Postal Telegraph
114 E. 10th Street
Kansas City, Missouri
Sick in body and in mind, I returned home to Lamar, Missouri. I secured a job with the Missouri Pacific Railroad again, and they sent me to Joplin as night operator. After about a week, my entire left side became paralyzed and I was forced to quit that job. After about three months with no improvement, I found an osteopath who said he could help me.
After two weeks I could feel life coming back into my left leg and hand, and in a month I was ready to go back to work. This time I went with the Frisco Railroad as extra, or relief operator on the division from Springfield to Kansas City. The Frisco line was very good to work for. While I stayed only a short time in each station, I met a lot of people, and in six months time my health had almost entirely returned. It was a joy to meet new people and feel good again.
The last job I held for the Frisco was in the main office in Kansas City's relay office. I liked it very much, as most of my work was receiving and sending messages with a small amount of book work thrown in for good measure.
One day I was in the downtown part of Kansas City and ran into an operator for the Postal Telegraph Company who worked for the main office at 8th and Delaware. His hours were not very regular - from 10 am to 2 pm and then again from 6 pm until around midnight. These hours sounded wonderful to me, as he had time off during the day and could usually work as much overtime as he wanted. I asked about the possibility of going to work for Postal Telegraph, and he said they were always looking for operators who wanted work. The trouble with most was that they would work to make money to lay off and get drunk on payday. Maybe they would come back to work and maybe not. They would get their pay and buy a bottle of whiskey and stay with it until it was gone. If they had no more money they would try to borrow enough to get another, and continue with that.
After the consumption of the second bottle, they were always broke, behind in their room rent, and as jumpy as a sack full of frogs. They would try to go back to work, but a very short test usually proved their nerves were not yet ready for them to return, and they would start looking for someone who would provide a drink, or at least lend a buck or two towards the purchase of a new bottle. If any of their efforts toward obtaining additional stimulation were successful, there was no danger of their coming back to work as long as the alcohol lasted. This left a wide, open spot for one who didn't drink, liked to work, and needed money badly. I fitted that niche very nicely and I received my first job as an operator for a strictly communications company from the Postal Telegraph Company.
While I had been with the railroads and steamship lines for several years, and had experience in the handling of messages, this was something entirely new and amounted to just one phase of the communications business; namely the sending and receiving of messages.
With the Postal Telegraph Company, our pay was based on a salary of $105 per month on the assumption that you worked eight hours per day for a four week month of six days per week! If you worked more, your salary was more, and they had an added incentive whereby you could improve your earnings. If you were proficient at your work, and could handle more than 30 telegrams per hour, you received an additional $.02 per message for all messages over thirty that you handled per hour.
When I first started to work for them, I did mighty well if on occasion I handled as many as thirty telegrams per hour. In fact, it was a nip and tuck whether or not I was going to hold on to my $105 job. But for the fact that there was a great shortage of gifted operators, I seriously doubt that I would have lasted the first week.
The main thing I had in my favor was that I didn't drink. Sometimes on payday when they came to the room for extra operators for a replacement, there would be no one there except me, and possibly one or two others.
Being listed as an extra operator, there was always at least two or more hours available every day and again in the evenings, if I wanted to work evenings, which I did.
My ambition was to become adept at the job and become available for the fast wires where I could make bonus. This required many months of hard work and devotion to a job that I was firmly committed to. My ambition was to become a first-class operator in every way.
After several months, largely spent in the waiting room waiting on assignments, I received an interesting one. It was to report to the Kansas City Star to copy press reports coming in from all over the country, direct by Postal Telegraph. The assignment would only be for three or four hours, but it was a giant step forward for me. It meant that they had enough confidence in me to place me on the most important wire they had.
To handle this job properly meant that it would be necessary to copy on the typewriter, news reports that would be coming in from all over the country by direct wire. It also meant that the receiving operator had to make no mistakes on the typewriter, and had to get them right the first time. You had no opportunity to ask for repeats and make erasures. They must be ready for printing in the paper when you handed a waiting copy boy the written copy.
I had anticipated in my wildest dreams of one day being able to do this. When I received the assignment, I was thoroughly overjoyed, for I had been preparing this for occasion for several months.
In the first place, newspaper copy that the telegraph company handled for the papers was handed to an operator at the point of origin of the news, and was usually something very special. The filing correspondent was always sure that he had a scoop, and wanted it handled at once. There was no news service wire there, and no radio or television circuit of any kind. The Postal and Western Union were the only telegraph wires available. It was up to me to prove that the Postal Telegraph was worthy of the confidence the reporters had placed in them. Any slip-up and the next time we didn't get the business.
While sending to an operator that was copying the news story, the sending operator usually liked to show off a bit and try to convince the receiving operator that he was a notch above the ordinary operator. To do this he would use Phillips Code while transmitting.
The Phillips Code was an abbreviation of words commonly used in sending news dispatches. In real press work it helped the sending operator as he could abbreviate the common words and save considerable time in transmitting. For common phrases, it was also used, like "i.e." stood for "that is," "D" stood for "in the," and "saik" stood for "shot and instantly killed," etc.
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| First page of Phillips Code |
I had purchased a Phillips Code book several months previously, and had studied up a great many of the common abbreviations and phrases, so I was able to handle it if the sending operator wanted to show off his skill by throwing in a few abbreviations once in a while.
After throwing in a few of the easier and more common abbreviations, if the receiving operator didn't break him, or make any complaints, the sender would show off his vocabulary of abbreviations as much for showing of his ability as for the extra speed obtained. Those who were adept at using code were the most talented of all of them, and showed restraint in using code at inappropriate times. Just another way of putting on the "Ritz."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Code
The Phillips Code is a brevity code (shorthand) created in 1879 by Walter P. Phillips (then of the Associated Press) for the rapid transmission of press reports by telegraph. It defined hundreds of abbreviations and initialisms for commonly used words that news authors and copy desk staff would commonly use. There were subcodes for commodities and stocks called the Market Code, a Baseball Supplement, and single-letter codes for Option Months. The last official edition was published in 1925, but there was also a Market supplement last published in 1909 that was separate.
The code consists of a dictionary of common words or phrases and their associated abbreviations. Extremely common terms are represented by a single letter (C: See; Y: Year); those less frequently used gain successively longer abbreviations (Ab: About; Abb: Abbreviate; Abty: Ability; Acmpd: Accompanied).
Later, The Evans Basic English Code[1] expanded the 1,760 abbreviations in the Phillips Code to 3,848 abbreviations.
Using the Phillips Code, a message could be composed and sent as this ten-word telegram:
Whereupon receipt by the news desk, it would be expanded to this:
Famously, The Kansas City Star published the following code in 1910:[2]
Which the news desk should have transcribed as the following before sending it to the typesetter:
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