Time as Measured in Typewriters
Elmer Anderson set himself up in the typewriter business in Pasadena the same year the Titanic sank--1912. The only link here is one of irony. Just as the Titanic went to the bottom, taking with it faith in one kind of technology, Elmer Anderson, who came west with nothing but his tool kit, was embarking on a career of faith in another: the business of the business machine.
Fast forward to 1995, to another irony. Time turns back on itself like a Mobius strip. Pasadena labors to make its old downtown old again, buff brick and terra cotta and cast stone, zigzag and checkerboard and chevron parapet lines, Mediterranean revival and Art Deco.
And just as Pasadena is returning to its old quaint self, Anderson Typewriter Co. is thinking that maybe it’s time to drop “typewriter” from its venerable name.
Any new client Elmer’s grandson David D. Anderson sees--well, it comes to this. “At the end of an appointment they’ll almost always say, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice. I almost didn’t meet with you because of your name.’ Everybody who knows us says, ‘Don’t do it. Eventually your name will be special; it says how long you’ve been in business.’ That’s not true. It makes people think you can’t possibly deal with their high-tech demands--you’re a typewriter company.”
David Anderson is 37, the third Anderson to run Anderson Typewriter. In high school, he swept the floors, turned the repair lathe. His sister’s dollhouse was made out of an old typewriter shipping crate. He went into hydrogeology before coming back 12 years ago to preside over the new Anderson, more service than sales, more fax equipment than typewriters--one reason he is thinking of changing the sign, the business cards, the phone listing, to “Anderson Business Technologies.”
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The timing is significant. A week ago, Smith Corona, one of the last American typewriter makers, filed for bankruptcy protection. People who knew that it is a typewriter, not a cigar or a beer, were probably surprised that it was still around at all.
A few Smith Coronas sit on display below the twirling ceiling fans at Anderson’s. “Last one” sale tags have been stuck into the platens. In glass-fronted bookcases along one wall is the Andersons’ evolutionary display of the elderly and cumbersome machines that became the word processor that presaged the computer.
Like cars, they had names then, not mere model numbers: Royal, Remington, Woodstock (the typewriter fabled in the Alger Hiss spy case), Underwood, Hermes, Blickensderfer, which was the forerunner of the Selectric, Sholes & Glidden (the first typed manuscript ever submitted was prepared on a Sholes & Glidden--Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi.”) And like cars, you sometimes had a choice of colors.
Elmer Anderson taught the trade to his son, Donald. During World War II, when the manufacture of typewriters was prohibited, Anderson’s suddenly found itself a service company, for Lockheed, for government agencies.
“There’ve been more changes in the past five years than the previous 83,” says Donald Anderson. The year 1982 was the toughest, his son says, a big shakeout year. You might buy 10 computers at $2,000 each; in two months the price was $1,500, and in three more, it’d be $1,000. “Typewriters,” says David Anderson, “you used to be able to buy 50 of them and stick ‘em in the basement and the price if anything would go up. It was like money in the bank.”
In the basement now, stashed in what they call the graveyard, are the carcasses of typewriters, waiting to be cannibalized for repair parts. The man who knows how to do the repairs is Pedro Diaz. He is only in his mid-40s but he is from Cuba, and in Cuba, he has told his boss, everything gets fixed, nothing is thrown away.
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People are still reluctant to throw them away. They have, like Old Pasadena, the charm of human scale. Anderson’s kids, perhaps already blase about computers, were enchanted when dad brought home an old manual. They could press a key, see the movement. Some old models, like the double-glass Royal, had real windows, as if something worth watching were going on inside, which it was.
You could sometimes fix a typewriter with a nail file. If you were desperate, you could spit on the ribbon and get a few more words out of it. I would no more try to repair a computer than I would a nuclear reactor.
Firms that tossed their typewriters in the rush to computers have often come back to order a few typewriters. It’s hard to address an envelope on a computer, hard to turn out one or two labels. A manual is handy after an earthquake. One customer says her doctor told her to work every day on a manual typewriter for her arthritis.
Elmer Anderson lived from the age of Edison to the age of Neil Armstrong. He was a businessman who saw how avidly humans can let go of the old to embrace the new. He was also a craftsman who might have appreciated what naturalist Aldo Leopold had to say on the topic: “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is, save all the pieces.”
