REPAIRMAN HAS WRITE STUFF
Still a market for typewriter repair
Art Skill is an 84-year-old typewriter repairman.
“You have to be around that age to be in the typewriter business,” he deadpans.
“There’s a guy down in Olympia, Washington, who’s 90-something doing it.”
But Skill has no plans to retire, because there’s plenty of work. Typewriters may have been rendered obsolete by computers and home printers, but many people and businesses still own them.
“You can clean them, which will make them look pretty,” he said.
“But if you’re going to use them, you can’t have sticking keys, the backspace has to work, the tab has to work. If the ribbon reverse doesn’t work it’s a bitch to wind it back.”
Hence many typewriter owners seek out Skill’s company, Polson’s Office Products, which has been the go-to place for typewriters since it opened in 1963.
Many Vancouverites will recall Polson’s from its old location on Broadway near Cambie. It’s downsized over the years — now it’s run out of Skill’s garage.
In its heyday Polson’s had 35 employees.
Now it’s down to four: Skill, his wife, and two technicians.
One technician is an ex-IBM employee who handles IBM Selectrics, a complex electric typewriter that remains popular with law firms.
“Every lawyer has an IBM Selectric,” said Skill. “Because there’s no memory, for one thing — a computer is storing everything you do.”
The other technician specializes in old manual typewriters.
“It’s an older guy, older than me, would you believe, who can do the old stuff,” said Skill.
“Don Brown, who’s just under 90. He does the old square Underwoods, black, (that were produced) before the Second World War.”
Manuals were king when Skill got into the typewriter business in the 1950s.
“The B.C. Electric had about 80, B.C. Tel had a similar number,” said Skill.
“We used to service them on a monthly basis. And (we did) the Province and Sun, (where the) editorial (department) had about 50 or 60. All manual, Underwood.
“The offices upstairs would have electric machines, and we would service those as well. But mainly it was the editorial, which was going 18 hours a day. The sound was …. not deafening, but all you could hear was click-click-click-click!”
Skill got into the typewriter business at 19 through an older brother who was a service manager for Remington Rand.
“I started as a technician,” he recounts.
“You had to wear a one-piece suit, tie and hat.”
He moved into sales but found himself jobless when Remington Rand shut down its Canadian subsidiary around 1970.
He landed a job with IBM in Fresno, Calif., but walking around in a suit and tie in the boiling California summers sent him back to Vancouver.
Skill started up a company called Modern Business Machines, which purchased Polson’s. For many years it was smooth sailing, but business fell off with the arrival of big box stores like Office Depot, Future Shop and Staples.
“We were doing $5/$6 million a year up there (at Broadway and Cambie),” he said.
“Mind you we got into furniture and all kinds of things. We had eight guys in service, three guys in trucks. Office Depot helped to kill that.”
Today Polson’s does a little of everything to pay the bills. The company repairs adding machines, Dictaphones, even cheque writers.
“(Cheque writers are) big now with lawyers because they’re converting Chinese renminbi to Canadian,” he says. “So they have to have at least a 10-column cheque writer, which is not normal. There’s a real run on those.”
He also sells new electric typewriters made by Nakajima in Japan for $399, and does a steady business selling reconditioned old typewriters for $200 to $250.
Many of his vintage typewriters have been rented out as props for TV shows like Timeless and The Man in the High Castle. His present stock includes 40 from companies like Hermes, Royal, Smith Corona, and Underwood.
“I have an Arabic typewriter, the carriage goes the other way,” he notes.
The Arabic typewriter is by Optima in Erfurt, in what was then East Germany. And it comes with a story.
“The Russians were advancing on Berlin (at the end of the Second World War), and the (Olympia typewriter) factory was between Berlin and the Russians,” Skill relates.
“So all the guys working there got on bikes with all the plans and pedalled like crazy to get out of the way and ended up at Wilhelmshaven, which is where all the U-boats were made.
“They took it over and developed Olympia (in West Germany). The East Germans couldn’t use the Olympia name (so became Optima).”
Skill isn’t just a typewriter repairman, he’s a typewriter historian.
If you’re going to use them, you can’t have sticking keys, the backspace has to work, the tab has to work.