One of the last typewriter repairmen

BREMERTON – The area’s last typewriter repairman is 92 and he’ll tell you all kinds of stories.

Bob Montgomery has the time for stories because he’s not that busy these days. Time passes slowly in his fifth-floor space at a downtown Bremerton office building.

He was always a skinny guy. At his age, he looks frailer than he is.

But his mind is sharp, remembering details about machines manufactured a century ago. His eyesight is good, and he uses magnifying glasses to work with tweezers on delicate parts.

Walk into his shop, and you’re transported to a different world.

Outside, people are tethered to their smartphones, busy, busy, busy tweeting 140 characters of random thoughts.

Here, at the Bremerton Office Machine Company, the machines from a different era sit on shelves, relegated to collectors and those who never quite adjusted to staring at a screen.

What matters here are not quad-core processors, but things like a little round metal escapement wheel, its teeth used to move type one space forward.

Oh, if somehow Montgomery could cash in on the renewed interest in typewriters. They’ve been making headlines around the world.

In 2013, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that country’s Federal Protective Service, worried about computer hackers, was planning to buy German-made Triumph-Adler Twen 180 electric typewriters. The Russians weren’t going as retro as to get totally mechanical ones.

Then, in July of this year, German media reported that a defense manufacturer in that country had switched to electric typewriters.

Also, the head of a German parliamentary inquiry into spying by the U.S. said his committee was considering using typewriters.

To capitalize, the manufacturer of the Triumph-Adler released a video touting the machine as “Bug proof. NSA proof.”

Actually, typewriters are not completely bug proof.

In a document worthy of spy novelist John le Carre, you can read an NSA paper called “The Gunman Project.”

It tells that in the early 1980s, the U.S. discovered how the Soviets bugged the American embassy in Moscow, including its Selectrics.

The implants were found when the machines were X-rayed.

Each character being typed had a unique movement, and the bugs could detect that and transmit the information.

Lifetime with typewriters

Montgomery was 7 or 8 when he began going to his dad’s shop in downtown Seattle, changing ribbons, learning to repair the machines.

That’s 85-some years of typewriters.

To be accurate, he’s not the last, last typewriter repairman.

But in the Puget Sound area, he’s the last one who could be found whose full-time business is repairing typewriters.

In Bellevue, you can find Dave Armstrong, who also repairs typewriters but says it’s only 10 percent of his business, Computer & Printer Repair.

“A lot of people see something on Craigslist and get some romantic notion to write the great American novel on this thing,” says Armstrong. “An awful lot of the machines are just not worth repairing.”

Every weekday, sometimes also on weekends, Montgomery takes the bus from the retirement community in which he lives to his shop.

His rate is $48 an hour, and a punch time clock ticks away on the wall.

Thousands and thousands of little typewriter parts are stored in drawers and plastic boxes. Montgomery is the only one who knows which specific model a little gizmo is for.

Sometimes, when he gets tired, Montgomery takes a nap on a couch in the office. “Then I’m good again for another two or three hours,” he says.

Repairing through WWII

Montgomery remembers repairing typewriters during World War II in Bushy Park in London, right where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was stationed as the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. A few times, Montgomery saw Ike going to and fro.

Wars generate not just casualties, but plenty of paperwork.

Montgomery had been drafted and trained as an infantryman.

Then his records showed he could repair typewriters.

“I think every latrine orderly had a typewriter,” he remembers.

When Montgomery returned from the war, he went back to the family business, which eventually moved to Bremerton.

Besides the machines, Montgomery’s other big love has been the Bremerton Community Theatre. He has acted in or been part of the production of more than 145 shows, as recently as a few months ago.

“It looks like the end of an era. We’re trying to figure out what he needs to retire,” says company president Paul Holiday.

Montgomery tries to explain his 85 years of love for the typewriters.

He says, “It’s the only machine I know of that you can put a piece of paper in it, start typing, and you see something appear on that paper.”

In the background, the punch time clock keeps marking the minutes.

For a while, at least.