Telegraphers reunite, let their fingers do the talking

They could have been old schoolmates or war veterans or stamp collectors, except for the curious way they devoted one ear to the conversation in front of them and turned the other to the front of the room.

Jokes, introductions, stories flowed on without a pause, but these 60 or so men never lost track of the tapping in the background. They had perfected that skill over long careers, and then let it go dormant.

On this afternoon, it reawakened to the music of the telegraph.

To spouses and guests, the clacking sounded like a crazy tap dance — galloping, then hesitating, then skipping an arrhythmic jig.

To the former telegraphers of the Maine Central, Bangor and Aroostook and Canadian Pacific railroads, the tapping spun out a language, a world of precise messages.

“I had not listened to telegraph for 20 or 25 years, and that was just like I had heard it yesterday,” said Ralph Coffin of Portland, moments after listening to a Morse code welcome at Maine’s first reunion of railroad telegraphers. “Once you learn it, you never forget.”

Like most of the people in the room, Coffin had spent a career tracking and directing trains by telegraph — pick up empty boxcars at Bangor, drop off two at Olamon, drop off two more at Enfield, pull over onto the siding at Lincoln to make way for the oncoming passenger train.

“To me it was like chess. It was always a challenge,” Coffin says.

More than a fascination with railroads, however, the telegraphers who attended Friday’s reunion shared a love for their medium.

Phillip Butler of Bangor spent a career listening to the telegraph for Maine Central. The railroads used the wire long after most other industries had given it up, but during the 1960s, their telegraph finally gave way to telephone and then radios.

About three years ago, Butler realized he missed the sound of the telegraph, and called his friend Royce Wheeler, another former telegrapher living in Bangor. Wheeler pulled out his “bug” — the chrome-plated, high-speed sending key that each telegrapher purchased for himself — and tapped out a cassette tape for Butler.

The two had such a good time with it that they decided to try a reunion. With help from the railroads, they assembled a list of 99 former telegraphers, and sent each an invitation for the first-ever meeting of the Fraternal Association of Railroad Telegraphers (a name Wheeler said he chose because the acronym fit the average age of the group’s members).

More than 60 telegraphers from Madawaska to Portland gathered for the reunion on Aug. 3 at a restaurant in Bangor. For some of them, it was a chance to see if the thumb and forefinger still had the dexterity to speak; for others, it was a chance to talk trains.

For Dana Bragdon and Wally Oakes, it was a chance to give a long-time friend a face. Bragdon, a dispatcher in Portland, and Oakes, in Waterville, both worked the night shift for 18 years. Over the telegraph, they became friends. When business was slow, they would chat about football and family, letter by letter, tapped out in dots and dashes.

While telegraphers made ample use of the rails, Bragdon and Oakes went their entire careers without ever meeting face to face. At the reunion, they finally met.

“Yeah, I guess he’s what I expected,” Oakes said. “Maybe a little heavier.”

If the dots and dashes sound impersonal to the neophyte, they convey much more than a series of letters to the veteran telegrapher.

“Everyone has their own touch on the key, just like handwriting,” said Wheeler. Telegraphers signed each message with a code indicating the sender, but according to Wheeler, most operators knew who was on the line before they ever identified themselves.

“There’s a lot of natural ability that comes with it,” Wheeler said of telegraphing. Some worked at it for years and years and never gained the skill to progress beyond a backup operator. Others, like Wheeler, proved early that they were good with the bug. They were the ones who became dispatchers, and they took pride in their work.

“We found it very natural,” Wheeler said, “as natural as you and I are talking today.”