time we come to see him.
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