I took a typing class in high school.
Electric typewriters were used in my school's typing class. However, I practiced my typing on my father's manual typewriter. Typing on the manual typewriter was difficult after using an electric typewriter because I had to exert more pressure on each key to produce the desired letter/numeral, etc.
My experience was similar to yours: all of her adult life, my mother, a prolific poet and an ardent researcher, had always owned a typewriter, up until the time that word processors and subsequently home computers came out. Her original models that I remember from my toddler years were the manual typewriters. Even though she typed at least a few times a week all throughout my childhood, I never developed neither the curiosity nor the interest at home in learning to type. I guess I saw it as an adult activity, and truth be told, an activity associated to women.
At some point in my schooling, either junior high school or high school, so I was a teen, typing was one of the classes I took, and even though I don’t remember if it was a required course, I truly believe that it must have been, because at the time, I had no inkling that I would ever use the skill at all beyond that classroom. Also, it was not a class about which I was very enthusiastic, as shown by my performance in it. I guess I thought it was a one-and-done phase of my life. (Note: this was pre-word processors.)
My greatest failing with typing was that from day one, I violated the cardinal rule of not looking at the keyboard as I typed, and instead I look at the page. I looked at and still to this day I look at the keys when I type. I have never overcome that bad habit, yet with the advent of computer use, on desktops and laptops I look at the keys instead of looking at the screen. Even on smaller devices such as the iPhone I’m using right now, it’s my go-to method. Of course, I’m so accustomed to doing it that way that I have by now perfected my skills to be just as proficient with typing as people who do it correctly.
I was well into my mid or late twenties before I ever needed to type in any work-related settings, and believe it or not, it was as a Marine. I was in radio communications, and had been doing it since I joined at age 18; typing was not even on my radar, but I was in the process of transferring to an administrative unit, and I had to be tested on my typing speed as part of the determination as to whether or not I would be accepted. Let’s just say that 24 hours after the trials, I was back out in the field with 15 pounds of radio gear strapped to my back just like I had been doing since radio school (I didn’t get the transfer). When I returned the my communications platoon after failing the tryouts, my platoon sergeant told me that when he had joined the Corps back during the Vietnam War and attended that era’s radio school, they had been tested on everything from Morse code, semaphore, naval signal flags and typing. It was a throwback to both World War II and the Korean War that such stringent curriculum was being taught. Anyone who failed radio school then was kicked out of there and sent straight to the infantry, the grunts, the mud Marines. Being smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War gave him plenty of extra incentive to do well. I joined during peacetime, and the radio school course was strictly focused on radios and radio codes only.
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Thank you, my friend!
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Randy D 