Telegraph Company

I made a friend named Al Poopidada. My sister Viola did not think much of my friend. She said, “What kind of a name is that????.”  Al had rabbits and needed food to feed them. It was his habit to go behind the stores in the dumpsters and get out the lettuce whatever the rabbits would eat. I decided that when he went to get this food I would go along with him. So this would be about 5 a.m. and I would still be sleeping. So our bedrooms were on the 2^nd floor in the house on W 116^th Street. I tied a light cord around my ankle and left the cord hanging outside window. When he came along he would pull on the cord and wake me up. I would quickly get dressed and while everybody was still sleeping I would go out with him.

Then, we decided to run a wire between his house and mine to use as a telegraph wire. He lived on the next street just about across from the house where we lived. There were telegraph poles and we ran the wire across the main street and across the big field and into my house. We managed it with some difficulty. Then we had a telegraph key that gave us the dots and dashes and we had to learn the letters so we could send messages back and forth. For the power we used a Ford coil and a car battery. Finally after a lot of work we got it operational.

At a pre-arranged time he would home and I would be at my home. We sent messages like, “How’s the weather over there?” It worked very well. But, pretty soon my father started getting complaints about static in the air and it was being picked up on the radios. We didn’t have television at that time. Everybody listened to the radio – programs like Fibber McGee and Molly. The static was our dot and dash. We didn’t realize the radios were picking this up.

The neighbors started with my Dad because they knew if there was anything going on in the neighborhood it was probably started by us. We operated our telegraph system for two full days before we were put out of business.

We were going to call our telegraph company Clyde Schumann and Al Poopidada Telegraph Company. This must have been the shortest lived telegraph company in the history of that sort of thing.

As far as I know the wires may still be up there on the telegraph poles because we never took them down.