Feeling Like An Achiever - of the Sears Waltons Typewriter Kind

* It's easy to see how invigorated I was by this trip: I've subconsciously swapped the figures around in my age - I'm actually 74!

I suspect the typewriter gods were with me on this journey, because it started well, with an on-the-spot, no-tools freebie typewriter repair job in the village of Braidwood, about an hour out of Canberra. We were walking down the main street when I looked into a store window and saw a dusty old Imperial 55 standard. I gave it a test type and realised straight away that the drawband was unattached. I asked the storekeeper if she wanted it to be returned to working order, and she said, "Yes, please!"  So I removed the carriage, reattached the drawband, and in less than five minutes had it typing again. The storekeeper was greatly impressed!

As is often the case in Braidwood, I saw one of the cars of my dreams (and the motor was still running in the owner's absence). But of course, it would never have been able to do the job the "Magical Mystery Tour" bus managed to do - which is haul back go Canberra all the things we'd found in op-shops along the way, including two "new" typewriters for my collection.

But getting back to the Sears Achiever 600. In its edition of October 1977, the Australian Consumers' Association magazine Choice rated 59 "lightweight" portable typewriters. Among them, it "double-dipped" many times, including Imperials, Royals, Chevrons, Pinnocks and KMarts made by Nakajima; and Brothers, Sears and Lemairs made by Brother. Brother came out on top, with not alone the Nagoya-made Sears Achiever 600 (which was on the magazine's cover) but the Brother 700T and the Lemair 800T among the four typewriters singled out for recommendations by Choice. The other one was the Olivetti Lettera 32.

The model I found was originally sold, at $79.99, by Waltons, an Australian department store chain founded by John Walton (1904–1998). In August 1955 Walton formed an alliance with the Chicago-headquartered retail giant Sears, Roebuck and Co. Waltons chairman Norman B. Rydge announced Sears had bought a substantial interest in Waltons shares, the first deal of its kind for an Australian retail outfit. In April 1955 Walton and Sears had each made a bid for another Australian concern, Foy & Gibson, one of this country's largest and earliest department store chains (it was taken over by Cox Brothers, which went into liquidation in 1968), and afterwards Waltons and Sears joined forces. Sears got equal representation on the Waltons board and its chairman, Theodore V. Houser, said he had been impressed by Australia’s growrth and prosperity. Ted Munk, on the Typewriter Database, points out that the new Sears Achiever model was announced in the Sears 1977 Fall Catalog at $118.99. Ted says it is the Brother JP-7 type. 

For all that, the "top prize" from our trip was the Remington 15 I found in Ulladulla. In my previous post, concentrating on this Brazilian-made machine, I neglected to mention two other variations of it, the Remington Travelriter, available for sale in Mumbai, and the Atlas 25, on WorthPoint, both with tabulation, unlike the Sperry Rand Remington 10 and my 15.

Having scored the more unusual Remington 15, however, I was content (though not 47 again). I could put my feet up, sip from a glass of bubbly, and enjoy the evenings at the "Magical Mystery Tour" base in Mollymook:

And start getting into the new "journalism library" of books my wife Harriet gave me for what was actually my 74th birthday: