The Type Is Cast
He works among ghosts and old stories, dreams that linger on dried ribbons of ink and in ancient dust from smoky rooms. He sits there in his shop, under a warm cone of yellow light, and his hands, still steady after 68 years of living, are fiddling with a typewriter. He is dusting it, oiling it, snapping the keys, and, somehow, he can see those who once sat in front of it. It is just a typewriter, but for Richard Lewis, it is a window into their souls.
His little shop, hunched behind the fancy stores on Newport Boulevard down from Triangle Square, is lined and stacked with them, hulks of black metal and keys made of bone. They are far less like the appliances they once were and more like medieval musical instruments, strange to look at and untuned, but still playable with the right touch. Lewis can see if a typist thought clearly, if he ever corrected his mistakes, or if she was the first in the family to go to college, smoking too many cigarettes like Dorothy Parker.
Lewis is not a historian; he is history. He can see it every day, how the computer has changed the world, but inside his store he can somehow resist. And so, after almost five decades of typing, and after the typewriter mostly has vanished from everyday life, he fixes them over the crackle of AM radio, because that is what he knows, because nobody else will, and because he prefers it that way. “The typewriter business,” says the old man, “has become . . . a sad, sad story.”
Nobody is sure how many typewriter repair experts--beyond the “parts changers,” as he calls them, in the office superstores--are still alive; with computer laptops now the size of history books, why, one office superstore manager asked recently, even count? And so Lewis, paradoxically, is doing a reasonably good business. People send work to Lewis--whose shop is named Type-O-Meca--as often from afar as from down the street; ask the experts, and those who still type on a typewriter, and they will tell you there are a relative few in the country who do what Lewis does, and with the patient facility with which he does it.
Now and again Lewis gets heavy brown boxes from matriarchs in the deep South, or from writers (such as James Michener, who, Lewis figures, created his behemoth works with some supernatural command of the manual keyboard) or just from a young lady who wants her mother’s old Underwood set atop her piano. The boxes contain terrible abandoned projects; if they were motorcars, they would be rusting in a frontyard.
The work never makes sense--economically, at least. For the customer who often is asking Lewis to rebuild a wreck worth only $10 or $25 for $100, or for Lewis, who can spend three hours fashioning a minuscule component--a piece of chrome and rubber--from scratch. “All of this,” Lewis says, leaning back in his office chair among all his dusty machines, “is not worth it. People get them fixed for the sentimental value. That’s why I fix them.”
Lewis’ shop is a strange, incongruous place, a cluttered wasteland of quieted machines, left over from old newsrooms and secretarial pools: Remingtons, Underwoods, a 1907 Oliver and a work of art called the Blickensderfer, a German machine whose keys, just three rows of them, are all in the wrong places. The machines are beautiful in their simplicity, made of steel and iron like locomotives. Lewis’ workbench is dusty and sour from metallic smells of machine lubricant but meticulously organized in the controlled disorder of an old tool shop.
A push-button telephone is out of place; when it rings, it seems to come from another time. On the bench is a soda can, a digital clock radio, a Philips compact disc player, a Xerox machine, a Hewlett Packard color printer and a fax machine.
Early Love Affair With the Mechanism
Lewis’ spectacles are like magnifying glasses, rimmed with thick black plastic that make him look like a man who knows more than you do. He is gentle, and his hands move with a slow deliberation as if they have a patience all their own. His shirt is crisp white and so is his hair, and his manner is white-bread fatherhood circa 1950, with rolled-up sleeves.
He makes jokes now and again, less than politically correct and maybe offensive to some, but they appear to be less about race and perhaps more about nationalism, more about how a man’s life was rearranged by a world whose advances are forcing him to stand in place. Richard Lewis is obsolete, and largely that began when, in his eyes, Asian-made computers took over the world, turning the fine art of building well-oiled machines into something false, of plastic and chips and solder. “The technology is obsolete next year,” he says of computers. “Anybody,” he figures, “can build one.”
It all started an eon of technology ago, in 1946, before the civil rights movement, before women were professionals. While other boys in his Nebraska hometown were outside, seeing who could throw a rock farther, Lewis was entranced with the complex elegance of typewriters. He repaired four of them at school. He helped create the first typing class.
A little later, his crush on the typewriter blossomed further when he stepped into a room with rows of fine typewriters, enough for 40 people, in a typing contest at the community college in Kearney, Neb. He was one of the only boys there, a sophomore in high school ready to do battle, like a gunslinger with twitchy hands, in a room of future secretaries.
Almost from the start, when the room hummed from the sound of teenagers typing suddenly and furiously, he knew he wouldn’t win the contest. But he was intoxicated by the music of it all and the challenge of achieving a flawless page. He placed in the contest--Lewis once could claim a perfect 80 words per minute, but he could not remember how high he ranked in the contest--and he had fallen in love.
Typing His Way Into History
The typewriter has never stopped talking to him. In the Navy, he served as a typist. He typed letters and memos and regulation manuals 8 hours a day for more than a half-dozen years. He could talk and type. It was a different way of using the mind, he figures. On a computer, a typist can delete, cut and paste words; it makes you lazy. A typist must think ahead, Lewis says. He doesn’t, he says, “have five minutes for a computer.”
Once, Lewis said, he typed a letter to President Truman, just before Truman left office. He did not make a mistake. Lewis is not sure if he can tell the story, in case it is classified, but he does anyway: Lewis was a clerk in the Navy and had been summoned on a Sunday to take dictation from a commander. The commander pleaded with Truman to give him a good posting, someplace decent, because future President Eisenhower didn’t like him.
“I don’t know exactly what ever happened to him, but he was shipped off to a faraway place, waaay out there in the Pacific.” Lewis wonders not where the letter is but where the machine is on which it was typed.
Lewis has owned, or partially owned, five typewriter shops in his life. He remembers days when an IBM electric typewriter, one that would rumble to life like some radioactive hazard, would cost $1,000 or more. Life was good. So was the money. If you worked in an office, you typed on a typewriter, and people--college students writing essays, novelists writing their books, professors writing whatever they write--flocked to his store the way they go now to Circuit City.
Today, he has one employee who works on printers, photocopiers, things that hold no magic for Lewis. Every day, fewer customers come in. Money gets worse.
It is lonely. He knows he’s clinging not only to a machine but to a bygone world, one that allowed him to practice an art.
Often he is by himself, in the dark among the remnants of his more successful years. On one recent day, in the dark and musty back room of his shop, he unwraps the plastic covering from an old typewriter made in Germany, restored so it shimmers with silver and golden metal. He says it is one of only two Blickensderfers he has ever seen. It looks barely like a typewriter, more like a combination adding machine and steam engine, but he says it is so beautiful he would consider it an honor to see another. He figures that won’t happen. But he hopes.
He wonders what stories were written on it, what mindless memos, or if somebody ever used it to write a letter that broke a heart. Someday, Lewis says, he might sit down and stop all his fixing for other people and use one of his old machines and peck something out, something beyond a military commander’s report, or beyond testing a key with “XXX” or “AAA” or “MMM.” Maybe he’d start with a story about a hot summer day at an old community college in Nebraska, maybe so some child will someday read it and can know what a typewriter is. But probably not. He probably never will write anything at all.
