SepteRemember: Mom #1
Mom always prepared the bulletins every week for the church services and the church newsletters every few months or so. She'd create stencils on her electric typewriter then run copies off on a mimeograph machine. The ink couldn't dry fast enough so would often bleed from one copy to another. One of us kids would be drafted to stand by the machine and insert scrap paper in between the copies. It got hot and smelly but it was a fun challenge to be fast enough to get the scraps in before the next copy shot down onto the stack.
After printing there was always sorting the scraps out from the newsletter sheets and collating. Mom would put stacks of each page around the dining room table and we would run around it collecting one page from each stack. Then we would staple and attach mailing labels. It was quite the industrious printshop and mailhouse. Of course, it helped having six kids.
My bedroom was directly under the study and I fondly remember falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter and/or mimeograph clunking away above us.
ReplyDeleteDid you follow the link to the image? Is that what it looked like? I know she had a couple versions but I do remember the hand crank mimeograph before she got the electric one.
ReplyDeleteThe one I remember was longer and was dark blue. I don't remember if the hand crank one was tan or not.
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