NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Ray Marr works on an electric typewriter at Marr Office Equipment, his repair shop in Pawtucket.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PAWTUCKET –– The decade’s passing marked the virtual end of some things. Pay phones, handwritten notes, camera film, to name a few.

But just as his father, and his father before him and his father had, too, Michael Marr still greets each business day with the unceremonious opening of the family’s Main Street office supply store; an act as defiant of the digital world as the flag that continued flying over the besieged Alamo.

There are still typewriters out there needing repair.

“They’re still around; you’d be surprised,” says Mike, 42, an optimist who represents the fourth generation to run Marr Office Equipment since 1953. “Sometimes you go into an office and you get a snide remark.” Someone may see him returning a repaired machine and say, “ ‘A typewriter, oh my God.’ But every office you go into you see them. Not as many, but they’re still out there.”

His father, Raymond, a trim man at 72 who wears his running shoes to work, is more wistful.

“I might have put the key in the door and locked up a while ago if it wasn’t for Mike,” he says. “Oh, the business we used to do.”

They speak inside their small wood-paneled shop where out front, two rows of vintage Underwoods and Remingtons, Smith Coronas and IBMs offer a visual history, spanning nearly a century, of the greatest writing machine ever invented –– now as obsolete as 5-inch floppy disks.

Twenty-five years ago, the shop employed seven servicemen who set off each day visiting hundreds of customers, from small offices to large corporations. They cleaned and lubricated more than 16,000 typewriters a month. Texas Instruments, Balfour, The Providence Journal, naval bases in Quonset Point and Newport. … “I could go on and on,” says Ray.

And that was just the maintenance contracts. Three women in the office handled the books, took orders for new typewriters and arranged pickups for repair service. Ray’s older brother, Bobby, the company’s president, did repairs alongside Ray on the worn benches in back.

Oddly, the heyday for Marr Office Equipment arrived in the mid-1980s, as computers began replacing typewriters in corporate America. IBM, one of the world’s most successful typewriter manufacturers, saw the writing on the wall and eliminated its entire service center. Instead, it contracted with regional stores. It made Marr its exclusive Rhode Island dealer for sales and service.

“That,” sighs Ray, “was like a gift from heaven.”

Trailer trucks began unloading boxes of new IBM Selectrics and Wheelwriters at the shop’s back door. The typewriters left through the front almost as fast in the hands of happy customers. Silver “Dealer of the Month” plates commemorating Marr Office Equipment as IBM’s top East Coast dealer began finding their places on a wall where they would hang in perpetuity beneath a dusty, 40-year-old stuffed pike.

“It was like a merry-go-round in here,” says Ray. “If it had stayed like that. … Wow.”

Today, the shop’s employment roster stretches to three: Ray, Mike and office assistant Diane Iachetti, 49, who’s worked at Marr’s for 27 years and does most of the bookkeeping on a computer. But not all.

Maintenance contracts remain on penciled index cards. What used to be 16,000 typewriters serviced a month is now “maybe three or four,” says Ray.

When Mike decided to join the family business, he knew he’d have to diversify the shop’s services. So he went to school to learn how to repair printers and copy machines. About half the business now, he says, is devoted to those repairs.

He remains hopeful, though, that nostalgia, sentimentality and practicality will keep the typewriter business going, though Ray says it’s almost impossible to find a decent manufacturer of typewriter ribbon these days.

Ray pulls open several cabinet draws crammed with old typewriter parts. What will he do when those are gone?

“That will be Mike’s problem,” he chuckles. “Not mine.”

Around him, several repaired typewriters await pickup. The attached tags give a clue to the shop’s customer base: a Smithfield doctor; the city of East Providence; the FBI’s Providence office, which has sent over two IBMs. An agent reveals that some of the agency’s forms are easier to fill out on typewriters than pull up on a computer scene.

Judy Revan is another sometime customer. She’s had her trusty electronic Panasonic on her desk at AAA in Providence for decades. Lately she has worried about the day she may have to part with it; it’s easier sometimes to type an address on an envelope, she says, than to print a label from the computer.

“One day I thought I might have to toss it,” she said. “I turned it on and it started printing the wrong characters. But I prayed and prayed, and one day it just started working again.”

Patricia Ricia, the purchasing agent for the City of Providence, says, “The old-fashioned typewriter is still in use, believe it or not” in some City Hall offices. The Parks Department, for instance, uses one, appropriately enough, to type out on index cards the burial records for the North Burial Ground.

Freelance writer Judi Cosentino of North Providence is one of Ray Marr’s more frequent customers, and represents a resurgence of typewriter lovers whom the Marrs often hear from.

“I have eight typewriters,” she says. Each has a name. She used “Martha,” her Smith Corona, to write a book last year titled “Good Girls Don’t.”

“There is just something about a typewriter,” she says. “The way it sounds, the way when you take the paper out and you see your work before you. It just gives you a sense of being a writer the way a laptop can’t quite measure up. I don’t know what I would do without Ray.”

That day may come.

But not today.

tmooney@projo.com