From the Jolly Juggler to
the Krazy Kat Drummer
In the Percy Smock Corneron his The Classic Typewriter Page, Richard Polt lists resources for the modern-day typewriter collector. Smock (real name Percival Edward Schmauch) was a post-war collector in Redwood City, California, and Richard has dedicated the corner in his honour as he "was collecting typewriters back when only eccentrics would do such a thing".Never were more true words written. Smock and Carl Praetorius Dietz were the two most famous American typewriter collectors in the 40 years from 1934-74 (Dietz died in 1957 and Smock in 1979). And "eccentric" is, if anything, an understatement in describing these two pioneering gentlemen.Carl Dietz, for example, was a singer-songwriter who travelled the US at the turn of the century as comedic vocalist T. Addison Wade with the Wilbur-Kirwin Light Opera Company, playing leading man roles opposite the prima donna and owner Susie Kirwin. Dietz then joined the Murray-Hart Repertory Company as a juggling clown, the Jolly Juggler who tossed and caught a cavalryman’s boot, a ball and a bushel basket.Rochester, New York, October 1894
Percy Smock, for his part in the eccentricities of the early typewriter collectors, was in the late 1920s a drummer in pianist John McDonald's 10-piece "peppy music" orchestra, playing at dances and beach concerts in California. Though working by day as a typewriter salesman and mechanic in San Jose, Smock had managed to travel the world with various bands, and had played at the Krazy Kat Café in Sydney, Australia, in Suva, Fiji, and at the Silver Dragon Café in Honolulu. He was later a member of the Santa Cruz Magic Club, a magician known to perform card and rope tricks. Smock was also a singer and was still playing drums with San Mateo orchestras into the early 1960s.It was written that Smock "knew his South Seas and his traps". There were traps for beginners, too, when Dietz put down the juggled plates and hit the road in search of old typewriters.
Dietz must have felt like the solitary example of a very rare breed indeed when he first began to travel the highways and byways of America on his typewriter quest in 1934. That is, until he reached Detroit on this day 80 years ago, for the 1936 Great Lakes Seaway Conference, and met there the Canadian typewriter salesman and collector Byron Alexander Haining.
Haining, born in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1892, was still working for the American Writing Machine Company, famous for having been established by George Washington Newton Yost and James Densmore on January 12, 1880, to produce the Caligraph typewriter, the first competitor to the Remington (this venture was backed by Edward Mead Johnson of Johnson & Johnson fame). By 1906, when it stopped production of the New Century Caligraph, the once proud AWMC had been reduced to rebuilding typewriters for the Union Trust. In 1919 it started to distribute the Century 10, a redesigned Remington Junior, but by 1923 its one remaining role was in finding typewriters to rebuild.![]()
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X marks the spot - the critical crossroads where Dietz made
the fateful decision to drive to Elgin insead of Woodstock.
After the Bar-Lock came a Pullman, spotted in a store beside the Tuscon, Arizona, railway station. In a Pittsburgh shop basement, under a pile of discarded machines, Dietz uncovered his first Sholes and Glidden. In Denver he bought an Odell. In Grants Pass, Oregon, Dietz got his hands on a Yetman transmitting typewriter, and in Knoxville, Tennessee, he found a Corona 3. Under the stairwell of a basement store in Philadelphia he unearthed a Peoples.![]()
Donald Hoke at the MPL in 1982.
Apart from typewriters, Dietz left behind this scale model of the Kleinsteuber workshop on West State Street, Milwaukee, where Christopher Latham Sholes (seated right), Carlos Glidden and Samuel Willard Soulé had worked on the earliest prototypes of the typewriter.Although, unlike Dietz, Percy Smock was actually involved in the typewriter business for many years - 57, to be precise - unlike Dietz he seemed to be that little less knowledgeable about the old machines he owned. The caption with the Associated Press image of his second wife, Maxine Smock, at a Fay-Sholes typewriter, which appeared in newspapers across the US in August 1951, suggested the machine was dated to 1879, when at best it was a 1901 model. Percy's first wife, Ruth, died in a fall at her home in 1940. She had been in a car crash a year earlier - when her own husband was driving the other car! Percy Smock ran the Smock Office Equipment Company at 1034 El Camino Real (the "Royal Road") and lived in San Carlos. Regardless of his business address, and his appearance in Bruce Bliven's Royal Typewriter Company-backed 1954 book The Wonderful Writing Machine (see photo at top of post), he specialised in Smith-Corona typewriters (and in the 1970s Adlers). Before the war this had been E.E. Hunter's Office Store-Equipment Company, for which Smock was a long-standing salesman, typewriter technician and foreman. It became the Smock Typewriter Company in 1947. Smock started out as a typewriter mechanic in 1922, aged 18.Smock was born in Campbell, Santa Clara, on March 17, 1904. He died at San Mateo on July 7, 1979, aged 75.Tomorrow:
Part II: Calvert, Peters & the Brookes
