Touch Typing Pays Off, 60 Years Later

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Paul Camerer, Senior Freshman

By Erik N. Nelson

Miss Sullivan would’ve been proud.
     Seven decades after she taught him to operate one, Paul Camerer didn’t have much use for typewriters. That was true in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when he kept maintenance records for the B-29 Superfortress bombers and other aircraft he ?xed and test-piloted. He continued to avoid typing as a teacher, running Folsom High School’s auto shop after putting in 20 years with the Air Force.
     After his stint at Folsom High, Camerer signed on as a technical adviser to the local Lemon Law arbitration board at Chrysler. If you wanted compensation for a mechanically challenged Challenger, you might get him to verify your complaint, but he wouldn’t type it.
     And when most people of his generation would be more likely playing dominos or knitting, the River Park resident is ?nally touch-typing computer keyboards just the way Miss Sullivan taught him in 1936. Not content to send off the odd email or print out letters to his 90-year-old sister, Pauline, Camerer is studying the ?ner points of manipulating data on Microsoft Access database software at Sacramento City College.
     “I was trying to be able to speak the same language as my grandchildren, younger people,” says the well-wired octogenarian in a fuzzy green v-neck sweater while standing outside the college’s computer lab. “You know, iPods and all that stuff."
But dabbling is never enough for Camerer. At 87, he still runs 5k races (he ran marathons and ultra-marathons, such as the American River 50, into his 60s) and takes tandem bike trips of 100-plus miles. Every Monday and Thursday, he and longtime pal Sally Edwards head out before dawn to ride atop the American River Parkway levee. It’s all part of Camerer’s strategy of staying a lap ahead of the Grim Reaper as far into the race as possible.
     “You know the old cliché: Use it or lose it,” says Camerer, who believes that idleness is an enemy of the brain and the sinews and sensory organs it controls. “The mind is a muscle. If we exercise it, we can keep it in pretty good shape.”
Continued...

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