[Fists] Morse in Minnesota (2nd try)

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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.

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 pmeier@startribune.com.