At four a.m., Bob Marshall would fold newspapers for his paper route. He was 12 years old. While he banded and bagged about 30 copies he'd deliver that morning, he'd read the columns inside — particularly those by Dan Bernstein.
"It was kind of the early version of the meme," Marshall said.
But Marshall didn't just know Bernstein from the paper. He knew him from his aunt and uncle's house, from family gatherings.
"It was extremely impressive," Marshall recalled. "And here's this cool guy. He had the biggest, most intelligent-looking glasses I'd ever seen. They've gotten smaller as the years have gone by."
Now Marshall, nearly 50, and the founder of Typewriter Muse — one of the few remaining professional typewriter repair shops in the country — is honoring that family friend with a dedicated creative space inside his expanded shop. The Dan Bernstein Writing Room opens Jan. 31.
"Once his name popped up, there was no other question," Marshall said.
"Nobody wanted it. I gave it a good home."
The connection between the two men runs deeper than childhood memories. About two years ago, Marshall got to work on the very typewriter Bernstein used to write his column during a 32-year run at the Press-Enterprise — a Smith Corona secretarial model that still worked just fine.
"It meant so much to me to get to work on the machine that brought so many people in the community such goodness," Marshall said.
Bernstein still has the machine.
"Nobody wanted it. I gave it a good home," Bernstein said. "Bob Marshall gave it a new life."
When Bernstein learned a writing room would bear his name, he was caught off guard.
"I was surprised and flattered," he said. "Since I retired in 2014, I've told people I used to be Dan Bernstein."
A writing room named for him? "I think it's a very comfortable fit."
Defending Riverside from the snooty outsiders
Bernstein joined the Press-Enterprise on June 1, 1976. He and his wife Candia had moved from Oregon with a solemn pledge: two years and we're out.
"Riverside wasn't love at first sight for me," Bernstein said. "In fact, the smog was often so thick it was hard to see the place. Walking out of the air-conditioned office and into the summer heat made me feel like I was being advised to forget about heaven."
But in 1982, when he became a columnist, something shifted. A column requires a point of view.
"So, I unwittingly and surprisingly developed a stake in the community," Bernstein said. "Riverside became 'my' community. When snooty outsiders who had never set foot in Riverside trashed it as a smog-choked, edge-of-the-desert hick town, I saddled up my high horse and ran them off."
He wrote the column for 32 years before retiring in 2014. Since then, he's published two books: "Justice in Plain Sight," which chronicles the Press-Enterprise's two U.S. Supreme Court victories that opened America's courtrooms to the public and press, and "He Kept His Day Job," a memoir about his lifelong love of trombone.
Writing without daily deadlines is different, Bernstein said, though he believes deadlines remain "absolutely essential to good, clean writing."
"They forced me to focus on what I was doing and block everything else out."
From motorcycles to typewriters
Marshall's path to typewriter repair wasn't linear. By day, he works as a building mechanic and locksmith for the County of Riverside. He still races motorcycles at Bonneville Salt Flats and El Mirage dry lake bed — custom choppers he builds with his son, continuing a tradition started by his father.
His book, "American Road Runner," chronicles his participation in an outlaw cross-country chopper race spanning roughly 3,000 miles. He wrote it on a typewriter.
"I had to admit a long time ago, I like to run, I like to go on a motorcycle and be part of the scenery instead of looking at the scenery out the window," Marshall said. "And I like to write it all out on a typewriter."
The through-line, Marshall explained, is slowing down.
"There's that great personal time that you build a relationship with yourself when you're running or racing a motorcycle cross country that you've built in your backyard out of scrap parts," he said. "Typing on a typewriter, you get to really dive into that same thing. It's the long game and slowing down to a place where your human mind and human body can do its best work."
When Marshall announced he was getting into typewriter repair, his phone rang within two weeks. It was Tom Hanks' people.
"I'm not going to say that I cut my teeth on his typewriters or anything, but some of his typewriters were some of the first machines that Muse got to work on," Marshall said. He estimates he's worked on about 50 of Hanks' machines.
Hanks, who once called the typewriter "a real muse machine" — a phrase Marshall borrowed for his shop's name — has referred other clients his way, including Steven Spielberg. In the past year alone, Marshall's machines have appeared at the Getty Prize Gala and in an Academy Awards video called "Words of Wisdom," featuring actors including Mark Hamill, Ben Stiller, Isabella Merced, and Ryan Coogler typing messages on a glossy black 1933 Royal Portable from the Muse collection.
The only shop that does its own rubber
The Hollywood connections expanded Typewriter Muse's reach, but the business runs on a model Marshall built to last.
"I made a promise a long time ago that Muse will have to stay in the black and serve what the customer wants," Marshall said.
Typewriter Muse operates across five interconnected niches. There's the rubber shop, where Marshall cuts and custom-sets rubber platens — the cylinders the paper feeds through — to each machine. He's the only typewriter mechanic in the country who does this work in-house.
"Those go bad, no different than the tires go bad on your car," Marshall explained. "So they have to be custom remanufactured."
Typewriter Muse also produces its own ribbons, covers, cleaning kits, and supplies. There's the service and repair shop, the sales showroom, and now the Dan Bernstein Writing Room.
Marshall offers a shipping service with custom boxes for safe transport. Customers drive in from as far as Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, and Yuma, Arizona. The backlog typically runs three to six weeks.
A machine that does one thing
The Dan Bernstein Writing Room will host workshops on typewriting, poetry, and screenwriting at about $40 per ticket for groups of up to eight people. The room will also host free monthly college nights and type-ins.
Marshall frames the appeal: "It's a machine that can just do one thing."
The same logic applies to typewriters in 2026. Writers use them for the focus, the tactile experience, and the freedom from distraction.
"Typewriters are not lovers," Marshall said. "You can have more than one."
The clackety-clack of typewriters
When Bernstein started at the Press-Enterprise 50 years ago this coming June, typewriters were the only option. He took notes on one during phone interviews. He typed his stories. Computers didn't arrive until the late 1970s.
"I was in my late 20s when I started writing stories on a computer," he said.
Now, asked what he hopes the Dan Bernstein Writing Room will become, he offered this:
"I hope it will be a space where people will feel the freedom and pleasure — not pressure — to create, to listen to their muses, to experiment and, yes, to rewrite, which is one of the most important yet magical aspects of writing."
And the setting?
"I can't think of a better setting to stir the creative juices than a small room filled with the up-tempo clackety-clack of typewriters."
More information: The Dan Bernstein Writing Room opens Saturday, Jan. 31, at Typewriter Muse, 1960 Chicago Avenue, Suite D-17, Riverside, CA 92507. For more information, visit typewritermuse.com.
