dead letter office

Quick follow-up on my last blogpost - Richard Griffen offers a much more personal review of The Post, in the Wicked Local:

When I was a child, that Post was the largest newspaper in New England, and it was also where my father worked. Newspapers were central to our world.

After my freshman year in college, I had a summer job as a copy boy at another paper, The Boston Globe. Along with one or two other young men, I stood by a pneumatic tube in the newsroom, waiting to send typewritten pages upstairs to the composing room.

In this digital age, of course, such jobs no longer exist. But they did in 1971, and in “The Post,” Spielberg shows us a world of pneumatic tubes and metallic type, when people counted on papers for the latest news.

One of my summer jobs was typing letters on an electronic typewriter in my dad's architectural office. I used the keyboard skills taught to me in my typewriter classes in my catholic all-girls' highschool, learning QWERTY and space bars and what to do with mistakes. I can still hear in my ears Mrs Skippington's singsong voice orchestrating us girls in synchronised typing. I guess that job doesn't exist these days either.

Photo of a hospital's "Typewriter Graveyard" from Jonathan Haeber's Flickr page, used under the creative commons lisence.