More Bob Burford

 It was circa 1960, give or take, and I was working my first real job at Western Union in Tucson. My first assignment was in Hammond, Indiana (telegrapher, phone operator), transferred to Holland, Michigan (delivery clerk), and recruited into sales in Detroit, all inside my first year with the company. I escaped from Detroit in the middle of winter and headed for the warmer climes of Tucson.

It was fairly late at night when in walked a tall, sophisticated-looking gent; not sloppy drunk, but certainly had been drinking. He wanted to sit down in the lobby and compose a telegram so I handed him a pad of blank forms and motioned for him to take a seat. He would write for a while, then get up and stroll over to the counter. Assuming he needed some assistance, I asked him if I could help him. Nope. He just wanted to talk ... about everything in general, actually, but specifically, to air his grievances about whoever he was writing about. 

He finally finished it, brought it up to the counter, and asked me to proofread it for him. Which I did. It was a perfect opportunity for me to rib him a bit, needle him, critique his copy. But that would have to wait until I got to know him better. Then everything was fair game – and I think he enjoyed it.

His name was Westbrook Pegler, a legendary syndicated newspaper columnist who had a reputation for hating everything and everyone. He was so far right-wing even the John Birch Society expelled him. The telegram was filed as a night letter, a class of telegram specifically designed for long wordy telegrams for overnight transmission to be delivered sometime the next morning. No rush. I assume he was in Tucson on vacation. So, for the duration of his stay, I would chat with him every night while he wrote out his column for the following day. 

After a short while our familiarity with one another developed a fairly common and open friendship ... to the point that one night when he entered the office, I asked, “So who’s tonight’s target for your toxic tripe and drivel?” I was pleasantly surprised that he didn’t seem to be offended at all. As I proofread his copy, I would mumble snide, digging remarks along the way. One evening he challenged me to write his column for him. “You think this is easy? You should try it sometime. You’d see.”

So, having nothing better to do, I spent the rest of that night writing a column for him. At that time the Defense Department was spending trillions of dollars building and installing missiles in silos all over the southwestern deserts. Some of the men working on these missile sites would come in to wire huge amounts of money back home to their wives. They were paid small fortunes. And rightly so. Working in the desert, miles away from civilization, sweltering daytime temperatures well over 100 and nighttime temperatures below freezing. So I wrote a column for him damning everyone who had anything to do with the government in general and the missile program in particular. That, of course, would include JFK, “that bleeding-heart liberal Catholic.” He had a debate with himself about whether or not to include the word “Catholic” in the story. He finally decided to leave it in. That led me to think he’s probably Catholic.  

Our teleprinters were kept loaded with large rolls of salmon-colored paper. That’s what I used for writing the column. Telegrams are all upper case. There’s no such thing as upper and lower case on any machine in the office. I’m guessing that the end product was eight to ten feet long. So, when Pegler came in the following night, again just a bit tipsy, I handed him my roll of salmon-colored paper. He began to unroll it and asked, “What the hell is this?” “Tripe and drivel!” I said. “Ten feet of toxic tripe and drivel!” 

He chuckled and began reading it on his way over to his usual seat in the lobby. He sat down and continued reading it, marking it with changes, corrections, insertions or deletions as he went along. When he was finished with it he rolled it back up and leaned on the counter. He asked me a few questions, kinda to expound on a few parts of the column. After making a couple of final changes, he then slapped the counter with it, handed it to me and said, “Thirty dash! File it!” (In the journalism/printing industry a thirty dash is a column-wide stylized dash that’s put at the end of an article indicating the end, or that’s all there is, or ain’t no more copy to follow. In manuscript it would simply be -30-)

That seemingly innocuous transaction caused unimaginable consternation with the powers that be. The manager of the office was a mousey little guy named Morlin. Wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. Here’s copy for a paid telegram that obviously has been written on one of our printers loaded with a continuous roll of salmon-colored paper.

How did that happen? they wanted to know. So the following is a 30-second read condensed down from a 15-minute real-life exchange:

BOSS: Did you let someone use our printer? 

ME: Nope, I wrote it myself. 

BOSS: Where did you get the copy?

ME: I wrote the copy.

BOSS: No. Who wrote the copy for the column?

ME: I did.

BOSS: You wrote it?

ME: I did.

BOSS: Whose idea was that?

ME: Mine.

BOSS: The idea for the column was yours?

ME: It was.

BOSS: You composed the copy and then you sent it?

ME: Correct.

BOSS: Who authorized you to do that?

ME: Westbrook Pegler

BOSS: Westbrook Pegler read this?

ME: Of course he did. It’s his column.

BOSS: And he approved it to be sent?

ME: He did. All of the editorial marks on the copy are his. I made those changes and sent it off ... as per his instructions.

The 48 contiguous states are divided into five divisions. Morlin wanted to call the division manager of operations over our division, but he couldn’t come up with a rational reason to do so. “Exactly what are you going to tell him?” I asked. “You could tell him you have a problem but you don’t know what the problem is. That would make him proud.” What I had done had never been done before. There was nothing in our tariff book (our comprehensive all-inclusive bible) on the matter. He really didn’t like what I had done but he couldn’t find a reason to support his thinking. I hadn’t done anything bad, just uniquely unorthodox. So Morlin really had no option but to just let the subject drop, much to his dismay.

For the rest of my time in that office, every time my path crossed Morlin’s, he would divert his eyes and give me a very wide berth. However, that situation wasn’t to last that long since, unbeknownst to me, in a few months I would receive orders to report to Santa Monica as manager of that office. 

I learned in the four years with that company that I did not belong in corporate America.