Hello from occasionally sunny Seattle!  I found the recent postings
about the Auto-Typist to be of interest for two reasons.

The first is that when I was in my early teens in Chicago in the 1970s,
I rode the bus (and occasionally cajoled a ride from my parents) around
the city looking for forgotten nickelodeons and player pianos.  Someone
suggested that I visit the Auto-Typist Company.  And there I met Otto
Schultz who gave me a tour of the factory.  You can imagine how shocked
I was to see that these modern looking office devices were actually
player pianos (minus the piano) in disguise.

Forty years later, after a move to the Seattle area, I answered a
Craig's List posting of Ampico rolls for sale and ended up meeting the
man who was the Seattle representative for Auto-Typist (and Auto-Pen)
from the early 1960's through the company's demise in the mid-1970s.
It turns out he wasn't much of a player piano fan but when he started
getting service requests for the machines he sold, he ended up hiring
a local player tech.  The pianos in the player tech's shop so
fascinated him that he purchased an Ampico piano from the tech.

Because I was the first person to come along in about 25 years who had
any interest or knowledge about the Auto-Typist he pulled out a slug of
sales materials, catalogs and service manuals -- all of which he ended
up giving me with the purchase of a bunch of his Ampico rolls.  To hear
him tell it, the business was very strong even up through the late
1960s.  He said he visited Boy's Town in Nebraska where they had over
100 machines clacking away day and night.  Charities and bill
collectors seemed to be the biggest buyers in his mind.

As the recollections began to wind down, the man got a second wind and
began searching his warehouse for something.  Shortly he returned with
a used tracker bar from one of the Auto-Typists.  He had been saving
a number of the machines in his warehouse for decades, but as he was
moving he had just had someone bust them all up for scrap.  So I left
with a lot of info on these unusual machines and an Auto-Typist tracker
bar as a souvenir of our conversation.

Just goes to show you never know what you'll find when you're out
hunting for stuff.

Warmly,
Marc J. Sachnoff
Seattle, Washington
tel: 1-310-291-3645