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| The
Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central
Ohio. |
Father Zorro and the
Statisticians The best part of the job was the typewriter they assigned to me. It was a brand new IBM Selectric -- an electric typewriter. I'd never used one before, only gazed at them from afar. It came with a box of a dozen little metal balls that let me change its font whenever I wanted. I especially liked the way it snapped to attention like a loyal hunting dog whenever I clicked its "On" button, then sat on the desk humming with anticipatory electric current, waiting for me to do something interesting.
I got the chance my second week on the job. The forms that Crop and Livestock Reporting mailed to the farmers were printed from permanent plates. By accident, the plate with the pecan orchard questionnaire got damaged a few days before it was due to be sent out. Someone had to create a replacement for reproduction on the offset press. My supervisor gave the task to me. The pecan questionnaire was one ugly form, with misaligned columns, cramped blank spaces for the data, and questions in microscopic print. All twisted and crowded, it resembled an aerial photo of some medieval ghetto in Europe. I gave it a face lift. I narrowed the margins to create more space for writing, substituted a compact font in place of the minuscule type of the original, and cleared up the clutter into distinct regions of text and white space. My supervisor was pleased. The new form was easier for the farmers to fill out, but also easier for the statisticians to use when they had to compile their numbers. By the end of the first month, my in-box was piled with forms the statisticians wanted me to revise for them. The statisticians were a young group, mostly men in their early 30s. By revising their forms, I got a chance to know them. None of them was originally from Alabama. They'd been assigned there by the USDA, and they were all ambitious for a prestigious assignment to the Washington headquarters.
Typing their reports, I got to know their talents, too. They were competent writers who did a good job of presenting data about projected soybean yields or rainfall shortages. But one of them was a star. His copy about soil moisture in the northern counties made you want to roll up your sleeves and dig in the sweet dark mud. His reports about the wheat crop made you hungry for fresh-baked bread. Like the others, he was a master of his statistics, but there was a poetry to his reports that none could duplicate. His name was Ed. With his talent, Ed wasn't destined to stay long in the Montgomery office. Everyone knew it. Everyone said it: Ed was going to be promoted and sent to Washington long before anyone else. He'd been good with figures since grammar school, but he fell in love with writing during his teenage years. In college, he flirted with a major in journalism, but opted for a degree in mathematics with a minor in agriculture instead. Ed married his high school sweetheart during his freshman year at some Midwest university, and then had a baby girl. As a family man, he needed a steady income, and just being a writer seemed like a pretty insecure life to him. A man needs something real and steady to write about, he decided. Nothing's more real or steadier than crops. Ed told me all this one day during a basketball game. |