Manson Whitlock, Typewriter Repairman, Dies at 96
By MARGALIT FOX
David LaBianca
Manson Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven in 1990.
For eight decades, Manson Whitlock kept the 20th century’s ambient music going: the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop ... bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys.
From the early 1930s until shortly before his death last month at 96,
Mr. Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven, cared for the instruments,
acoustic and electric, on which that music was played.
Mr. Whitlock was often described as America’s oldest typewriter
repairman. He was inarguably one of the country’s longest-serving.
Over time he fixed more than 300,000 machines, tending manuals lovingly, electrics grudgingly and computers never.
“I don’t even know what a computer is,” Mr. Whitlock told The Yale Daily News, the student paper, in 2010. “I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me.”
Whitlock’s Typewriter Shop once supported six technicians, who
ministered to patients with familiar names like Royal, Underwood, Smith
and Corona, and curious ones like Hammonia and Blickensderfer.
The shop, near the Yale campus, attracted a tide of students and faculty
members; the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Robert Penn Warren,
Archibald MacLeish and John Hersey; the Yale classicist Erich Segal, who
wrote the best-selling novel “Love Story” on a Royal he bought there;
and, on at least one occasion, President Gerald R. Ford.
In recent years, however, until he closed the shop in June, Mr. Whitlock
was its entire staff, working with only a bust of Mark Twain for
company. He reported each day in a suit and tie, as he had from the
beginning. On Sundays he sometimes cheated and dispensed with the tie.
Mr. Whitlock was older than most of his charges, though by no means all
of them. (Among the shop’s resident machines was a 1910 Oliver, with its type bars arrayed vertically,
like harp strings.) He owed his longevity, he told The New Haven
Register last year, to “cheap Scotch and strong tobacco.”
Manson Hale Whitlock was born on Feb. 21, 1917, and reared on his
family’s dairy farm in Bethany, Conn. In 1899, his father, Clifford
Edward Everett Hale Whitlock, opened a bookstore in New Haven.
The store had a typewriter department, and Manson, the kind of boy who
took clocks apart to see what made them tick, began working there as a
teenager. By the 1940s, he had his own shop nearby.
There, except for Army service in World War II, Mr. Whitlock remained, a bulwark against the emoticon age.
Lately, he tended to only a small number of customers, including
holdouts — who, like him, were married to the music of roller and
carriage and ribbon and bell — and hipsters, who bought old typewriters
on eBay only to discover that they had no idea how to make them go.
Mr. Whitlock’s death, on Aug. 28 at his home in Bethany, was reported in
The Register and elsewhere. Survivors include a son, William, as well
as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A man of sober reserve, Mr. Whitlock could wax uncharacteristically
philosophical about his long, symbiotic relationship with his charges.
“Has the typewriter remained in use because of me,” he wondered aloud in an interview with the Yale alumni magazine this year, “or am I still around because of the typewriter?” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/nyregion/manson-whitlock-typewriter-repairman-dies-at-96.html
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