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BYLINE: Peg Meier

CREDITLINE: Star Tribune

HEADLINE: Minnesotans dot, dash down memory lane



Morse code is a dying language, but it's not click-clacking its
way to the grave unnoticed.

Some of the last of the Minnesota men who can communicate in dots
and dashes gathered Saturday to celebrate the birthday of Samuel
F.B. Morse, the man who invented the telegraph and developed the
code. He was born in Massachusetts on April 27, 1791 -- 213 years
ago today.

Since 1944, Morse Telegraph Club chapters nationwide have met on
the last Saturday in April to honor Morse. The Twin Cities group
even had a birthday cake for him, with a "Happy birthday Sam"
inscription in English and Morse code.

The other reason for members getting together was sharing stories
about their former careers as telegraph operators.

Such as this one from Bert Miner of Cottage Grove. (You have to
understand that experienced telegraphers could tell which
colleague was sending a telegraph, just by the rhythm of the
clicks.) One frigid winter day, Miner sent a message to a
telegrapher in Fargo: "It doesn't sound like you." The response:
"That's because I'm telegraphing with my mittens on."

A few decades ago, the Twin Cities chapter alone pulled in more
than 100 people for the Morse birthday party, and so did other
chapters around the state. This year, the state's only gathering
was at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting in St. Louis Park and
attracted just 14 men, most of whom had been telegraphers for
railroads, and a few wives and significant others. So few people
today are proficient in Morse code that they relish being
together.

"This stuff is dead, I mean dead, except for us kids who play
with it," said Bob Branchaud, 79, also from Cottage Grove. He's
been the club's president since 1968.

Any regrets that their code is on its way out?

"Oh, my," Branchaud said. "The technology is interesting, but,
no, it's gone. Now we think e-mail is super fast and wonderful.
That's what people thought about the telegraph and Morse code
more than 100 years ago. Things change. That's progress."

Branchaud learned the code at age 16, and it provided him the
groundwork for a fabulous job -- "never a bad day." He went to
work for Western Union in Aberdeen, S.D., in 1946. By 1951, he
was with the Great Northern Railway, working first with
telegraphy and then with data processing.

Now he's retired, and his home office is filled with a collection
of old technology, including telegraph equipment. But even his
grandkids show no particular interest.

Memories live on

Stories flew Saturday. Gary Braasch, 64, of Brooklyn Center, told
about the telegrapher so entranced with his job that he installed
a telegraph key next to his bed. What was music to his ears drove
his wife nuts. She moved into another bedroom.

Boyd Ferrell, 67, of Black Duck, Minn., remembered that new
telegraphers were rotated to various stations to relieve
employees on vacation. In his first two years, he moved 64 times
and never got his suitcase unpacked. He remembers sitting under
the bridge in Burlington, Iowa, "bawling night after night
because I was so lonely."

Yet Lee Mills, 81, of Brooklyn Center, the club's vice president,
brought along the cover of an old Railroad Magazine that pictured
an adoring woman gazing at a handsome telegraph operator. "Ours
was a pretty good-paying job in a small town, and the girls
wouldn't mind looking up a new agent," Mills said. He spent 42
years with the Great Northern railroad and reports that the
living standard shrank with time: "Eisenhower got in, and the
working man didn't do too good after that."

Some telegraph operators were almost lyrical in their
transmissions, and others "you'd swear were sending with their
left feet," Branchaud said. The men all had stories about how
hard it sometimes was for a receiving operator to tell the
difference among an "h" (four dots), a p (five dots) and the
number 6 (6 dots) as wired by a sloppy sender.

Mistakes survive in memories. There's one about the florist who
sent a telegram ordering flowers for a funeral with a card
reading, "Lord, she is thine." It came through as "Lord, she is
thin."

With practice, telegraphers stopped hearing individual dots and
dashes; their brains processed them as words. And once they knew
Morse code, it was with them forever, the men said. For fun,
Branchaud brought a tape recording of Morse code transmissions.
The table where it was clicking away became the center of the
party.

It was in the 1830s that Morse invented the telegraph, which
means "far writing." He was already one of America's leading
portrait painters. If he had be able to build an electric
telegraph sooner, he might have gotten home in time for his
wife's funeral. She died at home in Connecticut in 1825 when he
was in Washington, D.C., seeking lucrative commissions. The two
cities were four travel days away, and word of her illness didn't
reach him in time.

Seven years later, he was returning from Europe, where he studied
painting for years, and he took part in a shipboard discussion of
the new electro-magnet. If electric current could pass almost
instantaneously over a wire, as one of the speakers maintained,
Morse reasoned that it could be interrupted to produce signals.
This was the beginning of the idea for his code. He built his
first telegraph instruments at New York University, where he
taught art.

After years of struggle, Morse and a partner got congressional
funding to finance the first telegraph line, from Washington to
Baltimore. On May 24, 1844, a small group gathered in a Supreme
Court chamber in the Capitol to watch him send a message to a
railroad station in Baltimore, 40 miles away. The message was the
biblical phrase, "What hath God wrought?" Those four words were
said to change the world.

After that success, Morse and associates were able to raise money
to extend the line to Philadelphia and New York City. Eventually,
telegraph wires went to every little hamlet in the nation.

Telegraph agents were the first to record news of war, birth,
death, marriages, everyday business, million-dollar deals and
plaintive appeals for bus fare home. To the outside world, it
seemed miraculous that messages could be sent at the speed of 20
or 30 words a minute. With time, telegraph operators used more
abbreviations and could get even more than 50 words a minute.

Branchaud said the Morse code was at its peak after World War I,
when press associations were still sending stories by telegraph.
Baseball games were telegraphed play-by-play (Branchaud himself
relayed some games) until radio broadcast games after World War
II. In the late 1950s, more than 800 telegraph stations were in
place along rail lines in Minnesota, with twice that many
operators.

The electronics industry has changed rapidly, Branchaud said, but
he and his buddies sure had fun while the code was king. As Ernie
Olson of Brooklyn Center said in his prayer before their lunch
Saturday, "Heavenly Father, thank you for the privilege of being
telegraphers."


Peg Meier is at .

"KØHB" wrote in message thlink.net...
This article from the Star Tribune has been sent to you by K0HB.


BYLINE: Peg Meier

CREDITLINE: Star Tribune

HEADLINE: Minnesotans dot, dash down memory lane



Morse code is a dying language, but it's not click-clacking its
way to the grave unnoticed . . .


. . . As Ernie
Olson of Brooklyn Center said in his prayer before their lunch
Saturday, "Heavenly Father, thank you for the privilege of being
telegraphers."


Well done - Tnx Hans!

w3rv

. . . As Ernie
Olson of Brooklyn Center said in his prayer before their lunch
Saturday, "Heavenly Father, thank you for the privilege of being
telegraphers."


YIKES ....I hope Lennie didn't see this ...if so .......

73 Tom KI3R