Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
You hear that great clackety sound the minute you walk in. Charlie May and Vern Trampe are both in back, kibitzing while May shoots air between tiny metal keys, like teeth in a black cavernous mouth. “Phew! There was a lot of gunk in there,” he says, dabbing auto-glass stripper on the scuff marks. “I polished the chrome for an hour.”
Trampe’s just finished a ham sandwich—a whole ham wobbles on a high worktable, a wedge missing, and a vat of potato salad sits next to it. Jokes fly, punctuated by the confident slam of a lubed return carriage.
These two are the Car Talk guys of typewriter repair.
They tell me about the first Remington—an assemblage of carbon paper, glass, and a telegraph key—that looked a lot like a toy piano. Inventor Christopher Sholes refined it, his target market clergymen and men of letters. Trampe leads me to an 1880s Remington “blind” typewriter, hits a few keys, then rolls up the platen so we can see what he’s typed. The letters are extra-black, a rich ink laid on top of—yes, it is: a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer test sheet.
Ignoring the anachronism, he points reverently at the Remington’s understrike keys. “These levers are made of wood.”
“Gee,” I say, “was that sturdy enough?”
“Well, it lasted 135 years, so, nah, it wasn’t any good,” shoots back May. He positions me in front of an ancient relic mounted on a piece of wood. “Can you type? Find the home keys.”
Can’t.
“This is the only keyboard I’ve ever seen that made sense,” he says with satisfaction. “You ever watch Wheel of Fortune? The letters they always guess, R-S-T-N and A-E-I-O, all here on the bottom row for excessive speed. A good typist almost never has to reach way up here”—pointing to the top row, Z and the other outcasts.
“So why didn’t it catch on?”
“Don’t have a clue.”
They compete with show-and-tell. An 1897 Blickensderfer has a thin, curved case: “They steamed the wood around a form.” A German typewriter that came out of the Third Reich has an umlaut key. “Some have swastikas.”
“The Corona was the first portable,” Trampe says, showing me a model used in World War I. “The reporters just folded over the top of the keyboard and stuck the machine in a little wooden box.”
I admire a jade green Royal, a turquoise Underwood. “You know, Tom Hanks loves typewriters so much, he developed an app that re-creates the sound,” I say.
“Yeah, I heard,” May says. “I bowl with two technogeeks.” He shows me a Mad Men Olivetti, an IBM Selectric with its cute little ball of type. “Selectrics are the easiest to work on. Smith Coronas, the line of write—what they call feet in motion—you can fix it, and it looks great, and five letters later, one of them will be bent.”
“But that’s how they used to solve crimes, right? Matching the type to the typewriter?”
“Which sometimes I think is bullshit.” He pulls out a ribbon. “Now this, this is a one-time carbon. You could roll it backward and get everything that’s on it. I had a buddy who picked up a typewriter from Scott Air Force Base to wash it out, and it wasn’t 30 minutes till two guys were bustin’ down the doors saying they had to have that ribbon, because it was used to type secret information.”
“IBM made a special motor with a flywheel on it,” Trampe adds, “to prevent spying. It leveled out the speed of the motor. Somebody had claimed you could put a meter on the line and tell what character somebody was typing by the voltage.”
“So did that ever happen?” I ask.
May shrugs: “Had to happen once. It was probably us, listening to the Germans.”
And now, since the National Security Administration’s espionage leaked, a German defense manufacturer has switched back to typewriters. Correctional facilities buy clear typewriters so inmates can’t hide contraband inside them. British novelist Will Self has gone back to writing his first draft on a typewriter because it forces him to think; he says it “brings order back into your mind.”
May remembers sportswriters Bob Burnes and Bob Broeg coming in once a year to have their machines torn down, all parts replaced, because they typed so much.
“What’s amazing is, they were one-finger guys,” Trampe says.
“You could not see their arms from the elbow down, they went that fast.”
“We have a number of writers who come in who claim—”
“The juices flow better.”
“They can get the ideas down faster. Plus the computer beeps at them all the time, and they lose their train of thought.”
May chuckles. “One gal was about 27, wrote for Popular Science. I said, ‘Have you heard of a computer?’ She laughed. She said, ‘When I freeze up, or the computer does, I go to this thing and beat the hell out of it, slam the carriage return a few times, and then I can start writing again.’”
