She’s put her stamp on Tucker Plus
Pat Lisson is turning 87 and launching into her fifth decade on John Street South
I always loved the backspace key on typewriters. The second chance of it.
If you didn’t hit your last letter strongly enough you got a re-do, another crack at driving it home more emphatically. Or, on certain typewriters, the backspace allowed you to put the carriage in reverse and add an accent, or overstrike (like a cedilla), to your last character.
Tucker Plus is a kind of backspace, with accents. A space, on John Street South, where you can go back. Back to a time when typewriters dominated office technology; when fountain pens and rubber stamps were not yet the quaint-looking, increasingly prized antiquities they are today.
Back to a time when Pat Lisson was not yet 50, when she wanted a job because “I was desperate to get away from five kids at home,” as she puts it with a wry, fond smile.
One of those kids, Paul, is sitting beside her in the shop that John R. Tucker started in the 1920s, in the old Lister building.
Paul Lisson started having lunch with his mom in the shop every Thursday not long after she started working for Mr. Tucker in 1978. Paul retired as special collections archivist at central branch Hamilton Public Library last year.
“Did you ever think Paul would retire before you?” I ask Pat, as I join them on a recent Thursday. No she didn’t, her smile says.
But here she is, 86, and about to
turn 87 just as she marks her 40th anniversary working at Tucker Plus (it was originally called simply Tucker’s; she took it over from John in the 1990s.)
She buses from her home near Upper Wentworth (Pat’s had 23 different homes in Hamilton over her lifetime — late husband Jim loved moving) to John South. Every morning.
Many of the new restaurants want customized stamps — for napkins, bags, coffee sleeves. Lawyers’ offices want them too, and city hall. She gets them made and walks from the store to the core delivering them.
“I like the exercise,” says Pat. “You’re still here?!,” says Mr. Lo Presti happily, pausing on his way, popping his head in the front door; behind him the flow of the day on a re-energized John Street South continues along, past the big front window.
He’s not the only one. Several people look in on Pat while I’m there; hers is one of the last two or three old John Street South stores, like tailor Emil Fusaro’s. A man walks in, asks if she has
any volumes of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She doesn’t, but it’s that kind of a place.
Typewriters, rare books, artwork, beautifully carpentered display cases (courtesy Jason Avery), dominoes, stamp inks, ink wells, embossers, stationery, stylish pens, like old Sheaffers, other writing implements.
Many of the typewriters are classics. The 1930 Progress Typewriter from Germany, for instance.
Smart-looking models, with their ructious poetry of moving parts, the bucking carriage shift rhythms and hammer jab of rapid-fire lettering, magically stampeding across a roller and a blackening white page. Space bars, typewheels.
And backspace keys.
You can go back in time, and at
the same time forward into the future. Because some bits of the past are too good not to buck themselves clear of obsolescence, right to the front of the march of what’s vogue, or even a little ahead of it.
Especially as there’s such an accent of timelessness, embodied by Pat and her continuity. Pat and Paul show me the original job ad that Pat answered in 1978.
“Wanted — mature, responsible person for small-office with good typing skills, invoicing, etc., to learn rubber stamp business, attend to customers, etc.”
Pat fit the bill, eminently. Still does. Hard to imagine John South without her; gladly, we don’t have to.