My Story
Czarnecki, Jan

>>JAN: My name is Jan Czarnecki and I'm an English professor at Bluefield State College. The story I wanted to share with you goes back quite a few years, probably about fifty years. In the 50's, when I was in elementary school, my dad was stationed - he was in the Navy - he was stationed in Gocek, Turkey and we lived not on the military base but right off the military base. The base itself was a small complex of Quonset huts and to make a long story short we had no television during this time so I was there from about kindergarten to about third grade. So we became students and again it was it was a very small Quonset hut, I was in first grade and my sister was in third grade, we were actually in the same classroom together and the teacher literally went down the room from first grade to second grade to third grade. We were quite a community of readers and my mother had an old Smith Corona Manual Typewriter and I asked her if I could type letters on it back to my grandmother back home and she said, "Sure, go ahead." So at second grade I learned how to type on a very old typewriter and I became pretty proficient at it. When I was in high school, the first time I touched an electric typewriter, I realized I could type well over eighty words a minute and now on a computer I can type about a hundred words a minute. To make a long story short, I realized that once I got that basic skill down for typing that actually writing became very easy for me because I didn't have to worry about the mechanics of typing and I could concentrate on the quality of the writing. In addition, since we didn't have television, we became quite a strong community of readers and we shared our books and I still have most of the books that we received when we were over in Turkey and it was a very valuable lesson and the people that I kept in touch with, we all became strong readers, strong writers, and I just wanted to share that experience.