Dick Ponce knows better than to look up when the air conditioner sputters to life and rattles the door. When you've worked in the same shop as long as Ponce has – selling a product that technology has left behind – you know the difference between the sound of a customer and the sound of cold air.
So Ponce keeps his head down, showing off an old typewriter at his Central Avenue shop, the one he has owned since 1963. Down on vacation from Lorraine, Ohio, where he owned another store, Ponce ate a $1.50 plate of fish and was hooked on Florida.
The typewriter business was booming back then. Ponce became the IBM distributor in Pinellas County, and the machines flew out of his shop. But a lot's changed in the last 42 years. Manuals got replaced by electrics, and electrics got replaced by computers. Most of his competitors have left the business. But Dick's is still open.
Ponce writes the same sentence – "this is the sample of the type on this machine" – every time he demos a typewriter. "Isn't this beautiful?" he says, as he types that favorite sentence into a light blue Royal from 1935. The old manuals, intricate systems of levers and switches, were designed with the care of a loving parent. As much works of art as they are practical machines, these classic typewriters are akin to classic cars. They share contours and colors, the same attention to detail. And both antiques were eventually replaced, tossed aside for boxy, utilitarian stepchildren.
Ponce's shop is small, but it feels like a closet with all the stuff he's got crammed inside. Metal bookcases line the walls, filled top to bottom with electrics. Every surface – the green felt work table, the window sill, the floor – is covered in parts and oil and tools. Ponce, in a plaid short-sleeve shirt – his white hair parted neatly, his dark green apron stained with grease – fits right in.
A quick-witted guy with a sharp tongue, Ponce spends most of his time leaning back in his chair, directing traffic. He has a repairman out in the field, and when folks need help, Ponce calls his guy and gives him the address. "Any big office has to have a typewriter," he says – for cards, checks and envelopes. (Ponce might be a bit overconfident – the Planet, for example, ditched its last typewriter a while ago.) But someone's still using them. The shop got four calls before noon on a recent Thursday morning.
"Normally I'll sell three to 10 machines a week," he says. That's down from 15 or 20 a few years ago, but the biggest drop in business has been rentals. It used to bring in $2,500 a month; now it generates a fraction of that. Today, every machine but one is sitting on a shelf.
Ponce is a proud guy. The program from his son's high school graduation, which happened five days earlier, is still sticking out of his breast pocket. He won't use the two computers he's bought for his family: "Don't show me how to use it," he told them, "'cause I'm not going to learn." But that's where the bitterness ends. "The typewriter industry has treated me well," he says.
And he treats the old machines like his kids. While the electrics are shoved on the shelves, the antique portables sit neatly stacked in their cases, never far from reach. Most are not for sale.
"I'd feel cheated if I sold it, because I don't need the money," he says. "I need the machine. If I don't like someone, I won't sell to them. Because … if they don't know what a good machine is, they don't deserve to have one."
Ponce considered retiring 10 years ago, but says now that he will keep going as long as he can walk.
"If I retire, what am I going to do – go home and watch TV?" he asks. "Bullshit."
He says there's still something to learn, even on typewriters 80 years old. Machines can still break down in ways that he's never seen. But, "If there's a problem on a machine," he says, "I'll fix it somehow."
Dick Ponce may not have as many customers walk through the door as he used to, but he doesn't seem upset about it. Business is still there. And sometimes, a young guy like me will walk into the store and be blown away.
When that happens, Ponce pounces.
He offered to give me a 1930 Olivetti Studio 42, a beautiful black typewriter with German lettering and a deeply textured finish. The buttons are round – they didn't go square until the '40s, he told me – and the font was an elegant one I'd never seen.
Of course, taking a gift like that from a person you're writing a story about is against every journalistic rule in the book. So I'm writing this on a laptop, which is hooked up to wireless Internet and could cook me dinner if I had the right plug-in.
Still, it's a good thing he didn't ask me for a trade. I'm not sure I could have said no.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2005.