Fond Memories Of...The Teletype?

By Frank Absher

I still have nightmares of getting to work and finding that the teletype has run out of paper.

Yes, that makes me an official old fart.

It was an empty feeling, getting into the studios at 4:30 in the morning and realizing that the news broadcasts you’re responsible for filling would be a bit short on content, and that it was your job to keep the listeners from realizing that.

Of course, you could always call the bureau and ask for a refeed, but it would come across with your call letters on it so everyone would know your night guy forgot to make sure there was enough paper to last through to morning.

There were other mini-disasters, like the paper jam. There would be shredded paper everywhere and a tangled ribbon to be extracted from the frozen mechanism. Then, with ink-stained hands you’d rethread the paper and call the bureau – again.

Teletypes were interesting creatures. They had a mind of their own, and the chatting rhythm could lull a newsman into a false sense of power, knowing that he had the first access to any breaking information. He alone could control when his listeners would hear the news.

That machine would sit there chugging out material. You could read the price of pork bellies or the temperature in Taipei. There were regular five-minute news summaries you could rip and read, and each contained a semi-humorous kicker. They’d even run an overnight roundup of all the day’s kickers.

During my first time in Alaska broadcasting, (1969) the teletype took on an added function.

The closest overnight bureau was in Seattle, some 1,400 air miles from Anchorage, and station managers hated paying long-distance bills. The wire services gave us an option that saved money.

Each wire service subscriber in the state had a keyboard on the teletype, and when the local split came, we could type whatever we wanted and communicate it to everyone along the Alaska circuit. That was how we posted our stories for the others to use.

Of course, during those times when there wasn’t a lot of news, we wrote whatever we wanted. It was another way to entertain ourselves during those long, cold overnight and early morning shifts.

And there was one other function served by those old machines, although it wasn’t well-known. One guy I knew used to nail groupies with the help of the teletype. It seems a woman backed up against a warm, wobbling teletype was provided with an experience that was both unique and memorable. One can only wonder how she explained those ink stains to her mother (or husband).

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