The summer of 1962 was an eventful one for me. I was an assistant manager/T&R tech working for Western Union in Tucson. Twenty or twenty-one years old. Western Union was a painfully cheap, horrible, inconsiderate company to work for. For example, I received a telegram on a Friday afternoon from the powers that be that I needed to report to the office in Santa Monica the following Monday morning and take over that office as manager.
The manager I was replacing was suddenly placed in a nursing home. The years-long unreasonable pressures the company puts on its management staff had literally eaten the man up from inside out. As soon as I got settled into the office such that I could afford a couple of hours away, I went to the nursing home to pay a visit to the man I replaced. I knew only that his name was Moss and that he was 44 years old. Nothing more.
I was stunned speechless when I met the man face to face. If I hadn’t known his actual age, I would have guessed him to be somewhere close to 75-80, more or less. It rattled my brain. I really didn’t know what to say or how to react. I remember asking him in different ways if he was the previous manager of the Western Union office. I thought maybe somehow things had gotten mixed up and he was another Moss entirely. Not so. He was the dude.
Western Union loves reports. Monthly reports. All of which have to be filed with the FCC and on time. There’s simply no way to fudge on the due date. Come hell or high water, the reports will be filed when due. So, given that the office had been significantly neglected for the past few months – understandably so – I had my work cut out for me just playing catch-up.
I prioritized the work as best I could ... which means I had to let some less-important work slide for a while. One such thing I let slide was a few messages asking for the manager – that would be me – to return their call. So I tackled them in order of age; the most recent went to the bottom of the pile.
Western Union loves acronyms. If it can possibly be abbreviated, then do so. For instance, someone files a telegram to be delivered in another city. The originating office might get a service message in return that reads, “HBD.” That’s it. Nothing more. Or, if an attempt was made to deliver the message but couldn’t find anyone at home, the message would read, “NHLN.” HBD translates to “House Burned Down.” NHLN is “Not Home, Left Notice.” DAF is “Doesn’t Answer Phone.” That mentality permeates the local office staffs who invent their own list of acronyms unique to that office.
A typical message slip listed the date and time, phone number, degree of urgency, and, more likely than not, instead of a name it would be an acronym of their name. That’s understandable given that the space for the name was less than an inch long. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was RR. Nancy Reagan was NR. I added WC to the list since I had become friends with actor Wendell Corey. (I don’t know what his connection to the Santa Monica City Commission was – maybe he was just really civic minded – but he attended all of their meetings and then would mosey on over to my office and just hang out for a while.) Of course, me being new in the office, I had no idea who any of these acronyms were, so I simply had to ask one of the staff. Raymond Burr was RB, Mae West was MW. Mickey Hargitay was MH. And on and on.
My office handled Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, Venice, and Playa del Rey with some bleed-over to neighboring communities. Knock on just about any door in those communities and you’re likely to find a movie or TV star, director, musician, etc. And, being the manager of the office, I found myself talking to these people on a regular basis. A first-name basis was fairly quickly developed with several of the people. All that to say, talking to famous movie stars became old-hat very quickly.
We arrived in Santa Monica from Tucson Sunday afternoon and checked into a motel. After dinner I decided to go into the office, introduce myself, and check the place out. I didn’t get a chance to make introductions, though; the phone was ringing off the hook and every one was busy taking care of other business. That’s Western Union for you; too cheap to properly staff its offices. So I answered the phone myself. Try to imagine it: A total stranger walks into your office, makes himself totally at home, and proceeds to answer your office phone.
The call was my first introduction to the area’s rich and famous. It was Joan Bennett, an actress whose heyday was in the 1940s and 50s. Luckily, I was old enough to have seen some of her movies. She wanted to send a telegram so I loaded the proper form into a typewriter that wasn’t in use and proceeded to take her telegram. In the process we chit-chatted a bit. She apparently was a frequent caller since she didn’t recognize my voice. So that opened up the opportunity for us to get somewhat acquainted. The call ended with her inviting me over for a visit primarily to get to know both her and her son whom she had mentioned who was close to my age. “You two would get on famously,” she said.
In the Santa Monica office there was nothing particularly special about picking up the phone and finding, for example, Mae West – a veritable Hollywood legend – on the other end asking to speak to Molly (a middle-aged, red-headed Jewish telephone operator I had inherited). If Molly was tied up, then the task of entertaining Mae West fell to me until Molly was free. The best way to describe Mae was simply a lonely old woman decades past her glory days. She actually said to me one day, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” A line she was famous for from one or two of her movies. I suspect she was serious.
So, working my way down through the stack of “call-back” messages I found myself looking at one from MM. Having no idea who that might be, I asked the person who took the call. “Oh, that’s Marilyn Monroe.” Well, holy shit! Being that it was Marilyn Monroe was stunning all by itself. But it was magnified considerably given that she had been found dead in her house just two or three days before. If I had given that stack of messages a greater priority, chances are I would be telling you the story of the time I actually talked to the undeniably sexiest woman on the planet. [Extract from my "Anecdotes" books available at amazon.com]
