The typewriter store is gone.

Actually, the typewriter store has been gone for a long time, but one can now truly say that the business that used to be the typewriter store is gone.

Many, many (many) years ago someone asked me to fix their typewriter. They didn’t want me to fix it personally. Just take it somewhere and get it fixed. It wasn’t an old typewriter. It was one of the new fangled, IBM Selectric, electric typewriters. For the youth of America allow me to explain that an electric typewriter was the battleship steel piece of hardware that everyone used to have on their desk, or on a little fold out table to the right of their desk, back before everyone had a PC on their desk. The Selectric was the state of the art typewriter, because it could perform state of the art word processing functions… Sort of. If I remember the most exciting feature was that it could ‘remember’ the last line typed, and then you could change some of the words in that line, and the typewriter would go back on the page, and erase undesired words (actually cover them over with ‘White Out’) and then retype any new/changed words over the old words. It was Cool & Groovy. It was also the size of a VCR. Actually, it was the size of a VCR from the period, which meant it was around the size of a radiator from a 2-½ ton truck. How those little typing tables ever managed to support those enormous typewriters still remains a mystery to me.

Anyway, I needed to get this Selectric typewriter fixed. This was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so I trotted out my phone book and looked up typewriter repair businesses. I found one, only a short drive away, and brought in the Selectric to be fixed. There was a big sign on the front of the building that said “Type Writer Repair??? and an even larger sign sticking out of the roof, shaped like a Selectric Typewriter that said the same thing. Once inside the building I noticed signs advertising the repair of telephone answering machines.

When my answering machine broke, years later, I remembered the sign and took my machine there. By this point the sign on the front of the building now said “We Repair: Answering Machines & Typewriters.??? The big sign up on the roof, shaped like a Selectric Typewriter, still said “Type Writer Repair.??? Back then telephone answering machines used cassette tapes to record messages. The repairman tried to tell me that I just needed to buy a special telephone cassette tape from him, and that would fix everything. The special cassette tape cost $25.00. I went somewhere else, where they replaced a rubber belt inside the machine for $30.00, but at least the thing was working again.

Then, even more years later, my FAX machine broke. By this time Al Gore had invented the Internet. So I used it to look up the closest FAX repair shop. The address looked familiar, but it wasn’t until I arrived that I realized my new FAX repairman was actually my old answering machine, typewriter repairman. By now the sign on the front of the building said, “We Repair FAX Machines & Phone Modems.??? The big sign on the roof had been changed substantially. It was still shaped like an IBM Selectric Typewriter, but all the parts of the sign designed to make it look like a typewriter had been removed. So now it was a sort of beige rhomboid that said, “FAX Machine Repair.??? They did a very poor, and expensive, job of repairing my FAX machine. I decided never to go back no matter what sort of equipment they began fixing.

Last week I was at the Post Office and on the way home I drove past the former Typewriter store. The big sign on the roof is still shaped like an IBM Selectric Typewriter, but without any of the additional features designed to make it look like a Selectric. So now it’s a big white rhomboid that says in green letters on a white background, “Hydroponics.??? The square sign on the front of the building now says, “Tomato Eyes Hydroponic Something.??? I was driving pretty fast and didn’t catch the whole sign. On either side of the text were sort of decorative maple leaves. At least I think that they were maple leaves. At least they were shaped kind of like maple leaves. Perhaps they were something else? Or perhaps they actually were maple leaves, because they’d be less controversial.

Glad to see that the proprietor, if he’s still is the same guy, remains a nimble entrepreneur able to keep up with constantly changing business demands. On the other hand, I wonder if the owners of the Porn Palace, whose name keeps changing, that’s two doors down the street objects to the changing nature of his neighborhood?

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