the typewriter repairman

I was scrolling Facebook a few weeks ago when I read, “McDavid Typewriter Service will sadly be closing our doors.”

 A few of my coworkers wandered into my office to chat, and I explained the store’s significance: After my grandparents bought me my first typewriter more than a decade ago, it needed its ribbon replaced. Gram found McDavid Typewriter Service in Jacksonville, Florida, where she and Pop lived.

Over the years,  many of my 17 typewriters have been repaired at McDavid Typewriter Service. When I interned at the Florida Times-Union in 2019, I pitched and wrote a story about the shop—an early work of creative nonfiction for me, since I wove in a bit of my own experience with collecting typewriters. After the story was published, Gram and I framed it twice. We gifted one to the shop, and the other hung on my apartment wall for four years.

Me, Bill and adding machine repairman Leonard on July 15, 2019. 

By the time I graduated college in 2020, Pop had died and Gram had moved to Kentucky, making occasional trips back to Jacksonville to prepare to sell the house. On one of those trips, she took me to McDavid Typewriter Service to pick out a typewriter for a graduation present. We left with two, an Olivetti Underwood that typed in script and an Olympia that owner Bill Pridgen wanted to keep but agreed to sell to me.

When I saw that McDavid Typewriter Service was closing, I hoped it was so that Bill could enjoy a long overdue retirement. Unfortunately, he had recently died, at the age of 87. Losing Pop in 2019 devastated me, and I feel his loss again every time an older man dies who had some connection to Pop: Alex Trebek, who died on the same day as Pop, a year later; my Times-Union editor Joe Fenton, who welcomed Gram, Pop and my sister to the newsroom for a visit and who died at the same age as Pop; Bill, who repaired typewriters for me because, in Pop’s words, I am “really into typewriters.” Grief builds and builds and builds.

Within an hour of seeing the news about the shop, I had texted Loui: “Wanna drive to Jacksonville this weekend?”

My husband has never visited Jacksonville, which was a second home to me throughout my childhood. I’ve been wanting to visit with him, and McDavid Typewriter Shop would have been on the tour. Maybe, I suggested, we should take the trip while it still could be.

One of my coworkers thought I was crazy, but this would be far from my first spontaneous trip to Jacksonville. Other logistics fell into place: Loui and I had already taken time off to make it a long weekend, and we had a $500 AirBnb gift card we won in a raffle this summer. By that evening, the trip was planned.

Loui and I spent three days in Jacksonville. We visited my longtime favorite Jacksonville restaurants, Al’s Pizza and PDQ, and of course The Book Mark bookstore in Neptune Beach. The current residents of Gram and Pop’s house graciously allowed us to visit. Every time we left after visiting Gram and Pop, we took a front porch photo as a family. Though Loui never got to meet Pop, we now have a photo as part of that tradition.

On our way out of town on Sunday morning, we stopped at McDavid Typewriter Shop. Bill’s family members have been in the process of cleaning up and selling the inventory. A lot had already been packed up, so Loui didn’t get the full effect, but the magic still lingered.

Loui in nearly the same spot on November 3, 2024. 

I introduced myself to a woman I suspected of being Bill’s granddaughter, who he told me ran the Facebook page for him because he had trouble with computers. (He thought typewriters would last forever, he said.)

This was Sam—Bill’s granddaughter, yes, but her sister is the one who handles the Facebook. I told Sam that I loved the shop and had written an article about it.

“Oh, we took the article down from the wall like two days ago!” she said. She and another family member thanked me for writing it.

As my typewriter collection has grown, I’ve become more picky, only getting a new typewriter if it diversifies my collection or comes with a really good story. The 1943 Hermes Baby typewriter I purchased did both—the only Hermes I own and the souvenir from a special sojourn to Jacksonville with my husband. Loui and I thanked the family, took a selfie with the McDavid Typewriter Service sign out front and got into our already-packed car to head toward home.

Then, not for the first time, I left Jacksonville with wonderful memories and another typewriter.