For most of the 20th century, secretaries were at the heart of every office, and it was one of the few career paths widely open to women.
The job required excellent organization, penmanship, expertise in spelling and grammar and the ability to type at least 80 words per minute on a manual typewriter. But if you wanted a really top job? You needed to add shorthand to your CV.
In the next installment of our series “Once Upon A Job,” we meet a group of women who are keeping their shorthand skills alive.
About a dozen women are have convened at a restaurant in Winslow, and are reading from the pages of their notebooks. Written on the notebook pages are curves and loops, each little mark as inscrutable as hieroglyphics, but the women are able to easily read back what they’ve just written down.
They’re doing a practice dictation at 60 words per minute, and everyone seems to have nailed the exercise.
The Maine Shorthand Writers Association has been coming together about once a month for almost 15 years to have lunch together, practice those squiggles, known as shorthand, and swap stories about their office days.
“The first man who hired me was because of my handwriting. Because when I was in high school we had a class of penmanship and spelling, and we all had beautiful handwriting,” says Arlene Comber, Waterville High School class of 1948.
While her bosses were first impressed by her command of cursive — another subject not widely taught anymore — it was Comber’s skills at shorthand that got her the big job. She worked for 30 years as a secretary at C. F. Hathaway, one of the last major shirtmakers in the U.S.
Knowing she wanted a career, Comber says shorthand was a major focus for her in high school. On the table in front of her are a series of little medals.
“I won them for shorthand,” she says “It had to be transcribed, and it was a congressional address, so you had to get it perfect.”
Young women in high school and college would compete for these medals in timed shorthand trials, transcribing speeches and addresses at varying speeds.
Comber cherishes the three she won at 100, 120, and 140 words per minute. And at the height of her powers, she could top 200 words per minute.
Even today, Comber uses shorthand for lists, brief messages and notes, but she says the number of people she knows who can actually read those notes is shrinking every year.
“There is no shorthand anymore. They don’t teach it,” she says.
Shorthand is basically a system of reproducing sounds onto paper, very quickly. A shorthand writer has to be able to tune into the phonetics of language. Each sound has a different name and corresponding symbol.
“Ish, chay and jay. Ish — shall, shun, shoal. Chay as in church, teach, reach, preach,” says Kay Grindall, who taught shorthand for 30 years before it was removed from the Oakland High School curriculum about 20 years ago.
Grindall got the idea to start a Maine shorthand club soon after that, when a couple of students in her English class saw her scribbling notes to herself, and recognized the scrawl as something their own grandmothers did.
“So then I got the idea, ‘Well, we need to get these grammies together.’ I knew that they were out there and that they loved shorthand. Anyone who knows shorthand loves it,” she says.
Grindall says many ladies in the club remember practicing their skills by tuning into the nightly news and writing down everything anchorman Walter Cronkite said. Comber says she frequently went to the cinema with her notepad, where she took down whole movies’ worth of dialog.
Grindall says a good shorthand writer can transcribe pretty much anything, including speech from another language, because it’s the sounds that get written.
The women in the room come from a variety of backgrounds, from private business to teaching and public service. Angela Stockwell was Margaret Chase Smith’s private secretary until the senator’s death in 1995.
“Took shorthand everyday, from her. Dictating, taking her letters, typing them and bringing them back. And it’s what I did every day,” she says.
One of the newcomers to the group is 74-year-old Linda Alderson, a civilian secretary and stenographer who spent years in Washington, D.C., taking down military communications for the Navy. She remembers one afternoon in the 1960s when she was told to report to a closed boardroom to record a special meeting, verbatim.
“And it turned out to be 33 master chief petty officers from all over the world. Adm. Zumwalt, and my admiral, and their aids, and I sat there with my shorthand pad taking down all the testimony that was said in that room,” she says.
Alderson isn’t spilling any of the secrets she was privy to, but she says she stayed up all night transcribing and typing up that report to deliver to top brass first thing in the morning.
Shorthand, like many skills, has largely been superseded by new technology. Smartphones and tablets have replaced pens and typewriters, and will even correct your spelling.
The Maine Shorthand Writers’ Association now has about 100 members on its mailing list, with many members in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Not all can make it to the monthly gatherings, but the women make sure to stay in touch — not with a badly spelled text message, but through cards, letters and notes in the mail — written of course in shorthand.
