Jones Typewriter

Vern Trampe, Part 1.

Vern Trampe, Part 2.

Vern Trampe, Part 3.

Jones Typewriter is located on the main drag of Maplewood, MO — that stretch of Manchester which used to be Route 66, between the old-fashioned Maple Leaf barber shop and the new-fangled Bouffant Daddy hair salon. It's a mess inside. The area up front is the way station for things fixed and awaiting reclamation by paying customers. It is cram packed, ceiling to shelf to tabletop to floor, with archaic business machinery — from every era since the invention of the typewriter right after the Civil War to the advent of the personal computer in the 1980s. The combined functions of all this bulky old apparatus now fit into a pocket-sized smart device.

The back of the shop is devoted to repair, a frenzied disarray of tinkering: oiled parts, oily gray rags, oil cans with long skinny necks, "World's Greatest Dad" emblazoned mugs full of oil-thick coffee.

Repairman Charlie Mays will cheerfully adjure you not to wander too far into the stacks: "We might never find you again, even with a search party."

Vern Trampe, founder of the business's current incarnation, knows something about every item in his shop, as you may glean from Puff Updater's transcript of our exclusive behind-the-scenes tour with him:

I started in the local Remington office in the sixties. I didn't fix typewriters then, I fixed calculators. Remington went out of business, but before they went out of business, they closed up all their offices, and made me into what they called a "selling dealer." I sold their equipment and they did the service for me. But — I didn't get along with the guy who they had doing the service for me. So I started my own service department.

We were still doing mechanical calculators back then. The electronic ones didn't came along until the seventies.

Even we have a computer now, to do our billings on, and to order parts and that kind of stuff.

We get two kinds of customers looking for typewriters these days.

The first are the Washington University English majors who are going to be writers — journalists, or poets or novelists or whatever. College kids are romantics. And they want a typewriter just like Hemingway used. But they can't afford that one. And not only that — like the delicate little $250 Red Corona over there — it may be nice for show, but they really wouldn't be able to use it. So we move them on to sturdier, more affordable models they can actually type on.

Hemingway had many different types of typewriters. He started with a Remington, but he didn't like it, because it was what they call a 'non-visible.' You couldn't see your typos without lifting a gizmo up. This is one of the first styles of typewriter ever made, from around the 1890s.

Typewriters came into being in the late 1860s, invented by a guy named Sholes. Remington made guns at the time, but they wanted to diversify after the Civil War, so they bought the rights to the machine. They were also making sewing machines in the 1870s, so their early typewriters had foot treadles to work the carriage return. That didn't last long, because the need for a pedestal prevented the machines from being portable.

You can tell the age of a typewriter not only from the typeface of the logo, but also by the design. In the 20s, for instance, the machines weren't closed in on the sides. Then in the 30s, they closed them in to get a quieter sound.

The second group of people who come in here looking for typewriters are the grandmothers of 10- to 12-year-old girls who are crazy about that American Girl series — Kit Kitredge, the girl reporter, in particular. In that case, the manual typewriters are a little too much for their little fingers to press down on, so we try to move them to electrics. Smith-Corona makes one with a manual return so they have that sound, but the power just makes the typing easier. Still some of them insist. But then they'll just type with one finger, and we don't want them to do that.

So we'll throw in some old typing guides, with those diagrams of how to position your fingers on the keyboard, so they can learn how to type properly — not just hunt and peck. Though many a sportswriter banged out his copy by the hunt and peck method! That's how Charlie types. I think he can do about 15 words a minute. I touch-type, so I can get up to 80 words a minute, if I'm not worrying about errors. If I want to be accurate, I'm down to 40.

No one buys the adding machines. They're too big, and they just don't have a collector's base. We have a few real old ones, like the Burroughs adding machine up here that a guy brought in three years ago and still hasn't picked up yet. He keeps saying he's coming for it, but he never does.

The Addipresto adding machine.

Someone brought this little Addipresto machine in to be fixed. It works on the same principle as the Chinese abacus. But it just adds, it doesn't subtract. It's a novelty.

As in William Seward Burroughs, of St. Louis.

Here's another Burroughs adding machine, from the 1920s. You would think it would be collectible, but because it's so big and bulky, it's just not. People only have so much room, and these things are very heavy to move. This one would cost about $150 to get into working order. We had to make our own key to get into the case and work on it, which is the only time the case ever needs to be open. These machines are about as obsolete as you can get.

This one has a carriage on the back of it so they used it to do statements and that type of thing. Print out invoices on carbon paper. A lot of banks used them. 90% of Burroughs business was banks. Remington, the company I initially started fixing adding machines for, had more of an industrial line — International Shoe was a big customer — though they too did some banking, like for Mercantile.

Step-over! We're coming through.

This one here is the starting of the calculators. It was used to multiply and divide. But it was mechanical. For instance if you wanted to multiply, you had to repeat. Say you wanted to multiply 144 by 144 you would repeat four times, space over, repeat four times, space over, repeat once and then it would have a total for you. That was called "step-over."

You multiply by 10, then multiply by 100, then multiply by 1000 as you step-over. That's the way calculators work. By repeated addition.

This one I can't get working. As is, it would cost you $50, for novelty purposes. People often bring these things in after they've tried to fix them themselves. But their tinkering has just made them unfixable. We don't throw them away though.

Oil, the repairman's essential fluid.

We use a light-weight machine oil to keep the parts lubricated. It's thin, like a sewing machine oil. Never use WD-40 on one of these old machines. It's silicon based. The silicon dries out and gums everything up. Then you'll have to bring your machine into us.

Thanks for the guided tour of your works, Vern!