How to fix a typewriter and your life

Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.

For three decades, he had worked in facilities management — an honest trade that ground him down until, in his mid-50s, he had money, an authoritative title and a soul that was being sucked dry. He managed buildings for Seattle-area biotech firms, where people in lab coats made discoveries that saved lives. He kept the infrastructure running. He was good at it, maybe great, but facilities managers are overhead, essential but invisible. Nobody notices until something breaks.

Lundy had reached a ceiling. No college degree meant no room to grow in a world that valued credentials above experience. Retirement at 65 stretched before him like a prison sentence. The three-hour commute was killing him — a ritual that thousands endure to afford living near Seattle.

“Fun was not what you would call it anymore,” allows Lundy, a trim, neatly pleated man with a soft, welcoming face.

One Sunday morning in 2014, he opened The Seattle Times and found a feature story about Bob Montgomery, age 92, known to friends, customers and locals simply as Mr. Montgomery. The article read like an obituary for a vanishing trade — fixing typewriters — suggesting that when Mr. Montgomery went, seven decades of expertise would vanish into the digital ether.

Lundy read it once, then a second time. He had never given old typewriters much thought, but something stirred in him that he could not quite name. He showed the story to his wife, Lisa.

“I think this might be it,” he told her. The next weekend, he drove to Bremerton, a weary naval town an hour’s ferry ride away and a world apart from gleaming, digitized Seattle.

Finding Mr. Montgomery’s shop required determination. No sign marked the building; no indication that inside, five floors up, a master craftsman was keeping alive skills that predated the computer age. You took an elevator that groaned. When the doors opened, you knew immediately you were in the right place: a 1916 Royal Model 10 typewriter stood guard outside an open door, and the air smelled like oil. Once inside, you encountered a shop stacked and stuffed with typewriters — Underwoods and Coronas, Royal KMMs and Remington Portable 3s.

And there, at a workbench, sat Mr. Montgomery.

He was small, frail, bent by osteoporosis enough that “he had a right angle,” Lundy says.

But his hands moved across the typewriter before him with unconscious grace, removing screws without looking, adjusting linkages by feel alone.

“Welcome to the crazy house,” Mr. Montgomery said, his standard greeting.

Lundy had planned to stay 20 minutes. He stayed four hours. What captured him was not nostalgia. What captured him was watching Mr. Montgomery work, the old man dismantling a machine while carrying on a conversation, barely glancing at the complexity beneath his fingers.

Mr. Montgomery had grown up in Depression-era Seattle, the son of a typewriter repairman who had a shop in the city’s downtown. When he was not learning the trade, he would sneak through alleyways into grand old theaters to watch rehearsals, developing a love for performance that would shape his life nearly as much as typewriters.

Then came World War II. Drafted at 18, he expected to carry a rifle through Europe. But the Army discovered his skill and put him to work fixing typewriters at Supreme Allied Command. “Probably saved his life,” Lundy says. After the war, his family opened Bremerton Office Machine Company in 1947. For the next 70 years, Mr. Montgomery stayed within a few blocks of downtown Bremerton, always fixing typewriters, even as the world abandoned them.

What Lundy discovered over the following months was that Mr. Montgomery knew how to patiently stretch everything — even a meal. Lundy began taking him to lunch every Saturday, and their meals became meditations. Mr. Montgomery would order a BLT with avocado and make it last 90 minutes, telling stories between bites and savoring every morsel as only someone who had grown up without much could.

Other than a sister in California, he had no family. He slept in the back of his shop on an orange vinyl hide-a-bed couch. At 92, he existed almost completely outside the system.

Lundy had been a 20-minute lunch guy his entire career — eat fast, back to work, back to the grind. Now, somehow, he found himself slowing down, learning a different rhythm. Lunches became a practice in patience, a different way of being in the world.

“Mr. Montgomery was such a nice guy,” Lundy says, emphasizing “such.” The old man made him feel seen. And listened to. Like everything mattered.

After a few months, Lundy noticed typewriters stacking up faster than Mr. Montgomery could repair them. Business had surged after the article. “Can I help?” Lundy asked one day.

Mr. Montgomery said yes. Lundy started coming after his facilities job, heading straight to the shop. Mr. Montgomery set him up a bench with a typewriter and photocopied repair manual pages. He left him to figure things out.

Lundy’s hands, accustomed to managing air-conditioning systems, had to learn a new language — to feel the difference between correct tension and too loose or too tight. When he thought a repair was perfect, he brought it to Mr. Montgomery, who tested it with quick fingers dancing across the keys and, invariably, pronounced: “That is not what I would have done.”

He showed Lundy the right way. No anger. No frustration. Just quiet insistence that good enough was not good enough.

Sometimes Mr. Montgomery would partly disassemble a machine and leave it on Lundy’s bench — a test, a puzzle, a method of teaching as old as apprenticeship itself.

“It’s like Zen,” Lundy says about those hours at the bench. “There are times when it is just very relaxing to be standing in front of the machine and slowly cleaning it, tweaking the adjustment so visually things start to really line up.”

One Saturday Lundy arrived at the shop to find men with clipboards pointing at Mr. Montgomery’s equipment. They were evicting him, readying everything for the dumpster; 13 months of unpaid rent had finally caught up.

Lundy could not abide the thought of all that knowledge lost, all that skill and history being tossed away. He called his wife. “They’re kicking him out!” he said. “My whole opportunity might be lost. I think this might be what I want to do.”

“You’ve done crazier things,” she replied. “Do it.”

The building manager arrived next, spelling out the cost: 13 months at $200 per month, equaling $2,600 total. For Mr. Montgomery, who had maybe $200 in the bank, this was insurmountable. For Lundy, with his steady salary, it was doable.

“I will pay his back rent if I buy his business,” Lundy told the manager. “I’ll pay monthly rent going forward.”

Deal.

The eviction crew left. Mr. Montgomery, who had watched the chaos with the remote calm of an elder, looked at Lundy and said just one word: “OK.”

Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. “I was happy,” he says simply.

For the next few years, Lundy and Mr. Montgomery worked side by side in that cramped fifth-floor shop. Mr. Montgomery was still the master, but he was slowing, taking longer naps. More and more often, he would look at a typewriter that had come in for repair and turn to Lundy: “You do this one.”

The teaching continued, deeper now, Mr. Montgomery pulling tools off the pegboard — tools he had organized decades ago, many he had made himself, his initials etched in the handles. “He knew everything about every typewriter, just off the top of his head,” Lundy says. “I know maybe 10 percent of what he knew. Maybe.”

Eventually Mr. Montgomery would watch his student work and deliver his highest praise: “You are OK.”

By the time Mr. Montgomery reached his mid-90s, life was catching up with him. His friends had intervened, helping him sign up for the veteran and Social Security benefits he had never claimed and finding him subsidized housing at a nearby retirement home — his first real home in decades. But he kept coming to the shop regularly, taking the bus in the morning. The bus drivers knew Mr. Montgomery and seemed to have memorized his routine — if he was running a bit late, they would wait.

Mr. Montgomery fell and broke his hip. His health declined fast, the way it does when the very old finally succumb to gravity. One afternoon, Lundy visited him in his apartment and threw out uneaten food that had accumulated in the refrigerator. Mr. Montgomery watched for a while, then said quietly: “I’m glad you did this.”

Both men knew he was talking about Lundy continuing the tradition at the shop.

Mr. Montgomery died in September 2018, at age 96. Full military honors were held at the cemetery. Lundy gave the eulogy, his voice breaking as he tried to convey the sum of a man who had lived through the Depression and World War II, who had become an iconic community fixture and spent 70 years fixing machines the world had forgotten, who had worked until the very end because work was who he was.

What neither man could have known was that they had been standing at the edge of the typewriter’s unlikely resurrection. The revival began quietly in temples of analog nostalgia — think Brooklyn coffee shops and Portland boutique hotels. Tom Hanks became an unlikely patron saint, writing a book about typewriters, collecting hundreds of them. Then came 2020. Everyone stuck at home, screens everywhere, Zoom fatigue setting in. People craved something tangible. Typewriter sales exploded.

“The kids get it,” Lundy says. “They’re not trying to be nostalgic for something they never experienced. They’re trying to escape what they experience every day.”

Now it is a Saturday morning. October 2025. Paul Lundy hunches over an IBM Selectric, a machine nearly 50 years old, probing its guts with the delicate touch he learned from Mr. Montgomery. The machine has taken its share of falls. Oil and dust have conspired over decades to form clogging sludge. Dog hair, too — there always seems to be dog hair.

He keeps solvent flowing, working back and forth through the brown muck, treating the dirt not as debris but as the accumulated record of life lived hunched over a keyboard — the residue of a marriage proposal, a first novel, a military order, a last will and testament.

His shop is different now. Brighter, airier, on the main floor of a building that was wasting away in downtown Bremerton until Lundy cobbled together enough savings to buy and renovate it, using all those facilities management skills he thought he’d left behind. He had kept the business in that cramped fifth-floor space for six years after Mr. Montgomery’s death. Management was planning apartments, Lundy says, so he wound up here — in a 1910 building that once housed a local electric utility’s headquarters.

From the basement below his wooden floors comes the thump of bass guitar, the crash of drums. Rock bands practice during many of his working hours. The structure shakes with enthusiasm. He smiles, tugs on his workman’s apron, adjusts his black-framed glasses and does not lose attention.

He clicks a return button. The Selectric whirs. He listens.

“The problems you see — and sometimes the problems you hear,” he says, wryly, as he adjusts the operational shaft, “are not always the real problem.”

Now the stubborn machine is yielding its secrets at last. Lundy has flushed its brown sludge, freed its operational shaft, oiled the precise points where metal meets metal.

Mr. Montgomery’s soul fills this space. The 1916 Royal Model 10 that stood guard at the old shop stands here now. There’s his woolen hat. There’s a photo from Bremerton’s Bob Montgomery Day, which he bristled at because he didn’t like attention. There are his community theater awards — best director, again and again — testament to the love of performance that began in those old Seattle theaters. There sit his notes, repair manuals and tools: blue-handled wrenches, metallic probes, soft-bristled brushes. Mr. Montgomery’s bench is where Lundy works.

“It’ll always be his,” Lundy says of the shop, now called Bremerton Typewriter Company. “I am just borrowing it.”

Lundy’s wife, Lisa, works at her own bench. She started learning repair work during the pandemic and became proficient, helping with the backlog.

The phone rings steadily; customers call from as far as Florida, New York and beyond. The novelist who needs an escape from the internet’s magnetic pull; the screenwriter convinced that only keys that fight back can force out good work; the teenagers who have just found a grandmother’s pristine Corona, a grandfather’s portable Hermes.

It is Lundy who takes on apprentices now. He teaches the way Mr. Montgomery did: patiently letting mistakes happen because mistakes educate best. It’s a steady transfer of knowledge, a careful passing of the seemingly arcane, a customer-is-always-right way of doing business.

Want to come in and type a poem on a 1920s Underwood? Sure, take a seat, don’t rush.

You’re over 90? Front of the queue.

“Gotta lay out the red carpet for our elderly customers,” Lundy says. “People forget that when you were younger, you did things. You made a difference. Then you get old and society just sees an old guy waiting for the bus, and it’s almost like you don’t exist.”

This year, Paul Lundy turned 65. Had he stayed in his old job he would have retired, probably on his birthday. Instead, he is working six days a week and smiling through it: “I cannot imagine stopping.”