The Twitching Finger of the Telegraph (NPR)

The World We Lost

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The Twitching Finger of the Telegraph
Gregory Whitehead, Lost and Found Sound, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 23, 1999

The clicking of Morse code and the tapping of the telegraphic finger remain evocative and mysterious to those whose lives they touched. Gregory Whitehead, whose father telegraphed the Boston Red Sox play- by-play in the 1930s, speculates on the meaning of it all.

Transcript:
[GREGORY WHITEHEAD]
This is the tale of two twitching fingers that come together at midcentury in a fog of sound. And twitching finger number one belongs to my maternal grandfather, Alexander Shannon, whose job for Western Union included telegraphing baseball news from Fenway Park during the 1930s and '40s. Fenway Park, of course, home field for the Boston Red Sox. I like to imagine Grandfather Shannon showing up at Fenway on game days with a long black case tucked under his arm, looking just like some kind of pool hustler, but when the case snapped open, instead of a cue stick, there would be his game finger, all polished up, electrified.

When the home team lost, something that happened with alarming regularity, I bet he tried to conserve a little bit of that finger's magic for later to defend against my grandmother. My grandmother, whose fanaticism with regards to her beloved Sox, sounded like the subway and even exuded a strange powerful odor like yesterday's lobster roll.

Al was the only voice to escape being recorded into the family tape archive. After all, he let his finger do the talking. But there's plenty of material for my grandmother, Nana. Here she is in the late '50s, teaching me how to sing the song about Taffy, the Welshman.

(Soundbite of woman and child)

WHITEHEAD: Nana was a largish person with the delicate touch of a hockey player. Her voice when shouting, if you were unlucky enough to be within, say, two or three miles, could generate enough vibratory force to turn your bones into Silly Putty. And I'm sure she held poor Al somehow responsible for all those season-ending disasters, as if with a twitch of his magic finger, he could edit out all the bad news and flick open the door to World Series glory.

Enter twitching finger number two, with a fingernail filed to such a fine edge that it can now be dropped like a phonograph needle to skip across the vinyl surface of the 20th century. It's the anonymously ubiquitous finger of the digital age and the Internet, flexible enough to tickle the fancy or pull the trigger. It's the birth finger for the wireless imagination, a finger that begins its long career by tapping out the first trans-Atlantic telegram on December 12th, 1901, sailing forth across the ocean, straight into the waiting ear of the celebrated inventor and the zealous self-promoter, Guglielmo Marconi. The single seductive Morse code letter S, nothing but an ambiguous dot, dot, dot, tremendously significant and yet totally empty at the same time, like a Beckett play. It just kind of vibrates out there a standing wave, brief, tuneless, cryptic and vague. My candidate for the signature sound of the 20th century, a century that ends in the universe .com. And although we don't have a recording, it probably sounded something like...

Unidentified Woman: (Singing) Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posies...

WHITEHEAD: If that's the soundtrack, then my favorite photograph of Grandfather Shannon may provide the perfect visual counterpoint. It was snapped by my mother back in 1953, not long before Al placed his professional finger back in that long black case for the last time. 1953 was also the year for the world premiere of Beckett's signature play, "Waiting for Godot," and that's exactly what the photograph looks like: slightly overexposed, black and white, a thin figure in a baggy wool suit and a gray felt hat. It's almost as if Grandfather Al has been cast as the character Gogo, who says towards the end of the play, 'I can't go on like this.' And his sidekick, Didi, who I figure must have been a Red Sox fan, replies, 'That's what you think.'

(Soundbite of music)