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Running off...
A shout out to my dear friend, Peg, who inspired this piece from a comment she left for “Chalking it Up,” one of my teacher memoirs. You might say it cranked up recollections all the way back to 1973, my first year of teaching in one of three fifth-grade classrooms at Northern Lincoln Elementary. Then, as now, the teaching profession involved running off at the mouth to impart knowledge or impose discipline. Then, but not so much now, students demonstrated their mastery, or lack thereof, on any given subject by wielding a no. 2 yellow Ticonderoga pencil to write their answers on worksheets.
During my first year in the trenches, “running off” also involved duplicating worksheets on a manually cranked mimeograph machine, otherwise known as a “ditto machine” or “mimeo” which worked by forcing ink through a handwritten or typed stencil onto paper. Easier explained than executed!
If you were lucky enough not to have to attach a full tin of duplicating fluid to a hose because the teacher before you left an empty, you still had to prime the machine to get its juices flowing—unless the mimeo had worked its tail off—best- case scenario. If not, then, crank ‘er up for a trial run. Too light? More priming. Don’t overdo it on the pumping because you’ll end up printing a soggy worksheet come prime time.
Once a sample printout met your approval, let the cranking begin. You had to monitor the output tray because you didn’t want your worksheets to fly off the handle, so to speak. Or, get yourself in a jam. You could only get so many worksheets out of your stencil before it faded to nothing. There was very little chance you could reuse that stencil.
By the time you made it back inside the classroom with your booty, your fingers and nails were tinted purple. On standby, a jar of pink, gooey hand cleaner you scooped out and rubbed into your skin to remove most traces of residue.
Hot off the press? Better to wait before distributing so the ink had a chance to dry completely and the paper didn’t curl. Against better judgement, some students brought the worksheet up to their nose to inhale the noxious odor akin to rubbing alcohol.
Long before our school got a Xerox machine, the faculty was ecstatic to receive a mimeo with automatic feed. The more things changed, the more they remained the same for retaining the perils which plagued the person running off. Ditto. Who’d dare run off at the mouth saying they’d want to duplicate the good old days?
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I love it when you "flew off the handle," whenever you got in a, "jam." ;-)
Ron