Reporter Discovers Familiar Hum in a Typewriter Repair Shop

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. In the late 1970s, after middle school let out, I would take a bus across Seattle to wherever my mother was working. Kathy Streeter was an office secretary then — what might today be called an executive assistant, mostly at the University of Washington. After a painful split with my father, she was navigating a hard, perilous stretch for our family, often stuck in jobs she was overqualified for. But when I remember those afternoons — sitting beside her desk, doing homework, listening to the staccato rhythm of her IBM Selectric — the feeling that returns is warmth. Security. The machines she favored were robin’s-egg blue, the keys tapping in a steady pulse that meant she was there. My mom died in 2019, at 87, just before the pandemic sealed us all away from one another. As a writer, I had been circling the subject of typewriters for years. And when I sat down to report a story about a typewriter repairman in a small shop in Bremerton, Wash., a working-class Navy town, I finally understood why. Mom had always been my bedrock. I was reaching for her. The story began with curiosity. I’d always appreciated typewriters, though I had barely used them myself. In college, I couldn’t type at all — I wrote papers longhand, and a friend transcribed them on a word processor. Still, those machines had left their mark, and I wondered if someone was keeping the old craft alive. I found Paul Lundy in the fall of 2023. He ran a small typewriter repair business he had purchased from his mentor, Bob Montgomery, a wizened, reclusive man in his 90s who had worked on typewriters for more than half a century. But as a national reporter at The New York Times, when the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel happened, the news demanded everything. I put down the story for more than a year as I covered the effects of the war in Gaza at home, the run-up to the 2024 election and the reshaping of Trump’s America. I might have dropped the typewriter repairman story entirely. But I couldn’t let it go. When I returned to Bremerton, Mr. Lundy had moved his shop across the street, into a 115-year-old building with big windows facing the sidewalk. People wandered in, drawn by the machines in the window — some of them as old as the building itself — and Mr. Lundy invited them to sit and type. I watched them discover what I soon would myself: the physical pleasure of pressing into those keys, the click and clack, the heft of a machine built to last. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.