Years and years ago, I looked for a rental apartment in the vicinity of LCH because I wanted to be able to be nearby to practice the organ. I remember occasionally coming home very late at night and seeing Carl Crosier through the window, sitting in the church office and typing away on the Selectric typewriter. It turns out he was typing bulletins for special services. In those days, in order to create justified paragraphs, he had to calculate how many half-spaces to insert to make the columns even. With personal computers, though, justifying paragraphs is as easy as a click.

We bought one of the very first Macintosh computers in 1986, called the Macintosh Plus, then soon after upgraded to a Macintosh SE. Carl used it to typeset many of the programs and bulletins that have been used at LCH over these many years. Of course, for myself, I upgraded to new models constantly, and have gone through something like 17 or 18 Macintosh computers over the years. Carl, though, spent so many of the early years setting music on the Macintosh SE using a specialized music font and software which unfortunately has not been able to be read by later generations of Macintosh computers. So when you walk by Carl’s church office, you see an old Macintosh computer there. Oh, it’s not the original one we bought in 1986, but Carl has been given other people’s hand-me-down Macintosh SEs so he has been able to transfer his programs and files to continue to produce bulletins containing music and text. I don’t know how many Mac SE’s he’s gone through — maybe 7 or 8 before each one going to Macintosh heaven. Can you imagine — the Mac SE was manufactured from 1984 to 1987 which means those computers are truly antiques — about 23-26 years old!

All that changed this fall, when the last remaining Macintosh SE died and I took over the typing of the 10:30 bulletin and special service bulletins. So if you notice things have changed a bit, it just means that I’m in the midst of a learning curve. Because of time constraints, Carl has not been able to learn InDesign, a page layout program we use at home, to produce the bulletins. The psalm antiphons now come on a CD, so that part of the bulletin is easy to insert. The rest of it, though, is typed in anew since we can’t read the old files.

I’m now in the middle of typing the bulletin for the Advent Procession program which will be held on November 28th, and I’m scanning Carl’s hard-copy printouts of the hymns. This will be Carl’s 35th and final Advent Procession and we are using the Great “O” Antiphons written by Peter Hallock. All the hymn texts were written by our own Pastor Fritz Fritschel, which Carl music-typeset years ago.

Shall we hold a memorial service for the last of the Macintosh SE’s?