Day 2, Barbara: The Hectograph Duplicator

I imagine every one of us has a memory of how we got started writing. My co-author of The Paragraph Ranch, Kay Ellington, remembered the time in fourth grade when she launched a handwritten newspaper. (I, in fifth grade in a different city and state that same year, created an illustrated book about a dog and announced my plans to be a children’s book author.)

So as long as we’re digging back into ancient history here, I’ll share. This is from a memoir-in-progress, Editing Elsie:

. . . . . .

I tell Cat about publishing my first work for nothing when I was in kindergarten, in an edition of a dozen copies. A clandestine enterprise.

My mother owned, for use in her club activities, a neat little device called a Hectograph Duplicator. It consisted of a metal pan the size of a coloring book, filled with a beige-colored jelly that, when you pressed a special waxed paper onto it, yielded an image that would transfer to other pages.

I was mesmerized by the machine. There was something organic and fleshy about the gelatin layer, with its reverse-image tattoo bleeding beneath the skin, that was irresistible to touch. You mashed it and it wiggled slightly. It had a not-unpleasant chemical smell.

I observed carefully how my mother rolled the dark-blue sheet into her typewriter, clattered out the recipes or bowling league schedule or whatever, then pulled out the finished master and laid it gently across the gelatin-filled pan. When she lifted it up it left behind a mirror image of her typing. She would sometimes let me help smooth out the white pages that she laid one by one over the inked surface to pull a series of positive impressions, moist and bruise-blue.

One morning when my mother leaves me home with Doris I steal to the hall closet and spirit away the Hectograph to my room. I labor all day writing out a poem on one of the magic pages, leaning hard on my pencil to make a good transfer. I smooth the master out on the gelatin surface the way I have seen my mother do. I lack her deft touch in lifting the copies up, however, and as I mash each piece of tablet paper into the tray my stubby fingers make little gouges in the duplicating surface. To make matters worse, when I finish printing my edition, ready to be folded into little booklets, I realize I haven’t learned how to erase the master image.

In a panic, before my mother returns home, I shut myself in the bathroom and turn on the hot water full force. I plunge the pan under the faucet to wash off the ink. I watch in horror as the gelatin melts away. The likelihood of getting caught solidifies to absolute certainty. All I can do is return the tray to its closet shelf, empty.

I never do fess up, though I’m sure Mom figures things out when I give her one of the blue-inked booklets for Mother’s Day.

. . . . . .

I’ve told you mine—now it’s your turn. How did you write your first story?

PS  Wanna make your own hectograph? Here's how.