Serial Number 5AX 142726 : Manufactured about 1963

This is my on the road typewriter. I bought it at a garage sale because they were asking just five bucks for it, it came in a hard case that looked like it could take a beating, and I wasn't at all thinking about cleaning the machine up for display or taking special care of it, aside from the usual maintenance it might need. I felt nothing sentimental toward this typewriter, other than my usual compulsion to take home every typewriter I see. I only wanted this one so I could bang out typewritten copy.

That said, after I took it home and looked it over I discovered this little portable had some local history. On the back of the typewriter I found this tag from the Stemp Typewriter Company. I love it when typewriters give up little bits of their past like this!

I think it would have been rather presumptuous of a shop that was merely servicing a typewriter to fix a tag like this on somebody's typewriter, so I would presume that this machine was originally sold by Stemp's and remained in Madison all its life, leaving the area only when its owner took it traveling.

Excited by the idea that there might be a typewriter repair shop in town, if only a vestige of the original Stemp's, I did a little searching, starting with the google and, when that didn't turn up anything, looking at the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Stemp's was a fixture on State Street for quite some time. Stanley Stemp founded the business in a shop at 533 State Street in 1929 after repairing typewriters in a shop on capital square for ten years. He moved the business to 528 State Street in 1947 where it remained for more than thirty years. His wife Elizabeth ran the business for almost twenty years after Stanley's death in 1948, retiring to let her son Stanley take over the business in 1967.

I found this image of the shop at 528 State Street in the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The building is a hair salon now.

© 2009 Dave Okonski