[CW] Denice Stoops (DA) Back at KPH for Night of Nights

[D.J.J. Ring, Jr.]

Historic station in Point Reyes brings Morse code back to life

By Rob Rogers
http://www.marinij.com/article/zz/20090711/NEWS/907119982
For frequencies and times see http://radiomarine.org

You won't hear Denice Stoops' voice when she takes to the airwaves on
Sunday night. But the shipboard radio operators who remember a time - 10
years ago this week - when Morse code telegraphers like Stoops brought
weather reports, news, telegrams and other messages to mariners throughout
the world will know her by the sound of her dots and dashes.

"She has very distinctive keying - you know it's her right away," said
Richard Dillman, a member of the Maritime Radio Historical Society and one
of the hosts of Sunday's "Night of Nights" event at historic radio station
KPH in the Point Reyes National Seashore. "She uses a chrome-plated key,
and she has those long red fingernails and bracelets jangling. She's one of
the most famous folks we have on the air."

Stoops, 53, of Bolinas, became the first woman to serve as a telegrapher at
KPH in 1979, working there for more than 18 years.

"It's romantic. Radio always has been romantic, and before radio, you had
the wires along the railroad, with the lonely guy at the train station in
the middle of nowhere receiving messages in American Morse," said Stoops,
who has worked as a dispatcher for an auto repair company and a billing
manager for a plumbing company since the station closed. "And for me in
particular, it was the romance of the sea. Ever since I was a kid, I was
always reading romance novels, and I'd always choose the one with the
picture on the cover of a handsome captain staring out from the yardarm."

Stoops joined the Coast Guard in order to go to college on the G.I. Bill,
and discovered she had an aptitude for Morse code, the system of dots and
dashes once used by radio and telegraph operators throughout the world.
Learning to communicate in Morse was like learning another language, Stoops
said.

"Every letter came to me as a struggle. It required a lot of rote
memorization," said Stoops, who said things began to change for her after
nine months of studying Morse. "One day I was driving my car down the road
in Petaluma, and I saw a stop sign. Well, 'stop' is a word that's quite
common in telegrams - it's used in place of a period, or to change the
subject - and so when I looked at that stop sign, instead of seeing the
word, I heard it play in my mind in Morse. And that was my light bulb
moment."

After serving in the Coast Guard for four years, Stoops accepted a position
at KPH, which at the time was owned by the Radio Corporation of America.
Established in 1905 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco - the source of
its call letters - KPH came to West Marin after the 1906 earthquake and
fire destroyed its original transmitters. Much of its equipment dates from
the 1930s and '40s.

"The station had a worldwide reputation for being the best, so I assumed
they had modern equipment. That was not the case," Stoops recalled.
"Learning to operate the radios was something of a challenge, and a lot of
the older guys were hard cases to win over. It took about 10 years for
everybody to accept me as an equal."

Stoops left in 1996 as the United States began to phase out the use of
Morse code for commercial messages in favor of the satellite-based Global
Maritime Distress and Safety System. The station closed in 1997. Radio
station KFS in Half Moon Bay broadcast the nation's last commercial Morse
message at midnight on July 13, 1999. The message - sent from station
"KPH/KFS," because KFS had taken over KPH's radio traffic in 1997 - was
"What hath God wrought," the first telegraphic message sent in 1844 by
Samuel Morse.

Determined to make sure that at least one station was preserved in working
order, Dillman and the other members of the Maritime Radio Historical
Society worked with the Point Reyes National Seashore to bring KPH back to
life on a limited basis.

"The station itself is a really pretty impressive building, an Art Deco
structure built in the late 1920s," said John Dell'Osso, chief of
interpretation at the Point Reyes National Seashore. "When I walked in, a
couple of months after it was abandoned, there was still paper coming out
of a machine as part of a message that had been left dangling. It was
almost like a ghost town."

By preserving the station, and holding events like the annual "Night of
Nights," Dillman hopes to honor those who served as marine telegraphers,
especially those who died in the line of duty. Because their position
aboard ship was so important, Dillman notes that the radio operator and the
captain were often the last to leave a ship in the event of disaster.

"You see transcripts from messages from doomed ships, and the man on board
will just say 'Must go now, old man' - and that meant that the water was
coming into the room," Dillman said. "These guys did their duty up to the
end. Often it was their skills that brought rescue to their colleagues."

The station will be open to visitors at 3 p.m. Sunday, returning to the air
at 5:01 p.m., or 0001 GMT - 10 years and one minute after the final Morse
message. Dillman doesn't know what ships or stations will respond when KPH
begins its broadcast. But he's hoping that someday - perhaps this year,
perhaps next - he'll have the opportunity to deliver one of several very
special messages to a ship that missed it more than a decade ago.

"One of the most famous station managers had a motto that there is no such
thing as a dead message," Dillman said. "And we take that to heart. The
receiving station has what we call a message rack, where all outgoing
messages to ships at sea are kept, and there are still some messages that
were awaiting delivery at the time the station closed in 1997. They're
still there, and if one of those ships shows up, we've got their message."

In the past, the "Night of Nights" has welcomed former mariners and
telegraph operators from around the world, men and women from Australia,
Finland and New Zealand who knew each other only by the sound of their
keystrokes. Yet even those who have never heard a Morse broadcast can
expect to see and hear something special on Sunday, Dillman said.

"Morse code resonates even with people who know nothing more than SOS,"
Dillman said. "People visit our station, and their eyes light up when they
hear Morse code filling the air. It's that human touch of the hand on the
telegraph key, which through some magic nobody really understands puts them
in contact with a fellow operator, who may be on a ship literally on the
other side of the world, with nothing between the two of you but the sea
and sky
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