In 1970, big news arrived on paper, delivered to your door. Not email, not a phone call, not a text message — a Western Union telegram, all capital letters, punctuation spelled out or dropped, and the sender paying by the word. This one came to my parents’ house on Ortega Street in San Francisco while I was a journalism student at San Francisco State.
THE AWARDS COMMITTEE HAS NAMED YOU A 1971 SEARS CONGRESSIONAL JOURNALISM INTERN AND IS ARRANGING FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT TO A CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE STAFF, FULL DETAILS WILL FOLLOW BY LETTER IN MID-JUNE, PLEASE SEND IMMEDIATELY YOUR SUMMER ADDRESS AND TELEPHONE NUMBER ROTH AT RESIDENCE AND PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT. CONGRATULATIONSS
The telegram is dated May 20, 1970, and it is signed by:
JOHN L WHEELER, VICE PRESIDENT, GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, SEARS, ROEBUCK AND CO, 1211 CONNECTICUT AVENLE WASHINGTON, D.C. 20056
Note the address: the telegram was sent by a corporate executive in Washington, D.C. The awards committee named the interns; the details — where you would actually be working, and for whom — would follow by letter in mid-June. In other words, you were told you had won before anyone could tell you what you had won.
The image itself is a reminder of how these documents were made. The routing codes across the top, the operator’s marks, the transmission time stamps, the form number at the bottom — all of it printed around a message that a machine typed out at the receiving end. The optical character reader stumbles over parts of it, which is fair; so does the eye. “BOTH” became “ROTH.” “AVENUE” became “AVENLE.”
Looking at it now, more than fifty years on, what strikes me is that a piece of news that changed the direction of a young journalist’s year came as a fragile sheet of paper with a glued-on tape of type. Today the same message would be an email, or a notification on a phone, gone from view in a week and unfindable in a year. The telegram survived because it was an object, and because I thought it was worth keeping. That is a decent argument for archives, and part of why these documents are here.