"Alchemy of Time"

PONG! I sometimes sit back in a big chair and try to visualize what the land around our home was like a long time ago before . . .

In the grand ballroom of Chicago's Hotel Sherman 500 spectators who had paid 50-c- each for admission watched tensely from behind a railing. In the arena before them four men and one woman sat at desks spaced 15 feet apart, five tense figures crouching over typewriters while their flying fingers danced upon the keyboards. The world's champion typewriting title was at stake.

At three desks sat Jenkintown's (Pa.) Edward V. Sherry, Chicago's local prodigies Norman Saksvig and Edith Kohn. At another sat Cortez W. Peters, a 220-lb. Washington, D. C. Negro, wearing a brown silk polo shirt, a white rag bound around his brow. At a fifth desk, a special one with built-in knee pads to protect his shaking knees, sat sleek, handsome, 33-year-old Albert Tangora, instructor in Manhattan's Radio City School of Business Practice & Speech. He wore a green eyeshade and his manicured fingers raced to keep the title he won year ago with 128 words a minute.

On a bulletin board the progress and the errors of the five contestants were scored up by officials. The pace was terrific. In a few minutes they began to sweat like wrestlers. They were typing from the Alchemy of Time, a treatise on the early history of Minnesota.

... a blinding snowstorm when but four or five miles from the post and they could find no shelter so they sat down together, put the blankets over them and . , .

PONG !

The gong signaled the end of the first 15-minute lap, but not a finger slackened.

Five strokes (letters or spaces) counted as a "word" regardless of the actual words of the text. But a wrong letter, a space in the wrong place, a wrong indention, a wrong punctuation mark, was an error that cost a ten "word" penalty against the total score.

The work of time is something that the mind of man can hardly fathom. This. . . .

PONG!

At the halfway mark, Typsters Sherry & Kolin glanced at the score board, saw they were falling far behind, got up and quit. For many years international typewriting contests were sponsored by Underwood Typewriter Co. but any manufacturer is glad to furnish a machine to contestants for the good advertising of having a champion use it. For several years Underwoods won. Then came Depression and the contests stopped. Last week's contest was run by International Commercial Schools Contest Association, and the three survivors, tearing the hearts out of their machines, were using Royals.

They had for a neighbor a man of most infamous reputation whose habit of selling whiskey. . . .

PONG !

They were away down the last 15-minute straightaway. The excited crowd could hardly restrain its cheers. Typster Saksvig had fallen back, but between Blackamoor Peters and Italian Tangora, both sweating in rivulets, the score board showed a dead heat. Tangora was a few words ahead but he had more penalties scored against him.

Tangora thought of his wife who was wringing her hands at the ringside, thought of his four months' training (golf, athlete's diet, and three hours daily at the key board), thought of the $100,000 insurance on his fingers, which were getting slippery in spite of the special preparation of talcum and alum with which they were coated, thought of the $10,000 that Royal would pay him for exhibitions if he won. He sprinted desperately.

Time works wonders and today Minnesota is thriving on its wheat and corn and is known the world over for its fine flour though corn . . .

PONG !

It was all over. Two minutes more and the whole Alchemy of Time would have been used up. Tangora had rapped out 43,000 strokes in 60 minutes. Subtracting 54 errors, he had averaged 135 words a minute, tying the all-time world record. Panting Peters, only two words a minute behind, got up gloomily, prepared to entrain for Toronto, where this week at the Canadian National Exhibition another rival international championship bout is to be held.

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