A show of hands for anybody thinking that a National Guard military post would have access to a 70's "modern", high-end word processing system?? Anybody?... anybody?
The Texas state guard would have been the last place to have modern equipment. I've seen guard units back in the 1980s...which as a active duty-type...it shocked me how badly they were equipped. If they had a typewriter...then they had one and only one...and it would have the squadron orderly room typing anything. And the amount of mistakes would have been easily seen...nothing was ever precisely typed. If this document doesn't have corrections noted on it...I'd be asking questions.
This is really a bad forgery. One almost has to conclude that whoever forged it wanted it to be discovered as a forgery. Or they are just too stupid for words.
Actually the IBM Selectric typwiters, had changable fonts by the use of a ball shaped print head. Their history page shows thet were introduced in 1961, But my failing memory says I saw one of those when I was in High School (52-56)
There is no mention of the names of the fonts available but maybe proportional fonts were available on those Ball shaped print heads.
Everyone and I mean everyone was using mostly manual typewriters. The few eary word processors available were not in guard or reserve units.
We know the national Guard had a lot of money to spend on advanced equipment but this sound quite ridiculous.
My husband went through Danley Field (in 1976 - 1978,) which he (my husband) says is the name of the ANG base in Montgomery. He "thinks" he has at least one document from that base from 1976 -1978. That's after GW's time there. He's going to try to dig it out tomorrow, if anyone is interested in seeing it.
Another interesting thing, my husband was assigned to the ANG because there were too many enlisted personnel in his field, so he was given an honorable discharge in exchange for doubling his remaining enlisted time in the Air National Guard. We moved back home, and dh called Danley Field several times trying to find out when to report for duty. He was told each time not to bother contacting them, they would contact him when his paperwork came in. Finally, in the summer of 1976, we got a certified package telling him that because of his failure to report for duty, he had been reassigned to his previous base, Ellsworth in Rapid City. That was the state of paperwork during that time -- it was a mess. We got it straightened out finally after reminding them about all the phone calls we had made to them.
Anyway, it woudln't surprise me one bit, based on our personal experience, if Danley can't find all of the records from back then -- that doesn't mean they never existed or that GW was in any way at fault.
ummm ... been a few years, but didn't the IBM Selectric (the old 'Golfball')typewriter have changeable fonts?
I seem to remember that I had a cursive font, a proportional font, a mono font etc.
And the Selectric II was CERTAINLY in use by the mid-70s - and was in use by the Australian services by then (My father was a CPO (Writer) then - effectively a non-com clerk - and he had one).