GeoCities.us » Route66 » Crossroads

Get your FREE home page!

Contents | Chapter 2 >>

CHAPTER 1
DOTS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE

The depot in Corbel sat at the bottom of Main Street, a yellow frame building with a bay window on the track side and a freight room on the end that smelled of grease and grain dust and the cream cans waiting for the morning train. In 1933 it was the most interesting place in Harvey County as far as I was concerned, and I was sixteen and knew everything.

Those were hard years. My father farmed wheat a few miles out of town, and that summer the wheat hardly paid for the twine. There wasn't any money for anything, and there wasn't much for a boy to do once the chores were done but walk into town and stand around. Most of the boys stood around the pool hall. I stood around the depot, because in the summer the bay window was propped open, and you could hear the sounder from the platform.

If you have never heard a telegraph sounder, it doesn't beep the way the radio code does in the movies. It clicks. When the man on the other end presses his key down, the sounder's arm comes down with a click, and when he lets up it goes back with a clack. What makes a dot or a dash is the time between the click and the clack. A good operator doesn't hear the clicks at all after a while. He hears words, the way you hear words when somebody talks to you and don't think about the letters.

The agent at Corbel was Harvey Mead. He had been with the company since before the first war, wore sleeve garters and a green eyeshade, and he could copy the wire with one hand, sell a ticket with the other, and argue about the Republicans the whole time. He let me hang around for most of a summer without saying a word to me. Then one afternoon in August he leaned out the bay window and asked whether I was planning to learn it or just listen to it.

The practice set

The next day he gave me an old key and a sounder screwed to a pine board, with two dry cell batteries and a piece of wire, and a card with the code written out in his own hand. I set it up on Mother's kitchen table after supper, and I sat there clicking every night for most of a year.

The code Harvey taught me was the railroad code, American Morse. It isn't the same as the international code the ships and the radio fellows use, and I'll tell you how I know, because it got me in trouble with a Boy Scout once. American Morse has letters with spaces inside them. A C is two dots, a little space, and a dot. An O is a dot, a space, and a dot. An L is one long dash, longer than a T, and a zero is longer still. Get the spacing wrong and you've sent a different letter, and the man on the other end will tell you so. The international code doesn't have spaced letters at all, and its C sounds like our J. You can't learn one and copy the other without starting over.

Mother put up with the clicking every night for a year. She said she'd learned the code herself just from hearing it through the wall, and I didn't believe her until the night I sent something smart about my sister and she swatted me with the dish towel without turning around from the sink.

Copying the wire

By Christmas I could send a little and copy a little, slow. Harvey said that was the easy part. The hard part was copying a real wire, with a real dispatcher who wasn't going to slow down for a farm boy. So that winter he let me sit on a stool in the corner of the office after school with a pad and pencil and copy whatever came over, and then he'd look over my sheet and tell me what I'd missed, which was most of it.

There were two sounders on Harvey's desk, one on the dispatcher's wire and one on the message wire, and he'd jammed a Prince Albert tobacco can in behind one of them so it rang a little different. That way he could tell which wire was talking with his back turned, selling a ticket. A lot of the old ops did that. I did it myself for forty years.

What you learn, sitting in the corner, is that every man on the wire sends a little different. One fellow would hang on his dashes, another would run his words together, another one sent so clean you could have set type by it. We called that a man's fist, and after a few months I could tell you who was on the wire before he signed. Harvey said you never really knew a man until you'd heard him send when he was mad.

By the next summer I could copy most of the train wire, and I could hear Corbel's call in my sleep. Harvey wrote a letter for me, and in the spring of 1935 the chief dispatcher sent word for me to come to Newton to be examined. That's the next chapter.

Kenny's note: While he was telling me this part, Grandpa tapped out his name on the kitchen table with his finger. Grandma didn't even look up. She said "John Russell" and went back to her crossword.

Contents | Chapter 2 >>

Posted August 24, 1997. [email protected]