Legendary Milwaukee Area Typewriter Shop Fights to Survive
With Co-Owner Jack Zinda Gone, Business and Building Are for Sale
1932 — what a year to start a business in the U.S. One out of four workers was unemployed. Charles Lindbergh’s son was kidnapped. A star — Debbie Reynolds — was born.
Despite all the turmoil, 1932 was a great year to start a typewriter repair shop. Albert Schweitzer founded Gramercy Typewriter in New York City and Blue + Koepsell was started in Milwaukee.
The Depression might be on, but people still needed typewriters. Offices that were still running needed their desk top typewriters repaired. If you were looking for work, you needed a typewriter to type out correspondence and fill out applications. They meant either a trip to the library to rent a typewriter or you rented one from a local shop. (Or you stole one, but that’s another story.)
Blue & Koepsell later became part of the Milwaukee Office Machine Dealers Inc. network. The most well-known and visible of these was the Typewriter & Adding Machine Exchange located in Downtown Milwaukee on Wells St., in the same building that houses News Room Pub today. At the time, Blue & Koepsell was on Green Bay Road with another location in Waukesha.
Typewriters reigned while adding machines held court in Milwaukee. There was the Germania newspaper in Downtown Milwaukee; English-language dailies, the Milwaukee Journal and Sentinel. The city’s universities and colleges also had plenty of machines that needed to be serviced.
The 1930s through the late 1980s were a good time to be in typewriter repair. Even better if you had knew how to service IBM Selectrics. Then the word processor came along in the early to mid 1990s, and that was the beginning of the death of typewriter shops.
But Blue & Koepsell soldiered on with Judy and Jack Zinda, who partnered with Chuck Krall. The Zindas consolidated the business and Blue & Koepsell became “Accurate Business Machines (Blue & Koepsell.) Chuck and Jack fixed printers, fax machines in addition to manual and electric typewriters. The business lived in the bottom corner of a blue-and-grey concrete building of a strip mall in Wawautosa.
Devotees found them as I did after moved to Milwaukee in 2018. Chuck tried to fix skipping issues on my ALL typewriter after it fell out its case in an Amtrak parking. More recently, he fixed the belt on my Electra 120 when I was in the Robert Caro phase of my life. Actually he fixed that belt twice. $$$ ouch.
When I last talked to him, I told I’d acquired a Selectric 721 and did he have a script face IBM element? He’d let me have for $10.
I forgot about that type element until this week when I saw a Facebook Marketplace ad for IBM elements. $5 each. Right here in Milwaukee. I immediately messaged the seller, Patti. When I asked for the address, I realized it was Blue & Koepsell’s. Patti confirmed that yes, Blue & Koepsell was selling IBM elements galore. I didn’t ask why.
But my face fell when I walked up to the building in today’s drizzle. Business liquidating. Everything for sale. Big, dreary signs. The grey sky matched the despair I felt.
Patti, not Chuck answered the door.
Turns out Patti is Jack’s daughter. Her dad died following complications from a heart attack in May. Coincidentally, I had brought along two letterpress posters featuring Blue & Koepsell and its old telephone number, LO2-1210. They were for Chuck.
I found the scriptface type ball I was looking for along with an italics one. But I’ll be back, maybe for another IBM element or two. Maybe for reams of onion skin paper, typewriter ribbon. God forbid I buy another typewriter though. (My ALL typewriter is for sale, along with a fold-down Corona manual typewriter and of course, an Adler typewriter made in Germany, a favorite with Germans across Wisconsin.)
There are also daisy-wheel typewriters, a dissembled Selectric and a whole lot more. So go. Buy some machines. Buy the business, the building. Milwaukee writers still need a place to go to fix their typewriters. (An elderly man came in carrying his heavy desktop typewriter after I arrived. Chuck’s going to fix it.)
If you’re like me (and if you’ve lived and typed in Milwaukee long enough), you need a place to visit when you drop a typewriter (me), a rubber belt busts (me) and you need another IBM element to add to your collection (not me).
My Electra 120, which I bought through a local craigslist ad, still has its Blue & Koepsell silver sticker on its side.
For what it’s worth, Blue & Koepsell’s New York City counterpart, Gramercy Typewriters is still thriving. It’s a third-generation business that counts celebrities like Tom Hanks and others to keep it going. And the location? Bananas with all those tourists.
But Blue & Koepsell doesn’t have a next-generation owner, a great location or a list of celebrity customers. Who will be putting those Blue & Koepsell stickers on machines in 2024? I hate to think about it.
