Tom Hanks wanted a typewriter.
A German Voss to be exact, and maybe a couple of rare Hermes models for his collection.
So, writer and friend Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) — a longtime devotee of the Swiss-made Hermes — recommended a man he knows in a St. Louis suburb, a dealer and craftsman named Dan Puls. Hanks’ assistant found Puls through his Internet site, MrTypewriter.com, and e-mailed her boss’ request.
“I e-mailed him right back and told him I had the Hermes 2000 and Baby Hermes in stock,” Puls said. “The Voss typewriters are another matter.”
He knew he had some, but not if they were in working order. Finding out means digging through one of his three massive storage lockers in search of the brand’s signature plaid zipper cases.
“It’s mostly digging through the layers of typewriters to get some,” Puls said. “Sometimes I have to turn the order down because I’m not going to move 800 typewriters for one $200 sale.”
And then there’s the matter of overhauling the machines, replacing the rubber, cleaning them. Assuming he has the parts, reviving a typewriter to working order can take from 4 to 12 hours.
In a world where electric typewriters seem anachronistic, it’s more than a bit surprising to learn that manual typewriters have not vanished from the face of the planet.
But for affluent collectors such as Hanks, they are mechanical masterworks of nostalgia and beauty. Others, like authors McMurtry and Harlan Ellison, continue to write full-length novels on rapidly antiquating machines. And in many parts of the world, where electricity is scarce, manual typewriters remain a necessity.
Which brings us back to Dan Puls.
In Florissant, a suburb 18 miles northwest of downtown St. Louis, Puls rebuilds typewriters in the basement of his red-brick bungalow.
A short flight of stairs leads from a side screen door to Puls’ wood-paneled workshop where rows of gray Smith-Coronas, black Royals and cream-colored Olivettis are neatly stacked in every available space. Today, jet-black Underwoods line a long work table, some disassembled for parts among an array of screwdrivers and pliers. A small TV squawks in one corner, covering the hum of a low-hanging fluorescent lamp over Puls’ long wooden table. The scent of Turtle Wax and wood glue sticks to nearly everything in the room.
Puls, 66, has been leaning over a workman’s table since before the computer age, evidenced by hunched shoulders and a round belly. A snowy mustache frames a mouth that’s constantly moving, often arching for a booming laugh. Hawkish eyes sit behind tinted glasses while chipped fingernails and a strong handshake betray years of complex work with steel and delicate moving parts.
Rescued from thrift stores, flea markets and garage sales by national network of scavengers, typewriters become born again in Puls’ hands.
Each typewriter takes a full day to resurrect, depending on parts. With his current backlog, he can fill an order for a specific model within three to four weeks. Prices range from around $200 to $450, but rare models have been known to fetch more than $1,000. On average, that’s about a typewriter a day, 365 days a year. His export business ships out 3,000 machines a year to Guatemala.
No matter what kind of typewriter Puls selects for restoration, its rollers almost always have to be replaced, as does other rotting rubber. Then comes the intricate mechanical work, the refitting of keys and wheels that stamp words on paper. Finally, Puls cleans and polishes up each unit — just like he did when he was 12 years old in his father’s North St. Louis shop on Natural Bridge Road.
“We’d say grace at the meal, and it’d be to `God, country and the manual typewriter,'” Puls said.
Patents for machines to set type reach back to the 1700s in England, but the first modern manual typewriter was patented in 1868, in Milwaukee.
Invented by Christopher Latham Sholes and marketed by the Remington Arms company, these hefty, black monsters weren’t an instant success — but sales bloomed in the 1880s with additional marketing. Mark Twain, an early adopter of technology, was reputed to be the first author to hand his editor a typewritten manuscript. From the early 1920s to the 1960s, a half-dozen companies were producing millions of typewriters, both desktop and portable, for the masses.
Puls’ father, Wilber “Hap” Puls, started a delivery business in his early teens after his father, a St. Louis policeman, was killed in the line of duty. He started hauling typewriters early, and decided to go into business for himself when he witnessed the machine’s high demand.
“Dad was not much more than a kid when I came along in 1936. I think 20 or 21,” Puls said. “When he picked me up from the hospital, he picked me up in a typewriter delivery truck.”
During World War II, government rationing of steel and rubber nearly put his father out of business. At night, he worked in an ammunition factory to make ends meet. Even then, however, “Hap” Puls proved a crafty businessman. Although he wasn’t allowed to sell typewriters, he bought back a few machines from customers, and rented them throughout the war, a move that helped sustain his family through the lean years.
Before Dan Puls reached his teens, he was helping out around the shop. “In the old days you learned by watching,” he said.
Soon, the lean times gave way to a post-war boom. In high school in the 1950s, Dan Puls was making too much money working in his father’s store to be interested in education.
“I quit or got kicked out, one or the other,” Puls said, laughing a little. “My attendance was very bad. I wasn’t going fishing though; I would skip school to go over to my father’s shop.”
In 1962, Dan Puls bought out his father, who had become disillusioned with the business.
“He was right, the manual typewriter was on the way out.Any idiot could have spotted it, but I didn’t,” Puls said. “Maybe it was fear. I didn’t know anything else, didn’t have an education, so I stuck with it.”
By 1961, the electric IBM Selectrics increased market dominance, leaving Puls with a warehouse full of dusty machines and few buyers by the mid-1970s. He considered making the jump to electric, but that would mean more training (“It would be like me fixing an airplane,” Puls said.), more competition in a market flooded with humming word processors. So he stuck with what he knew best, what made his expertise unique.
Puls’ dedication to his foundering business began to take its toll on his marriage.
“It caused my divorce,” Puls said. “The business was foundering pretty bad in the mid-1970s.”
Puls’ daughter Lauren Puls, 39, said this might be overstating the case, overlooking personality conflicts, but her father’s time-consuming business didn’t help matters.
“He’s such a perfectionist. He puts more time, thought and energy into a $300 machine for a customer than he would picking out a wedding present for a best friend,” she said. “That has to do with his reputation.”
By 1985, Puls had to sell almost everything, including his three Cadillacs, and move into a house with his aging mother. There was a whirlwind second marriage to a Cuban woman, but it didn’t last.
“We were married on one weekend and divorced on the other,” Puls said, laughing. “I never understood a single word that woman said.”
Manual typewriters, though, he understood.
Puls’ luck changed in 1987 when an entrepreneurial exporter from Guatemala named Peter Stolz walked into his storefront and bought all of Puls’ typewriters, nearly 2,500 of them, on the spot.
“I was stunned, I was desperate,” Puls remembered. “One day you can’t give them away, the next day you sell them all.”
Stolz himself was astonished at his discovery. He’d scoured the Midwest in search of typewriters, only to find Puls’ business through a business acquaintance.
“I don’t like computers. For my people, [typewriters] are better because of the price,” Stolz said. “I’m sure you and me will die and there will be a lot of typewriters still.”
In Guatemala, all students train on typewriters in schools. The machines remain a luxury in rural Mexico and Honduras, where electricity is either scarce, or unreliable, said Stolz, who was born in Guatemala.
Only a handful of companies still make typewriters, only a small fraction of them manuals.
Within this niche, partners Stolz and Puls have been meeting a growing demand for refurbished typewriters since the 1980s.
“I can’t explain it,” Stolz said. “People ask me all the time, and I don’t know. People need these machines.”
Since 1987, those typewriters that don’t make the cut for Puls’ workshop are stored, then sent once or twice a year to Guatemala, where 1,600-odd machines per shipment are factory refurbished and refitted for Spanish keyboard characters. Later, they are put to use in literacy programs and private homes in Central America.Among missionaries and office buildings, they remain in high demand, Stolz said.
“After he bought all my typewriters, he asked me to get more for him and this was something I knew how to do,” Puls said. “I did not think it would last all these years but I had no place to go.”
The export game has become Puls’ main source of income in the last 15 years. Today, Puls remains Stolz’s largest supplier.
Puls’ shared passion for desktop steel is seeing a resurgence of sorts, thanks in part to his Web site.
“The Internet has saved me,” Puls said.
It’s through his Web site that movie studios, collectors and authors find his business, which no longer has a business storefront. These days, Puls sales are almost purely a dot.com operation. Writers McMurtry and Ellison could not remember where they heard about Puls, but both appreciate his service.
“He obviously loves what he does, and that’s very endearing — to find someone who still wants to work with what is usually considered an outmoded technology, but is still good and serves a lot of people,” Ellison said.
Essayist, fiction writer and columnist Ellison has written exclusively on Olympia machines for much of his 50-plus year career, whereas McMurtry prefers the Hermes for his westerns and tales of small-town life.
“I’ve always found it was the perfect machine, at least for me,” McMurtry said. “I’ve been typing for about a half century and see no reason to change.”
Although the authors have remained faithful to the rapidly antiquating machines, the typewriter’s passage into technological extinction enrages Ellison.
“I don’t mind people who work on computers. I don’t care if they write with a raven’s quill standing up at a lectern. . . . Art works the way it works. Every writer has his or her own way of doing it. But what I do despise is when they replace one technology with another, they make it impossible to maintain your comfort level with the previous technology,” Ellison said.
He continued: “I have no idea what the attraction is for others, but this is precisely the level of technology at which I best function. I hit a typewriter key pretty hard. When it’s done, you can see the impression of the key. You can see where my intensity is.”
The attraction for Hanks, it seems, is the typewriter’s versatility. The Oscar-winner rotates his 60-odd typewriters in and out of use for typing notes to friends.
“I think they’re marvelous machines. Literally it’s a self-contained deal,” Hanks said. “You can take it anywhere in the world, and there’s a huge satisfaction that I get from pounding out thoughts as opposed to clicking them [as on a computer].”
`For the first time in the past five years, I sense that he is having a really good time,” Lauren said of her father. “Because he’s confident. For whatever reason, whether he’s a gifted salesman or if it’s all been incredible timing and love. He has more business right now than he can keep up with.”
She added: “We all wonder how he made it, but he made it.”
As an added bonus, Hollywood studios have been calling the last couple of years, keeping Puls’ workshop busy and placing his machines in “The Green Mile,” “Saving Private Ryan” and the upcoming Julia Roberts’ film “Mona Lisa Smile.”
“It’s something I can command,” Puls explained. “It’s something that no one else in this world can do.
“With the manual typewriter, I’m somebody.”
