Ann Kellett and Nancy Sawtelle
Pica rulers, hot wax, engraved metal plates and research in a library. At StoryCorps, Nancy Sawtelle, a former editor at NASA who worked on the Apollo-Soyuz mission tapes in 1975, and Ann Kellett - both longtime writers and editors at Texas A&M - have fun recounting the time-consuming tasks once involved in the tools of their trade. At StoryCorps, the good ol’ days.
- [Ann Kellett] So, what did that process entail to actually put together a newsletter in those days?
- [Nancy Sawtelle] In those days it was typing and you typed...
- [Ann Kellett] Typing?
- [Nancy Sawtelle] Typing everything out on the one, we did have a maroon correcting electric type writer that three of us shared.
- [Ann Kellett] Oh. [Nancy Sawtelle] And you would type and cutting and pasting was literally, cutting and pasting. So, if you had to rewrite a paragraph, you would retype it and we didn't use paste, we used tape. And then tape it over, where the original paragraph had been. It was a... a much more manual process than it is now.
- [Ann Kellett] Yes, I remember those days. I was at the... I'm a little bit younger than you are and I was at the tail end of that old school way of doing things that I found my pica ruler the other day. Which is a way of measuring typing fonts sizes and things like that, manually. And also my proportion wheel, which is two circles that interact with each other that let you know the proportion for ...
- [Nancy Sawtelle] Circular slide rule.
- [Ann Kellett] Yeah, circular slide rule, right. Exactly. And yeah, so that's kind of fun. I remember having a typewriter as well. I got my first desktop... I think in '85 or so. I got here in '84 and it was just a year or two after that. And sometimes I wonder I mean, what do we do all day? With just stuff on our desk, you know, to get our work done? Physical filing cabinets and stuff, I really honestly don't remember what it was like before desktops.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] We had lined or rule paper that was in a pad and on the Texas A&M Campus there weren't stores like Staples or Office Depot or something to go and get your stuff at. There was a store that they referred to as stores so, you would go...
- [Ann Kellett] Oh, yeah, that's right.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] You would put it in an order to stores for what they called quiz pad. And they were kind of like a short wheel pad and... You would... I wrote my stories in pencil.
- [Ann Kellett] Mm-hmm.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] On these things and then type them up from that.
- [Ann Kellett] Oh, okay. I honestly don't remember what I did. Um...
- [Nancy Sawtelle] And research was going to the library...
- [Ann Kellett] Yes, yes.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] There wasn't get on the internet and look it up.
- [Ann Kellett] And you didn't go there to sit at the Starbucks and gossip with your friends.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] There was no Starbucks. There was no food allowed in there.
- [Ann Kellett] It was a big building with books, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well y'all were very high tech because we didn't, I don't remember the tape for making corrections. We actually, I do remember having the hot melted wax that you literally just smeared on the back of your strip of paper and smashed it down in there and then made sure it was straight and...
- [Nancy Sawtelle] Oh, you were in the layout phase.
- [Ann Kellett] I was in the layout phase, yes, yes.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] See, what I did was took everything over to... at that time it was called Educational Information Services.
- [Ann Kellett] Ah, yes, EIS.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] EIS and they were located in the O&M Building.
- [Ann Kellett] Oh, okay.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] About the eighth floor, something like that. And they had artists that were there. And they would do type setting and I'm not sure exactly how they did that or if went over to the printing center. I don't remember. But they would cut everything out and paste it down on board so we had real mechanicals at that time. And then we would have to carry those things over to the printing center and they would make the plate and then, when you had to proof something it was a blue line proof.
- [Ann Kellett] And the plates were the actual medal engraved plates?
- [Nancy Sawtelle] Yes, yes; exactly. And then for the addresses, I was telling you about this earlier, we had our mailing list on Addressograph plates that were kept in a cabinet in alpha order, in little drawers. And so, if somebody called them and said they needed to change their address, we had to find that Addressograph plate and throw it away and make a new one. We made sure it was filed appropriately.
- [Ann Kellett] Oh, man, the good old days.
- [Nancy Sawtelle] The good old days.