Just hit “Return”

My son was reading a book a few years ago and paused to ask me, “Mom, what does a typewriter look like?” I went to the storage area above the garage and hauled out my extremely heavy electric typewriter. I could never let it go.

“This is what a typewriter looks like!” I said as I extracted it from its case. Decades later, it still smells like graduate school to me.

Bob Montgomery, 92 , repairs typewriters. Really.  He works every weekday, taking the bus to his downtown Bremerton, Wash. office. The drawers and plastic boxes in his office house little tiny parts that only Bob knows how and where to install, often on IBM Selectric machines from the 1961-1986 era.

Montgomery was drafted during World War II and trained as an infantryman.  But once his typewriter repair skills were known, that became his duty.

Now Montgomery serves nostalgic writers and others who abhor computers;  and he may soon welcome an S-R blogger at his office door, dragging her ancient writing machine behind her.

(S-R archive photo: In this Oct. 5, 1960 AP file photo, Jacqueline Kennedy poses at her typewriter where she writes her weekly “Candidate’s Wife” column in her Georgetown home in Washington.)