Maude Standish

Sometimes when Steve Kazmierski arrives at his store in the morning, there in front of the brown door are two or three typewriters, with a note scribbled onto some scrap of paper: "We didn't want to throw it out. Maybe you can use it." Steve, with his frozen meal of the day tucked under one arm, unlocks the door and brings them in, mentally cataloguing each one. "Nobody takes `em and I use `em for parts," he says.

Kazmierski is the owner and only employee of the last typewriter repair and sales shop in the city of Chicago, Independence Business Machines, located at 1623 West Montrose. The shop itself has baby blue walls, and is filled to the brim with typewriters--so much so that that the only way to navigate through it is to follow the predefined paths in between the typewriters--black ones with elegant bronze enamel, upturned beige plastic ones with their keys strewn next to them and curvy avocado green ones missing ribbons.

Kazmierski's desk is behind a counter that, like the floor, has been overwhelmed by typewriters. On the wall above his wooden desk hang a vinyl American flag, a brown indistinct clock steadily ticking, a business license with a shiny gold seal, two calendars, a smoke alarm and a sign printed onto an aged piece of cardboard that says, "AFTER 30 DAYS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL GOODS."

Kazmierski is handsome and has a fatherly voice with a bit of the old-country accent lingering in the crevices of his pronunciation. He starts to tell me about how he became a typewriter repairman. "I was 16 years old." And then promptly stops to look at my tape recorder. "Is that thing working?" He is wary at first and insists on hearing not my hesitant "testing testing" but his own voice played back to him.

"Well, I started with the International Typewriter Exchange. They never asked me how old I was. We came from Europe in 1950--from Germany. I am Polish and we were war refugees.

"After the war my parents didn't want to go back. The company never asked me how old I was so they put me to work dismantling typewriters and putting them back together again. See, this is how you learn. We didn't have electric typewriters. They were all manual, and I have been with typewriters ever since. It just happened."

Kazmierski happily displays shriveled newspaper clippings all about him, printed trophies tacked onto the painted wood planks that make up the walls. When asked if he writes he responds, "Noooo, I don't type. I never met a typewriter man that knew how to type. I'm a two-finger typist. You know what the record is on a Manual Underwood? In 1939--164 words a minute on a manual typewriter. I do type a little--the tags."

He starts to rub his wrinkled fingers across the crisp tags, each revealing the identity of the typewriter's owner. The typewriters come from all over Illinois and from all different types of people--doctors, professors, lawyers, sentimental types, realtors and pharmacists. "Do I have a favorite typewriter? No! They are all the same to me. Typewriter."

Kazmierski has a staunch policy on fixing the typewriters that are in use before those that are merely being cleaned to be showcased as antiques. But the antiques--and by antiques he means the ones dating back to the 1890s--are not forgotten. "Those machines," he says as he scratches the rust with his thumbnail, "gotta be rejuvenated."

Kazmierski is proud to have a Web site that was developed by the Chicago Tribune when they wrote an article about him, though his only proof that it exists is a flimsy black and white two-page printout. "Computers I hate. Oh yeah, `cause you get in trouble with the computers. That's why everyone has much problems. The computers. Don't you know the problems we are having? With the teenagers. They get in and they deal with narcotics and they buy narcotics. They steal the banks from the people. They cheat people. On computers! That's why I don't trust computers...Computers do nothing. People have to do it."

Ten years ago Kazmierski was not the only typewriter repairman. But over the years his competitors have grown old and retired or died. Steve, on the other hand, got divorced. He sits down and sighs. "I love what I am doing. I am thrilled when people are so happy. A man even came over and gave me a kiss because I fixed his typewriter. People just won't let me retire. Look at all the work I got."

(2007-04-10)

Also by Maude Standish

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