For these two, the keys to success are the ones that don't stick
To Ed Brauchle and John Mears, a hard drive is 10 hours in a car and a laptop is a good place to bounce your grandchild. Among the dwindling ranks of typewriter repairmen, Brauchle, 71, and Mears, 62, spend their days in their cluttered St. Louis store tinkering with Smith Coronas, Royals and other manual relics as well as more recent electrics. "You buy a computer today, and it's obsolete tomorrow," says Brauchle. "We decided we didn't want to live in that world."
Instead, the only two remaining employees of the Martin Office Machine Company-Brauchle is president, Mears vice president—have been cleaning keyboards and adjusting carriage returns since the mid-1950s. They average about 10 customers a day and still sell a good many used manual models, ranging in price from $50 to $90. They even make house calls (estimates are free, repairs start at $40). "A lot of people want these things fixed for sentimental reasons," says Mears. "They'll say, 'This was my mother's typewriter. Can you fix it?' "
Chances are, they can. They know theirs is "a lost art," says Mears. "But I figure we've got a few good years left." Says Brauchle with a chuckle: "We're probably the only people in town not worried about Y2K."
Bearing mail on the trail
On a warm Monday afternoon, postman David Jones pulls into Supai, Ariz. (pop. 450), bearing packages and mail for residents of the Havasupai Indian Reservation village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. "Monday's the light day," says Jones, 59. "Tomorrow's a big day." Which means, of course, that he'll bring more mules.
Since 1896, the U.S. Postal Service has delivered Supai's mail via pack trains that wend their way along a narrow trail eight miles down the canyon's craggy slopes to Supai. And since 1974, Jones has led the train, as one of the nation's only remaining postal mule packers. "We get our letters, checks, food—even our lab test results—by mules," says Supai postmaster Shirley Manakaja, 39. Adds Hank Delaney, 28, the agent in Peach Springs, Ariz., who contracts the work out to Jones (who lives in Havasupai): "We even send eggs, and they get to the village unbroken."
Every weekday morning, Jones rises at 3 and hits the trail by 8. He has no plans to retire but is studying auto mechanics, a field with little application in Supai. "There are," he observes, "no cars down here."
For those who dictate, the ultimate software
Doreen McVeigh's colleagues at the downtown Los Angeles office of the Arthur Andersen consulting firm are sometimes perplexed when they see her writing seemingly incomprehensible scratchings in her notebook. "People ask me where I learned to write in Arabic," she says. But that's no foreign language McVeigh is jotting; it's shorthand, the mother tongue of generations of secretaries, who have for centuries used various versions of the phonetic-symbol system for taking dictation and meeting minutes. "All I need is a notepad and a pencil," says McVeigh, 52, an executive assistant with Arthur Andersen since 1991. "Nothing to plug in or turn on.
"When I was first learning dictation [in the 1960s]," she says, "I ate, slept and dreamed shorthand." She still uses it every day, clocking 160 words per minute, much to the delight of colleagues like consultant Art Friedman, 63. "She's like a living computer, recorder and printer all in one," he says. And, he adds, throwing in a compliment no PC is likely to get, "she's an absolutely delightful person."
Pinsetter's lament: a dodgy life at the end of the alley
"If you see legs, don't bowl." That simple rule, posted conspicuously at Chicago's Southport Lanes, isn't always enough to protect Fernando Galicia, one of the country's last manual pinsetters, or pin boys. "When people have a few drinks, they get crazy," says Galicia, 32. "Sometimes they forget I'm back there. Sometimes I think they aim at me."
Dodging 16-pound balls is all in his day's work at the quaintly gentrified Southport, one of two dozen or so bowling alleys that defiantly reject automatic pinsetters. Galicia's assignment for the past two years: squeeze his fortuitously slender 5'3" body into the 3-ft.-deep space behind Southport's four lanes (coworkers call it Fernando's Hideaway), load the pins into a steel rack, push a handle that lowers them onto the lane, then hop over to the adjoining lane and wait for the thunder.
Galicia rolls the ball back down the sloped gutter, then sweeps away fallen pins with a sawed-off pool cue. In an eight-hour shift, working two lanes at a time, he might lift a cumulative two tons. "I end up with pains in my back and legs," says the native of Mexico, who sometimes makes up to $50 a night in tips (sent to him in the finger holes of bowling balls) on top of his $5.15-an-hour wage. "But I don't feel this is just a job. I feel like I'm part of the game."
Patrons agree, hinting there may be a correlation between good tips and pins "accidentally" toppled by Galicia. ("The more you tip," says stockbroker Tom Kuhn, "the better your game.") Of course, if the worst accident is a toppled pin, then Galicia has had a good night. "There's a real art to being a pin boy," notes Jim Baer, marketing manager of the International Bowling Hall of Fame. "Especially when you have kids aiming at you."
In a high-tech, information-age economy, one might expect jobs like Galicia's to be downsized, and fast. But don't underestimate the value of tradition. "We'll never go automatic," vows Steve Soble, 35, part owner of Southport, which first opened in 1922. "The appeal here is a little like Wrigley Field." Nor does Galicia show signs of tiring: He even likes to bowl in his off hours, at alleys with—gasp!—automatic pinsetters. "And when they break down," he says, "I just sit back and laugh."
Kate Klise in St. Louis, Ron Arias in Supai and Los Angeles and John Slania in Chicago
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
