Pioneer Pride: Part 7-Calligraphy
As a fourth grade student at Mt Pleasant during the 1973-74 school year, I participated in a a calligraphy experiment with the goal of improving penmanship in beginning writers. This ancient Asian art form was taught to me weekly by a Catholic nun from Marylhurst College. Her name was Sister Grace and she studied calligraphy under the tutelage of a Reed College professor named Lloyd Reynolds, widely regarded as a master calligrapher and responsible for spreading its gospel to thousands of people.
One of those people was Steve Jobs.
According to my mother Dawn Engel, and my 5th grade teacher, Doug Bansch, both elementary teachers in the Oregon City School District during the 70s, the district was somehow chosen to pilot a curriculum that called for calligraphy to replace the ball and stick and cursive methods in the instruction of penmanship for elementary age students. I am not making this up.
I was one of the few students who participated in the calligraphy experiment and I can still remember Sister Grace dressed in full habit entering my fourth grade classroom carrying a box that contained the special pens, ink and paper. It was the first nun I had ever seen.
It’s my belief now that my teacher, Nancy Johnson, had taken a class from Sister Grace because she often followed up Sister Grace’s lessons with calligraphy exercises if spare time suddenly reared itself which it invariably did in the days before the totalitarianism of state testing commandeered public education. I even recall staying in from recess to practice, for all the good it did me. I was a terrible calligrapher, unlike my mother, and once the project was abandoned, my handwriting became an amalgam of calligraphy, ball and stick and cursive, and largely illegible to most people, including myself after a week or so of writing something.
At the same time I practiced calligraphy, so did Steve Jobs while he attended Reed College, located in SE Portland. In multiple Jobs’ interviews and biographies, he claimed that the calligraphy course at Reed his freshmen year taught by Reynolds was the only one he ever regularly attended. (He flunked out after this first year and started Apple two years later.) He stated that he often attended the class while on LSD. Furthermore, Jobs maintained that the crisp, minimalist elegance of calligraphy informed his entire aesthetic for developing Apple’s revolutionary (anti-Microsoft) approach to simplifying and beautifying the visual interface between human and computer, an approach that truly changed world history, but perhaps not for the better.
To consider that a calligraphy course taught decades ago in Portland played a major role in our later enslavement to cool digital gadgetry is one of the disturbing and agonizing historical reflections of my life. Someone really needs to write a novel about this seminal and horrible event in American life and all the chapter titles should be written in haiku.