Few historic slaughters have been as thorough as the computer vs. the typewriter.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Yonkers-based Westchester Office World did $100,000 per year in typewriter repairs, mostly working on the fabled IBM Selectrics and mostly via corporate service contracts. The company”™s first name in 1978 was the Yonkers Typewriter Center.
Now there is one typewriter contract, for 13 machines at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, and the store offers typewriter repair as a low-volume customer service accounting for perhaps 5 percent of its bottom line.
Typewriter holdouts include police departments, banks, schools, “anyone whose forms require impact typing,” according to Chris Bonfiglio, who runs furniture sales and business machine repairs at the 2025 Central Park Ave. store. There also remains a large number who like the typewriter for dashing off letters and for addressing envelopes.
“People are sheepish when they come in with their typewriters for the first time,” he said. “They think they”™re the last person on the planet who uses one.”
The store receives about six Selectrics per week and another six machines made by the likes of Smith-Corona, Olivetti, Underwood and Crown Royal. The volume is not enough to employ a repairperson, so typewriter repair is farmed out. A recent complete tune-up (with three new parts) and including a chemical bath for a 1979 Selectric with balky keys cost $195 ”“ worth it to those who still speak of the IBM “touch” with reverence; it”™s very unlike a computer keyboard”™s touch. Westchester Office World contracts Sam Vasquez of the Bronx to perform the work.
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The Selectric had 1,200 moving parts and weighed 40 pounds. “It cost $1,000 new and IBM never discounted them; they didn”™t have to,” Bonfiglio said. At that price, just two Selectrics would have bought a new Ford Pinto, originally $2,000.
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Another 20 percent of Westchester Office World”™s trade is in the repair of office equipment other than typewriters, a task handled onsite by Peter Warner. “He has an amazing memory, to know how to put everything back together, where every little screw goes,” said Bonfiglio. “It”™s just amazing.”
Seventy-five percent of Westchester Office World”™s bottom line is in office furniture. “Conference rooms, waiting rooms, filing systems, executive desks ”“ that”™s where the money of the business is now,” said Bonfiglio. That equipment is displayed on the second floor of the stand-alone blue headquarters on the west side of Central Park Avenue north of Tuckahoe Road.
Home office furnishings occupy a smaller sales niche on the first floor, a function of the electronic age. “Time was when a person opened a home office, they bought office furniture,” Bonfiglio said. “Now, your couch with a palm device and your kitchen table with a laptop have become the new home office.”
Bonfiglio”™s partner is brother-in-law Greg Keleshian, who focuses on office furniture. Keleshian originally spun out Westchester Office World in 1978 from the family”™s like-themed store in Greenwich, Conn.
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REPORTER”™S NOTEBOOK
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Still hunting and pecking
“I am from the low-tech era: a world of rotary telephones, manual typewriters, carbon paper, telegrams and Vicks VapoRub.”
That”™s Bronxville resident and my father Jack Fallon, 86, speaking. He has long had his manual typewriters repaired at Westchester Office World.
Westchester Office World used to repair his 1960 Underwood. It was the same typewriter he used first as UPI”™s Southwest Division news manager in Dallas, when UPI won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and later as UPI”™s foreign news editor in New York City.
“Around the world I was known as the world”™s worst two-fingered typist,” he said recently. “But I could go like a bat out of hell when it mattered.”
Thom Marshall, a columnist from the Houston Chronicle, called my father in March 1997 to see if the Underwood was still around. The sale of an Associated Press Kennedy assassination news scroll that year had prompted the call. Marshall knew UPI and my father broke the story and that the AP scroll was the second-place finisher, even if it did fetch $10,000.
Asked by Marshall if the Underwood was for sale, given the interest in the AP scroll, dad said it was not. Dad simply used it until it had no more to give. “It broke down about five years ago and I got this Olivetti,” he said. He uses the Olivetti mostly to write letters.
The Olivetti is manual, too, and Westchester Office World repairs it and takes care of ribbon needs
