SAM DINGMAN: This is a series about analogs. Things people make by hand, and what those things tell us about those people. The first person I want to tell you about is Duane Jensen. Duane Jensen fixes typewriters.
DUANE JENSEN: Gonna move that out of the way … [TYPEWRITER KEYS CLICKING]
DINGMAN: Duane works in his garage, next to his car, which is covered in Rush stickers — the band, not the shock jock. He’s got a workbench packed with tools: fine metal prods, calipers, tiny screwdrivers, and a magnifying glass. Behind him, and on shelves that stretch from one end of the room to the other, are typewriters — some of them over 100 years old. There are a handful of electric typewriters, but most of Duane’s typewriters are manual.
You feed paper into them with a hand-rolled crank, and when you press down on a key, a hinge triggers a metal bar with a letter carved into its tip. The letter thwacks against a ribbon that’s pressed against the paper. Where once there was only blank space, now there’s the beginning of a word — maybe a love letter, or a poem, or a novel.
Duane finds none of this romantic.
JENSEN: I’m just not in that category of writers, you know, where I just wanna hold my typewriter against me and go to bed with it or something. But I’ll fix your typewriter. I make these people very happy, and, you know. So that’s fun.
DINGMAN: Duane started fixing typewriters because he lost his job at a hardware store. It was the early '80s, and he was a teenager, living in his first apartment.
JENSEN: My mom died, and my abusive — well, semi-abusive father moved back to the house. We were incompatible, so I left before I was 17.
DINGMAN: He spent some time living out of his car, or with friends from the neighborhood. Eventually, he found his own place.
JENSEN: Got set up in the trailer park at $50 a week. A little trailer — I mean a little trailer, for a 6 foot 6 [inch] guy. My head hit the top of this trailer. I mean I think I was hunched down the whole time. But you know, it was my place, it felt very great. Everything was fresh and new, and on my own, and that was just the beginning of it.
DINGMAN: He’d been applying for new jobs, but he didn’t have a phone in his trailer. So he’d been giving potential employers the number of a payphone across the street, outside a laundromat. Every day, he’d wake up early, sit by the window, and wait for the payphone to ring. One day, at about 6:30 a.m., it did.
DINGMAN: So the phone rings, and you — what, just sprint across the street?
JENSEN: Yep — sprint across, and it’s them, and they wanna do an interview. So we set that up, and that was it. Went there and got the job within a day.
DINGMAN: The job was at an office supply company called Dick’s Supply. Part of the job at Dick's was fixing office supplies, like electric typewriters, and Duane knew his way around a circuit board. He’d taken an electronics class in high school.
Thing is, electric typewriters were still relatively new back then, so they didn’t break very often. So during their down time, some of the older guys at Dick’s started teaching Duane how to fix manual typewriters. After a few years, Duane switched to a different company with a bit more of a traditional corporate culture. They sent him to a training school for formal typewriter fixing lessons.
JENSEN: And so that was fun, because half the time I knew the machine better than the instructor did. And so you know, I just felt comfortable fixing the stuff. Confident, right away.
DINGMAN: Eventually, typewriters gave way to computers, and the company didn’t need guys like Duane to fix them anymore. But Duane wasn’t ready to shake that feeling of comfort and confidence. So he opened up his own typewriter repair shop. Sometimes, there wasn’t much work, but Duane still showed up at the shop every morning. He stayed there all day, from 8 to 5, even if all he did was look up old typewriter models on the internet and listen to Rush.
JENSEN: So I just kept it going, idling kind of. And kept the day shop open and worked a night job for 10 years.
DINGMAN: And what was the night job?
JENSEN: Pizza delivery.
DINGMAN: After a full shift at the typewriter shop, Duane would deliver pizzas until around midnight. But that wasn’t the end of his day.
JENSEN: You know, I’d go to the casino till 1 in the morning, come home by 2, in bed, up at 7,, back to the shop at 8.
DINGMAN: Duane’s bosses at the pizza shop were impressed with his work ethic. They offered him a job as a manager. But he turned it down.
JENSEN: And they never raised my minimum wage — even though I was there 10 years. And at one point, I says, “You can give me a dime more than the other drivers you’re just hiring — I never make mistakes, I never ruin a food order. I deserve …" “Well, that’s all you’re gonna get.” A couple times I shoulda left. But I didn’t.
DINGMAN: Did you find you were putting a lot of the money you got at the pizza place into the typewriter business?
JENSEN: Absolutely — it was a supplement for that. That’s why I started working more hours there, and everything.
DINGMAN: To keep this going?
JENSEN: Yep, it was for that.
DINGMAN: Duane says that from the time he opened his typewriter shop, until about 2008, he probably repaired about 50 manual typewriters. But in 2008, something changed. His phone started ringing off the hook. Parents were calling to say that their daughters wanted a typewriter for Christmas — could they bring in an old one for him to fix up? Or did he have any for sale?
JENSEN: So I asked ‘em, I said why are you interested? They said, “She watched this movie called “Kitt Kittredge.”
[MOVIE CLIP]
JENSEN: She’s using a typewriter — that’s why they wanted it. That’s why the little girl wanted it. So then, it couldn’t’ve been a week later, another call, another girl, and her parents call. And the same thing, they saw the same movie, Kitt Kittredge.
DINGMAN: The first winter this happened, Duane sold 10 typewriters in a month. Then 20. Then 30. And the boom continued — Tom Hanks became a typewriter evangelist. Taylor Swift featured one in a music video. Then 2022 was Duane’s biggest year of all, and business is still brisk. The day I visited his garage, he had 300 typewriters on display, many of which were already marked as sold. He estimates he’s one of about 30 people in the US who still work on manual typewriters.
JENSEN: Workin’ 80 hours a week, in the heat!
DINGMAN: Yeah!
JENSEN: Almost killed me!
DINGMAN: I mean, we’re sitting out here, it’s like 100 degrees.
JENSEN: Sorry.
DINGMAN: And I know you’re hooked up to an oxygen machine here — does that make it difficult?
JENSEN: No — well, yeah, mobility, and I have COPD, and I have trouble breathing. This business was part of the factor I have COPD, because I had a shop without ventilation. That’s why my lungs are not working.
DINGMAN: Wait. So your lungs were damaged by doing the typewriter work?
JENSEN: By the smell of the chemicals.
DINGMAN: He says his lung condition was diagnosed seven years ago.
JENSEN: They gave me a five-year life span. That was seven years ago, so I’m already beatin’ it.
DINGMAN: Ever the gambler, Duane’s still fixing typewriters. These days, he keeps a fan blowing, and works with the garage door open. He has two children, and they don’t totally understand why he won’t quit.
JENSEN: They think I’m crazy. A little bit, you know? "You’re workin’ too hard," you know, and stuff. You’re not makin’ that much money. I’m like, well …
DINGMAN: So you just like fixing ‘em?
JENSEN: Fixin’ is fun! Yeah, so I guess it’s me, now. Put a typewriter in with my casket, in the grave. And a Rush album.
