Typewriter Repair days

I had had a typewriter since middle school...

This is just like my machine. Note it isn’t even electric.

... and this was one of the few things I had brought with me on the bus from Arizona. One day I got it in my head that it would be interesting to learn how to repair and maintain typewriters (maybe I was in bike repair withdrawal -- I hadn’t brought my bike). Anyway, I noticed a typewriter repair store out the bus window and went in to inquire. They didn’t need any help but he referred me to this shop way out in the Richmond District -- close to both the ocean and the Golden Gate. I went out to “Bill’s Typewriters” and the owner, who was no longer “Bill,” hired me.

It was a small shop on a marginal commercial street at the edge of town. They didn’t do much business and the proprietor spent most of his time in the field repairing machines. He mostly needed someone to mind the shop, but he would also train me to clean typewriters and even to do basic repairs. (The secret to typewriter repair is having a spring hook. I still have my spring hook and it’s amazing how often it still comes in handy.)

So for a year I would ride the bus all the way out to the Outer Richmond and spend the day selling, cleaning, and repairing typewriters. 

The worst machines to work on were the typewriters owned by heavy smokers. The guts of the machine went into a solvent bath and came out clean and ready to be oiled. But the case had to be scrubbed clean of all the sticky tar by hand... nasty.

At the time, but no longer, San Francisco had an afternoon newspaper, The Examiner, that produced a number of editions as news developed -- often this “news” involved pictures of the then young and lovely Princess Caroline of Monaco (above the fold -- so you could see her in the vending box window -- with the contrived story below where you could only read it after you bought a copy -- “Only gas... not a baby bump after all!”). One day at Bill’s I was making a snack run to a corner market when I read about the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk -- the events made more famous by the movie Milk. Which recollection primes us my my next transition (see The Book Business).