One recent afternoon, I tried dialing up Fred Hribar, my old typewriter repairman. I got a busy signal, which I hoped for Fred’s sake was as promising as it was anachronistic. When I eventually managed to get him on the line I said, “How’s business?”
“There ain’t none,” Fred said with a chuckle. You won’t find a more cheerful bunch of fatalists than the typewriter repairmen of the Twin Cities. Assuming, that is, that you could actually find a bunch of typewriter repairmen in the Twin Cities. (Maybe, in fact, bunch isn’t quite the right word; handful would perhaps be more like it, allowing for the loss of a finger or two to shop accidents.)
“Everything’s pretty much died,” admitted Hribar, who has been servicing typewriters since 1961. “I’m one of the last dogs left—Friendly Freddie the Freeloader—and these days I’m more or less just putzing around the house. Stuff now is made to be obsolete; if it breaks down you just pitch it in the dumpster.” Hribar is sixty-nine, and he can remember when things were different. For decades he owned Gittins Typewriter on Chicago Avenue, and he was an authorized Brother technician, doing a quarter of a million dollars a year in sales and service.
“I remember when the old IBM Selectric ball machine first came along, people thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” Hribar told me. “Then the daisy wheel models hit the streets and pretty much killed off the ball machines. Once computers became affordable, typewriter sales went to hell and the service followed. It got so bad that I rented out my building on Chicago—it’s a gun shop now.” Today he works out of his house in Hopkins.
I hauled a portable Brother manual typewriter around with me for twenty years; it’s a beautiful little turquoise-enameled tank with a pop-off top, and the thing still works like a charm. Whenever I needed a new ribbon or a cleaning, Fred was my man. He can still spit out my machine’s specs off the top of his head. “Oh, hell yes, that thing’ll last forever,” he said. “Takes a T-5 ribbon, still being made by General Ribbon out of California.” I kvetched that since I started working mostly on computers eight years ago I’ve gone through three different machines. “That’s the story of the world,” he said with a shrug. “Everything’s changing all the time, and things go to hell in a hurry. So much of the stuff that’s out there now costs so much to fix that it’s cheaper to just go buy a new machine.”
Hribar said, “If I make $100 a month I’m doing pretty good. It’s a dying racket, and I guess I’m dying right along with it. You watch it all disappear and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. I live with reality, and I deal with it. What the hell, I’ll go fishing. And if I could find a rich woman to support me in my old age, I’d be doing just fine for myself.”
Things aren’t quite so dire at Vale Typewriter, Inc., in Richfield, where owner Mark Soderbeck still keeps regular hours. Vale’s been in business since 1956, and Soderbeck has owned the place for twenty-eight years. On the afternoon I stopped by, Soderbeck was hanging around the backroom, shooting the breeze with Ted Schroeder, a retired typewriter tech who was with Royal and Metro Sales for forty-two years. It was immediately apparent that Soderbeck and Schroeder had spent more than a few hours telling old war stories and commiserating over beers. They recalled the days when there were upward of twenty-five different repair shops in the Twin Cities, and the state vocational schools (and Stillwater State Prison) offered programs for aspiring repairmen. A behemoth like IBM employed more than a hundred repair techs in the metro area alone, and Royal had twenty-two working out of its shop in Minneapolis. Today there are only two typewriter manufacturers left in the world, and most of the old fraternity of repairmen have died or retired.
As office machinery evolved over the years, and electric typewriters gave way to electronic models with computerized components, Soderbeck took classes to stay abreast of changes in the industry. Though he now also services printers, fax machines, and copiers (and makes office calls), typewriter sales and repairs still account for seventy percent of his business. “Things just sort of keep plugging along,” Soderbeck said. “I’ll see quite a few of what I call heirloom machines, things people just want to restore. And I still pretty regularly sell manual typewriters to young people who apparently want to be writers and think it’ll give them some kind of edge. The old manuals just don’t break down. There are also still some things that are just plain easier to do with a typewriter—envelopes, labels, carbon copies where you need that impact; it’s quicker to roll something like that into a typewriter and bang it out. I suppose as soon as the government comes up with forms that you can fill out online, that’ll be the demise of the typewriter business.” Schroeder listened to this prediction, chuckled, and nodded his head in agreement. “Oh yeah,” he said. “We’re a dying breed. Ten years from now there won’t be any of us left.”—Brad Zellar
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