[GreenKeys] A Little More TWX History

[Ralph Irish]

When I first went aboard the USS Hancock, a WW II vintage aircraft carrier, it had a flock of 'FAX' equipment in one corner of the RATT 
Room. I asked several of the more senior Radio Operators about it and all anyone could remember was that it was installed in a big hurry 
and was only used for a week or two, (several years earlier) when some VIPs were scheduled to be aboard for some kind of 'courtesy cruise', 
and the VIPs wanted to be certain of getting photos 'back to land' as soon as possible, for PR purposes. 

Later on, it was all removed and taken off the ship. Don't remember if the available space got used for anything else or not. That general 
area of the RATT Room was eventually separated from the rest with a 7' tall green curtain, and the 'back section' became a Crypto Area for 
several pieces of on line Crypto gear. (KW-26, later a KW-37R was added and the 'two tape' PYTHON, off-line gear that was already back 
in that area.) 

I got a Secret Crypto clearance and all of my duty after that was 'behind the curtain'. Interesting times for a 20/21 year old! I had access to 
a lot of Classified 'paper', although no 'Need To Know', but I still managed to read a lot of it. 

One thing that came in every day was a long message (sometimes as two separate messages, due to length) called the "Pacific Fleet 
Intelligence Summary". This covered things going on all over Asia and the Pacific. A lot of what was seen in the original releases 
showed up one or two days later in the regular news from AP, UPI and Reuters that we copied on RTTY for the ship's daily newspaper. 
Timing is everything, I guess! 

I was aboard the Hancock for just under two years, (59-61) and had two 'WesPac cruises'. (Western Pacific) Saw a lot of water, and a 
few plane crashes. We had the F3H jet fighters, A3D Bombers, A4D Bombers, F8U fighters and as strange as it sounds, we had squadrons 
of old prop planes, known as "ADs" Also a number of support helicopters one of which was always in the air during flight ops. 

I saw a lot of unclassified message traffic headed for various commands in "French Indo China", talking about Military Advisory Groups, 
known as "MAGs" all dealing with equipping and training what became the South Vietnamese Army. At that time, "French Indo China" 
was the preferred designation. 

I got out in March of 1961 and the 'festivities' didn't officially start until sometime in December of that year. Since I had two more years 
of obligation, I was concerned about being recalled. The later "Cuban Missile Crisis" and the "Berlin Wall" events also kept me glued to 
the TV news and dreading what might come in the mail. I guess I wasn't as important as I thought I might be! 

73, 

Ralph - W8ROI 

- - - - - - - - 

From: "Raymond Cote" <bluegrassdakine at hotmail.com> 
To: "Jim Haynes" <jhhaynes at earthlink.net> 
Cc: greenkeys at mailman.qth.net 
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2019 2:21:55 PM 
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] A Little More TWX History 

We in the oceanography community used the Alden wet paper machines for oceanographic bottom contour mappings for years and when paper got 
too hard to get ir was too dry we switched to dry paper machines. 

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. 


> On Nov 27, 2019, at 09:03, Jim Haynes <jhhaynes at earthlink.net> wrote: 
> 
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, Harold Hallikainen wrote: 
>> 
>> I used to do contract work for Alden (I think that's the company name) in 
>> MA. They made wet paper fax machines for distributing weather maps to the 
>> ————- 
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