Key to Repairman’s Future: Typewriters

Dale Frederick takes emergency calls on the weekends and at night, hitting the road at a moment’s notice. His task: fixing typewriters.

Yes, typewriters--those clackety machines that once graced every office.

Even as computers began sweeping into offices two decades ago, leaving piles of discarded typewriters in their wake, a loyal few--from secretaries to clerks to aficionados--refused to relinquish their beloved machines.

So when one breaks, who do they call? In a few Southern California cities, it’s Frederick.

“I feel like a blacksmith at the turn of the last century--shoeing a horse but knowing I have to get out of the way of an oncoming car,” he says.

But like those who resisted putting their horses out to pasture, Frederick believes typewriters still have life in them.

“Computers are great things when you’re working on a piece of 8 1/2-by-11 paper,” he says. “But try putting gum labels or envelopes or cards in the printer and see what happens. . . .

“Look, a computer is like a fork. You can eat and eat and eat with it right up until somebody hands you a bowl of soup. Then you need a spoon. The typewriter is the spoon.”

More than 200 businesses in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties still have “spoons” for Frederick to work on.

Sandy Salinas still uses her 1973 IBM Selectric to address envelopes or quickly type checks at a law firm in Riverside.

So when it started to give her problems, she turned to Frederick.

“He keeps it running like a fine old Mercedes-Benz,” she says. “But he doesn’t just fix it. He teaches you things about it.”

Her typewriter was one of the last custom, handmade, metal Selectrics--a collector’s item, he told her on a recent visit.

Over the years, Frederick says, he’s found that typewriter loyalists are second only to owners of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

“These people love their machines,” he said. “When they want them fixed, they want them fixed now.”

As a result, Frederick has had his share of strange calls.

Once, he was called out to repair a typewriter thrown out a second-story window. Another time, a jealous wife poured molasses inside because she thought the typewriter consumed too much of her writer-husband’s time.

“He asked what it would take to fix it. I told him we’d have to boil it to get the sugar off. Then I remembered the instruction manual said, ‘No boiling the typewriter.’ ”

He’s also had his share of strange finds. For instance, there was the typewriter that had several keys that wouldn’t work. He opened it up and found a gold charm--a gift the owner had lost soon after she received it from her husband, who was killed in the Vietnam War.

“She was so happy, she . . . [nearly] picked me up and carried me around the room,” Frederick says.

Frederick’s typewriter fix-it career began after he was laid off from a San Bernardino County job repairing fire trucks and went to work for IBM. A few years later, he worked briefly at a small office repair shop before opening his own business--Up N’ Running--in 1987.

Frederick travels from job to job, which can range from $50 to $350, in a truck that was new in the 1980s. He works when called, averaging about 50 hours a week.

“Everything that man ever made has broke. Heck, even the pyramids are wearing out, and they were built right sturdy,” he says.