Cody Carrol sounds likes a wonderful character and a great teacher.

You made me think back to the Academy of Stenographic Arts on Potrero, 1972. I do believe all the male teachers were gay, though it wasn't an issue. There was Mr. Hedman. The first day in theory, he said, "You will be married to your machine," at which point his false teeth clicked together as sort of a punctuation mark. From then on he would dictate endlessly, click, period, paragraph. So, I'm sitting out in the lobby at one of the picnic tables one day, and the headmaster says, "We've got a job up north for you," and I say, "But gee, I'm only in the 160 class." He says, "That's okay. Go get your feet wet!" And I flew up there, got into court and nearly drowned, but was at least freed from ever having to return to school where they had been reading the S.A.L.T. talks to us for months, not to mention the shipping news, and a cute story about people living on some island outside of Seattle.

I can remember people falling asleep over their machines, wiping their noses with steno paper, parking their cigarettes in the pen holders on the writers, manual steno writers and manual typewriters.

Oftentimes, those insane consonant compounds come back into my head, like "She leaves hopes and dreams, or "A dreadnought is a battleship. "

One thing that was very good about CA College of CR was that Cody believed in LIVE dictation with real people. There was no light board or the ridiculous raising one's hand or changing their voice to read 2-part dictation. Once in the 200 class, you got real live 4-voice dictation with 4 people up there reading. He also jumped right on the video bandwagon back in the Sony Beta days and would tape takes for us to practice to later.
I'll never forget a couple of student readers we had and the funny names they gave each other -- Sue Coleman (Snoo) and Marge Bergman (Joo).