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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

OFFICE—Typewriter Ribbon Still Rolls Through San Fernando

To get an idea of how close Dick Martinelli and his wife Margie are to the way they have done business for decades, walk through the door of their San Fernando-based office and make a sharp right. There (now behind glass and under lock and key) is a collection of office machinery that includes a 1941 Sunstrand adding machine, a Monroe calculator from 1917, and an army of black manual typewriters the oldest a Remington No. 7, made somewhere between 1896 and the early 1900s. Martinelli’s Office Machines and Equipment first opened its doors on Chatsworth Avenue in 1965, then moved to its present location on Maclay Street in San Fernando in 1969. The relics on display are just a sampling of the types of office machinery the company has sold and serviced over the years. Today, however, the manual typewriters and hand-cranked adding machines have been replaced by palm-sized calculators, fluorescent-colored beepers, Star Spangled Banner-blaring cell phones, fax machines, digital copiers and, yes, the computer and its companion: the Internet. “One morning I woke up and everything was electronic,” said the 71-year-old Martinelli, who began his career fixing typewriters out of a small office in Montrose. He started the company with a whopping $5,000 bank loan. “It’s all changed so fast I don’t know how to describe it.” Truth be told, Martinelli has slowly been handing the reins over to his children Jim, 44; Rick, 48; and daughter Pat, 40 over the last few years. His sons primarily handle the requests for service or parts for personal computers, electronic equipment and Internet set-up and assistance. Pat keeps the finances in order, but it’s all on computer a tool of the trade her parents are not necessarily comfortable with so don’t ask Dick or Margie to tell you how things are panning out. Court reporters once provided a steady stream of business for Martinelli’s, but with the advent of the computerized stenotype machine, they no longer have a need for ribbon replacements. Nevertheless, somewhere on Martinelli’s walls you can find just about every typewriter ribbon still available on the market more than 400. Which is where Margie comes in. She may not be able to tell you the difference between a microchip and a megabyte, but she knows her ribbons, and insists there are plenty of customers out there who still need them. “You’d be surprised how many people have computers but have hung on to their old typewriters because they simply can’t get with electronic equipment,” she said. “Some people come in here and ask us why we still carry all this stuff. I just tell them that we have customers who say they just don’t want to work on the computer, they want to type it out.” Ironically, said Dick Martinelli, it is the so-called high-tech superstores their biggest competitors such as Circuit City Stores and Best Buy Co. that have inadvertently kept the market share strong for companies like Martinelli’s. The number of authorized dealers for equipment made by companies such as IBM, Hewlett Packard and Xerox, for example, has been on the decline as the big retailers have come along with their own in-house service departments. More and more of those big retailers have a hard time keeping their shelves stocked with replacement parts because they grow outdated so quickly or, in some cases, because the manufacturer no longer exists. “I’ve had customers come in and ask me for replacement products for relatively new equipment, because they tell me the store they bought it from just stopped carrying it,” said Jim Martinelli. “That’s how fast technology changes. So we try to track those parts down and keep them here because we know someone is going to want them.” And, unlike many of those large retailers who require their customers to bring their equipment in for service, Martinelli’s will “deliver,” be it to help a small business go on line, or to help a frustrated home-worker clear a jammed printer. The company has taken a few hits over the years, once literally in 1971 when the Sylmar Earthquake struck, damaging much of the store’s stock. Next came the demise of the aerospace industry and the loss of clients like Lockheed Martin Corp., LibraScope and Whitaker. “Our business really went down the pipe when that hit,” said Dick Martinelli. The recession the real recession of the 1990s was a particularly trying period. But ask Dick or Margie if they ever thought of shutting down, and all you’ll get is a shrug of the shoulders. “This is what we do,” said Margie. How did they pull through? “We just started looking more closely at industries we hadn’t been selling to and started offering other products,” he said. Although the company at one time had non-family workers on the payroll, today it is strictly a family-run operation with a distinct “mom-and-pop” mentality as its core business driver. Customers can find Martinelli’s on line now. Inquiries from Asia to Antwerp for rare Smith Corona replacement ribbons, for example, are liable to come through at any moment.

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