Victor Wakefield, 1926 - 2024

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: You may have missed the news in the comments section, but our own Celia Wakefield's beloved husband Victor died this past month, at home in bed, at the age of 98. He led an amazing and rich live in his almost-century, and this morning, instead of a recipe, Celia is sharing a few - there are so many! - Victor stories.

 

 

It's Julia's week which seems to say it’s Celia's Sunday. Julia suggested that while I had written so much about my own childhood perhaps it was time to tell some of Victor’s early tales. 

 

Where to start? Of course, how did we meet? I had recently joined IBM UK and was at the Data Processing Christmas Party held in the pub across the road from IBM UK HQ. (IBM was a dry company worldwide, in fact they were ahead of the current trend). I was feeling very nervous finding myself a part of a group around the managing director (UK speak - CEO). Someone came and stood between my friend Audrey and me. “Hello, Vic” said Audrey and introduced us. However, Victor told a different tale. He always insisted he had seen me from across the room and asked who I was. On being told I was a new secretary - "and I hadn't a boy friend," Victor like to add as he replied then, "Well she does now!" Knowing the person he had been speaking with I disagree. There are some things one didn’t discuss at work. But you be the judge as to which version seems most likely.

 

Victor grew up in circumstances very different from mine. He was a life-long asthmatic. This served him well as he turned eighteen in 1944. He was called up to fight in the Second World War, but due to his health was never sent to the front. Instead, he was placed in British counter intelligence. On testing he proved adept at foreign language, so was learning Japanese when the war ended. As he still had to complete his three years of national service, he was posted first to India, where the saying was, “Those who hold the Red Fort (large military complex in Delhi) hold India.” The transfer from British to self rule was, as Victor wrote, “A turbulent and terrible time.” The work involved retraining of thousands of jobs done by the British now to be done by the Indians. Victor spoke very little of his actual work. I would imagine he had to keep listening for possible sedition but I have no proof. 

 

The scanned version is scratched, alas...

Victor loved to talk about his seven sweeps of the scythe. Opportunities which might have ended in disaster but from which he was saved by unexpected help. Here is one that has disaster written all over it. After the monsoon season Victor heard of a remote hilly area where a profusion of spectacularly colored butterflies hatched only at that time of year. Riding on a narrow dirt road he veered too close to the edge over a deep drop into the ravine below. His motorbike swerved off the path and hung over the drop. He was stuck. The bike was army issue so losing it was out of the question, but it was heavy and there was no way to maneuver it back onto the path. Then his luck changed. 

Along the path came two Indian men who, seeing Victors predicament, ran to him and were able to lift the bike and pull Victor back to safety. 

 

The screen shot version is blurry!

From India Victor was posted to Nairobi, Kenya. Among his responsibilities was teaching the “Kenyan Askaris” to be smart and effective soldiers, which included learning how to ride motor-cycles. This involved a lot of merriment on the troops account. They referred to the motor-cycles as piki-piki, in Swahili from the motor-cycle sound. 

 

Victor had several adventures or Swipes in Kenya. I think this one scared him the most. One night he drove his jeep into the bush to look at the stars. Turning off his headlights to scan the heavens, he was horrified to find he was being watched by hundreds of pairs of eyes. Reversing quickly, headlights on again, he fled back to civilization.

 

Victor was a man of many talents and hobbies. He liked to tell friends that he had been active all his life from the early gift of a bicycle from a Canadian soldier. He rode miles over the South Downs above Brighton. He loved to play tennis and one friend wrote of his determination to win (though in a most gentleman like manner.) He had great pleasure trying to play with our grandson in 2021 even though it was hard to swoop around the court as he had in the past.

 

His retirement work centered around mechanical clock repair and rebuilding until he had his cataracts removed, which altered his shortsightedness. He was an avid gamer, researching century old games which he would build to play with kids. He was a clown. Yes, he went to clown school! He was a photographer and returned to the immediate pleasure it gave him through his iPad - instant gratification. He would take photos of breaking news on the TV. I think this helped him to cement the event as he knew his memory was failing. 

 

Victor and I bonded over my love of the Beatles whose lyrics he told me reminded him of Elizabethan madrigals. We loved music, particularly classical, and Victor studied and played an Alto recorder with our daughter Olivia, who played the soprano version before switching to flute. He was a founding member of the Recorder Group here at the senior college at USM. Looking back on our almost 60 years together I realize he has left me a gift. Time to spend now on pursuing some other interests of my own - though I know I shall still be cooking. In fact, I am finding that cooking for one isn’t as bad as I thought, so perhaps that will be my topic if Julia invites me next time. 

JULIA: Oh, you know there will be a next time! Dear readers, what are some of your stories about loved ones now passed?

Let's talk typewriters!

HALLIE: I remember my love affair with the Remington typewriter that sat on a typewriter table (remember those?) in our family room. I loved the way its metal body smelled -- a lot like the hood of our Buick. I loved coming to the end of a line, hitting that metal handle, and sending the carriage return flying back to start a new line. I remember how dirty my fingers got when the ribbon ran out, and it was time to reverse the spools. How I wish I still had any of the dreadful stories and, heaven help me, poems, that I rolled off it.

My mother and father were Hollywood screenwriters. They wrote a movie ("The Desk Set") with a computer in it named EMERAC (IBM's was UNIVAC) which Katharine Hepburn refers to fondly as Emmy as it spews reams of useless information and inadvertently (and presciently) fires everyone.

As a thank you, IBM sent my parents one of the first electric typewriters. (We once got a case of Baskin & Robbins ice cream when they put that in a movie; ah, for the days before paid product placement.)

She used that electric typewriter for years to type out movie scripts, the lines centered on the page, with three carbon copies. White-out and copy machines hadn't been invented.

I remember everything about that machine, and especially that there was no lever to make the carriage return. Just a button that sent if flying (they hadn't yet invented the key ball).

And then, how sleek my first portable electric seemed, the one I took to college. In those days you have to remember, we thought bowling balls were portable, and this thing weighed only slightly more.

When I see those bracelets made of old typewriter keys (I have one) it makes me sad to think of all those mutilated typewriters, moldering away somewhere.

Do you all remember your typewriters, and was it a love or hate relationship?

ROBERTA: Oh boy, Hallie, you're making us show our age! But I did get a little black typewriter (not electric!) in college, most notable because it had keys with French accents on them that were specially attached. I majored in French literature and had to write a big junior

paper in French and then a senior thesis--so this was a necessary luxury! It was a very cute machine and I wish I'd kept it.

I don't have such fond memories of the key punch machine we had to use to record hundreds and hundreds of data points for my graduate school research. Though it was fun when that tedium was over and you got to slide the stack of cards into the machine and watch the results come out.

JAN: I remember when I started my first job at the News-Tribune, we had IBM typewriters. I remember swearing, A LOT. The first thing I noticed when I converted to a word processing system at the Worcester Telegram, was that I no longer swore when writing. There was no frustration. So no, no fond memories of typewriters, except..... My brother who passed a way tragically at age 26 used a typewriter to write letters. And he always made a carbon copy. He was a prolific letter writer and I have all his carbon copies. So I thank the typewriter for that!


ROSEMARY: I don't remember typing that much - I must have been a terrible student! My typewriter was a small, orange portable as I recall. My sister had the same little number in blue. We shared one long desk that my uncle had made and with the orange and blue it must have looked like the office of the Mets or the Knicks.

As it happens, while cleaning out the home of a recently deceased aunt, I just scored a beautiful old Royal and it's now in my office. It still works and the old dear even had extra ribbons, $1.29.

RHYS: My relationship with typewriters was much more hate than love. Having to retype a page with 3 carbon copies when one made a mistake, which I did frequently having never taken a typing course.

I was editor of my college newspaper and we had to type skins for the duplicating machine. Ah, the swearing that went on in the early hours of the morning when that blankety blank skin had to be retyped.

Then I was doing PR for the California Nurses Association (yes, I've had a chequered career) and had to turn out a newsletter every night after the last session of their convention, again on a wretched duplicating machine. By then my language had become even richer.

I remember applying for a job in Hawaii and having to take a test on a Selectric. I complained that I'd only ever used a manual typewriter. The large Hawaiian lady put her hands on her hips and declared, "Honey, there ain't a manual in these whole islands." Didn't get the job.

The day they invented PCs was bliss for me. Now I can type as fast as I can think and changes are so easy and I never, ever swear! Well, hardly ever.

HANK: My Gramma Minnie taught me to type...gosh, back in 1959? I bet it was. She had an Underwood, I think it was, that came in its own boxy suitcase. You'd flip it open, put it on the table, and type away. I LOVED it.

Here's how long ago it was. I practiced by copying out jokes and essays from her stack of Readers Digests. So funny to think back on that. I was big on doing the vocabulary words---what was that section called?

And of course when I started as a reporter, you could hardly hear anyone talk over the clatter of the typewriters in the newsroom. Now--it's silent.

DEBS: My parents worked from home, so the clickity-click of my mom's typewriter and the ding of the carriage return were very much part of my soundscape when I was growing up. I, however, didn't learn to type until I took a break between institutions of higher learning (my very checkered educational career.) My parents sent me to secretarial school so that I would learn to do something that "could actually make me a living." We used IBM Selectrics, and I passed all my secretarial courses with flying colors, except--typing. I could never get my speed up to the required level with no mistakes.

Now I type faster than I can think, and I don't bloody care if I make mistakes. I think word processing was the greatest thing ever invented. And I do make a living typing, which I think is nicely ironic. No nostalgia for typewriters here, although I do have a wonderful vintage Underwood that was a gift from friends. I keep it on the same desk as the computer, just because I like the juxtaposition.

HALLIE: Oh, Debs, your description took me back. Whenever I got home from school, I knew if my mother was home from the sound of the typewriter, too. That, and the smell of Kent Cigarettes. Didn't we all once-upon-a-time smoke? A blog for another time...

Please, share your memories fond and otherwise. The QWERTY lives!