Nearly 30 years ago, I sat in a computer lab in a suburban Colorado high school with a case of senioritis and a lazy mindset that I would breeze through this elective business class so that I could graduate and leave the rigid confines of my parents’ home.
I sat in the back near some friends and two girls on the soccer team I couldn’t stop talking to. The teacher, a tall man with an ever-serious look behind a going-gray beard and a pair of unassuming glasses, quietly strode over and cast an imposing shadow over our conversation.
I knew business teacher Dave Sanders more for his role as Columbine High School’s softball coach. As a member of the football team, I also knew the unwritten rule that as an athlete you showed respect to all of the school’s coaches or else word would get back to yours.
I quickly shut up and turned toward the keyboard in front of me. A strange jumble of letters that spelled “QWERTY” stared back.
Sanders was teaching us to type. I didn’t know then the central role that skill would play in my life. Like driving is to a bus driver, typing is the ability I have relied on for more than two decades as a journalist, carrying me from the smallest of weekly newspapers in Littleton to the newsroom of The Washington Post.
Sanders is best remembered for his heroics ushering scores of students out of Columbine High School’s cafeteria 25 years ago today before he died bleeding from gunshots. The 1999 killing of Sanders and 12 students became a seminal event in our country. It punctured the air of innocence schools once held and ushered in an age in which mass shootings have become a nearly daily occurrence. Sanctums we had largely considered safe, from churches to elementary schools, have been scarred like our psyches since that fateful day.
With each tragedy, news reports remind us of the mothers, brothers, sisters, friends and fathers arbitrarily lost to gun violence. Sanders taught business and computer skills at Columbine for 25 years. He also coached girls basketball and softball. He had a wife, four children and five grandchildren.
It’s not hard to imagine the impact he and other mass shooting victims had within their immediate circles. What’s harder to assess is just how far their influence stretched in their cruelly cut-short lives. How many people did they touch? How long and far did the ripples echo?
Sanders was 47 when he died — the same age I am today. I did not know him well. We did not trade jokes in the hallway. He did not impart on me any life lessons or give me any pep talks.
He taught me a simple, secretarial skill that I have used every day of my working life. That career has now spanned 24 years, and it’s a testament to how long Sanders’ impact has extended beyond his death. It’s also a reminder of the very real tools teachers equip us with for the rest of our lives.
Not until this week did I learn of the origin of the layout of modern keyboards, a design that has shaped the way the English-speaking world has punched out words for more than 150 years. Christopher Latham Sholes is credited with designing the Q-W-E-R-T-Y keyboard in the 1870s. It was designed to spread out commonly used letters so early type machines wouldn’t jam as they did with alphabetically laid out keys.
Sholes was a politician, printer and journalist, and he must have had expediency and efficiency in mind when he came out with the design. Speed has always been important in newsgathering, and the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news cycles have only quickened that pace and demand in the journalistic profession.
When I think of a keyboard, I remember filing game stories from high school football stadiums while working weekends in college — often with no more than 15 or 20 minutes to file. I recall the time I passed out on a keyboard in the Boulder Daily Camera newsroom, staying up late to write the obituary of the old Mile High Stadium, a story I naively believed would catapult me to fame.
I remember collapsing with my laptop at a table in a north Florida coffee shop and describing the devastation I had witnessed in Biloxi, Mississippi, the day after Hurricane Katrina. I recall the countless times I fixed my eyes on an official speaking at a news conference, never needing to look down at my fingers that danced with precision as they transcribed every word and quote.
As I go about my job pounding out briefs and clicking and clacking away every single working day, I rarely reflect on how I learned to type. Today I do. Today, I type to remind others of Sanders’ lasting legacy that lives on in the many former students he saved but also in places much more ordinary but no less significant. Like these fingers.
Justin George is a 1995 graduate of Columbine High School. He has worked as a reporter at six news organizations including the Boulder Daily Camera, the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.