Traveling to California, reporters flooded the telegraph operator with stories they were filing about the day’s events. Just a rookie at the time, J.L. Brown struggled to transmit the articles to editors using Morse code.
“He (Dewey) put off a bushel basket full of stuff and we had to get out and move that stuff on the line. We sent it everywhere in the United States,” Brown, now 88, said. “You work with those old-hand operators and I tell you they were sharp, they knew what they were doing. You take a young man like me ... trying to figure out what they want and what they didn’t want.”
Brown visited the Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum this week with family to rekindle memories of a bygone era, a time before fax, e-mail and text messaging could instantly send messages across continents and oceans.
“We moved everything on telegraph when I first started. Then we went from Teletype to radio,” Brown said, surrounded by children and grandchildren. “I saw it all. It just kept getting better for 39 years, then I quit. I retired.”
Museum executive director Judy Covington said people use the restored downtown Santa Fe depot like a time machine. The old telegraph on the second floor takes you back to an era when operators tapped out messages on a small gadget. Workers at the destination then translated the dots and dashes into words.
“A lot of train families come here. It just really connects them to their past. Particularly that communications room,” Ms. Covington said. “A lot of people from different areas of the country come here to try and reconnect with the past.”
In 1840, a portrait painter turned inventor named Samuel F.B. Morse patented an electronic alphabet called Morse code. Four years later, the first telegraph line was finished - between Baltimore and Washington - and carried the initial message, “What hath God wrought?” The telegraph went transcontinental in 1861.
Maritime workers continued to use Morse code until the end of the 20th century.
Brown said he learned how to operate the telegraph at Chillicothe Business College in Missouri in six months. But in real time, keeping up with lightning-fast dots and dashes requires an intense ability to focus on whole words rather than individual letters.
“That stuff comes in about 20 words a minute,” Brown said. “We forgot the dots and dashes. After you work so long, you go by sound, you just sit there and listen to it, you can make out the first two or three letters and you can make out what the words are going to be.”
Brown said the Temple depot was a relay office like the Belen, N.M., depot where he started in 1941. He communicated with Temple, but today the operators’ names are just a blur.
And back in 1948, Dewey lost to Truman.
“Then he got beat, and I said we wasted our time anyway,” Brown said, regarding Truman’s surprise victory. “Should’ve just thrown it in the waste basket and forgot about it.”
