Mary Adelman, "whose Manhattan typewriter-repair shop tended to machines with shift-lock keys that would do neither and carriages that would not return--and to the people who pounded away on them," died November 22, the New York Times reported. She was 89.
For decades, her Upper West Side shop, Osner Business Machines, "was an emergency room for typists with bent keys, problematic platens and ruined ribbons," caring for the typewriters of numerous well-known writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Mamet, Erich Maria Remarque, Nora Ephron, Gene Shalit and Philip Roth. The Times noted that Joseph Heller "had a Smith-Corona with keys that flew off (they were soldered back on). The novelist David Handler was so grateful for Mrs. Adelman's assistance that he made her a character in a mystery, The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy."
Author Walter Wager said the shop "was almost a local pub for writers in the community, a mini-Algonquin.... She was the serene, courteous, efficient, get-it-done aunt."