There is a headstone for my deceased parents in Mount Calvary Cemetery in Wheeling. It sits on a sloping part of the graveyard high above some of the oldest burial plots in the area.

The headstone contains the usual data of our parents’ names and their dates of birth and death.

It also holds the first names of all of their 12 children. When planning the headstone, my mother told me that the reason for our names being included on their headstone is because they considered us to be their greatest accomplishments in life. Thus, we would be for all eternity, engraved in granite alongside our parents’ names.

Unusual, perhaps. However, if you take a closer look at the headstone you will notice something else our parents embodied throughout their lives. Carved in the middle of the stone is the image of a manual typewriter. That typewriter represented our father’s 50 years in the newspaper business and our mother’s pre-married days of working in the newspaper business in Moundsville.

For myself and some of my siblings, that typewriter was the only thing we had in our home on which to write term papers and school reports. Prior to an electric typewriter making its way into the house, several of us toiled over that black, metal manual machine that required sheer strength and determination to produce our written products.

We learned how to change the ink ribbons that this beast required. Without a doubt, it resulted in black ink-stained fingers in the process. The invention of Wite-Out saved many of us from a poor to passing grade for neatness.

Typing on a manual typewriter is noisy. I can remember as a child, the clanging of busy fingers on keyboards when I visited my dad in the newsroom of this newspaper. Today, the sound of reporters’ fingers on those soft-touch keyboards is nearly silent compared to its ancestors’ noise.

Modern accomplishments have changed the way we all communicate. Now, I also sit in front of a computer whose keyboard requires little physical effort to produce these words. I can appreciate the ease of such work after having been a slave to a manual Royal typewriter.

I saw a story the other day that told of a college professor who installed typewriters, some manual, some electric, in her classroom. She wanted her students to do their work on the typewriters to prevent the use of Artificial Intelligence so easily available on their computers and I-pads. Good for that teacher. My siblings and I would tell those students that a little harder work never hurt anyone.

Heather Ziegler can be reached via email at hziegler@theintelligencer.net.