M's note: I found this on the computer in the business center at the Lenbrook. Kathleen had begun an autobiography, partly at the urging of Richard Prince (who lived on her floor in the Brookhaven Tower - the date/time of the post is guesswork for when it was composed). Ultimately, Kathleen dictated it and Martha Bell (of Peachtree Christian) typed it up (I'm not sure how it ended up on the business center computer hardrive but fortunately it did).
by Kathleen Lindsey
Chapter 1 (Telegrams, Trains, Railroad Depots, Telegraphers)
I have been encouraged to write about my early years of growing up with the telegraph keys, trains and railroads. I don’t suppose there are too many of us left to tell the story.
Both of my parents were telegraphers and station agents for the Southern Railroad, now Norfolk Southern. Dad taught mother telegraphy during World War II when there was a shortage of men and a great need from the troop trains were running and there were important acts of war.
Mother was quite young—still in her teens and I was a baby at the time. The next door neighbor kept me while Mother worked. Dad was self-taught by hanging around the railroad station at a small town where his brothers, my Uncle Paytaw lived. The railroad agent in the small town chose him.
Dad had left the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near Hendersonville, for the flat lands of Estell, South Carolina. He had grown up on a beautiful farm with a large family—four brothers and four sisters. Telegraphy was in its hay day at the time. It seemed to appeal to him as a career. He had just been out of the Army and had been dismissed during peace times. He was successful in getting a job, or jobs, and worked for the Southern for some forty years.
So I grew up in this fascinating era of telegrams and train rides galore. Much of my childhood was spent the railroad office of my mother. After school, I would walk to the office to be with mother. The telegraph wires would be clicking—clickity click.
There was several keys and sounders in the operation where the dots and dashes of the morse code would be sending messages from all over. I learned the morse code at an early age. It was like a game to me like learning your ABC’s. As a child, I talked with my Dad on the keys, with mother’s help, and this is a memorable experience. I had the strangest feeling at this moment of time.
Telegraphs were going hither and yond on the clicking keys with a symphony of different tones and pitches, some slow and some very fast. The operator had to keep an ear on alert for a special que in order to answer his or her call. Actually, the office became quite noisy at times to the extent that the sounds would bother me and mother had a way of quieting things down. One way was to stick a pencil in a certain part of the sounder. Another was to have a tobacco can placed on the sounder—I think to make louder or resonate softer.
I still have a telegraph key and sounder that was used by my parents. I also have an instrument that was called a “bug” that was used for fast sending of messages. So called, because the instrument message was so fast that it made a buzz similar to a bug. My Dad used it a lot. He was a faster sender than my mother, although she was very good. Dad had more experience. These instruments are in my possession and are for sale.
My mother had a good thought to keep them. She had key placed on a board for travel to Atlanta to the Morse Club Historical Society Annual Meeting which used to take place annually at the Atlanta Woman’s Club. The key was hooked up to a battery so that she could send a message to the main center celebration which I think was in Philadelphia. I was introduced as having cut my teeth on the telegraph key, which was so funny to me but almost true. I thoroughly enjoyed these meetings because the participants had so many interesting tales to tell as we went around the tables. I wished I had recorded them in some way. Now they are all gone and the meetings no longer exist. It is sad to me that this great era is gone. I will attempt to describe in more detail some of the instruments that equipped the railroad office during the time my parents were telegraphers. I have a few pictures of the station—one especially of me and my mother standing at the entrance to the depot and showing a flower garden that she had planted to beautify the area—I was young, about 8 years old and I had a big bow in my hair (picture). This picture appeared in a journal called The Telegrapher (I think) that was published by the railroad and I did have a copy. I did have a copy, but this article has been lost. It was complimentary to my mother and so the good caretaking that she had with the depot in trying to keep the yard pretty with flowers. It was the responsibility of the agent to keep the depot clean and also the yards.
The office had the telegraph wires to the right of the door as you entered and then there was a big desk to the left of the door where mother’s big desk was. There was a big pot belly stove in the center of the room, a setee close by, and then on the opposite side of the room there were 2 big desks. One of them I claimed as mine and I had a typewriter and an ink well. It was the kind of pen that you dip in the ink and, of course, I enjoyed that. Also, indelible pencils which were purple and leave a little purple mark and I loved that color of the pencil. I had paper and pencil, and I probably used up a lot of Southern Railway papers and stationery and I would write letters to my cousin Mary which was fun. We would write each other back and forth.
The office opened into the freight room and inside the freight room was a blue jar which had a copper foot in the blue water and it had wires that were hooked up and that supplied the electricity for the sounder and keys. I will describe this more later in the story.
The office had large windows, kind of like a bay window, from the ceiling to the desk top so that mother could look up and down the railroad track and see the train coming. On the other side of the room was another large bay window from ceiling down to desk level. The Branch line had only one train that came daily, usually late in the afternoon, around 4:00 pm, and this was the big event of the day because it brought freight. It also picked up freight and it went up into the mill yard and across the highway—it was about half a mile up to the mill and dad had a station just about a mile away in a small town called Bath, South Carolina. He had a different type office—a busier office. It was on what’s called “the main line” and he did passenger service as well as freight and express and, of course, handled the mail from the post office there. Mother had the same thing, except for the passenger. There was no selling of tickets to ride the train.
Outside of the station was a big platform that went all around the right side, the back and the left side which was sort of the front of the depot and there were two doors at the opposite end of the place that had originally been for passengers, but apparently, they decided not to sell tickets at that station. One was labeled “white” above the door; and one was labeled “colored” above the door. But, an odd thing happened. It seemed that we didn’t have a place to live there for a while and we lived in the depot itself—somehow through special arrangements with the railroad and so those waiting rooms which were supposed to be seats for passengers were used as a “condo” for us to live in and they put running water in the kitchen which was one of the waiting rooms and that was our kitchen and dinette and the other passenger room was used for a bedroom. Our office was our sitting room. That was it! We lived there until Dad found a better living arrangement.
He had a garden across the railroad tracks which were close to the station and my Dad was a farmer at heart. Dad also had a cow and she had a stall at the far end of the station. It was just a little place he could stand and put a tin roof over it and we had some chickens—so we had eggs and actually I guess there was no store close by. We had our garden and our milk and eggs and that was the way it was.
I remember one time we had picked a lot of butter beans and spread them out on a sheet in the warehouse. We were selling butter beans and I was little. They had a big pile of beans in the middle of the sheet, and it was mother, me and my uncle and a few others shelling beans. It was tempting to me to play in those beans and so I did that. My uncle told me not to play in the beans, and I evidentally didn’t stop it. I got a spanking—the only real spanking I ever got—from my Uncle Herbert. That’s my butter bean story.
I used to play on the platform outside a lot and walk around the station. There were rain barrels on each corner and on the far end of the depot. They contained water with kerosene in them. It made a filmy top which was to keep the mosquitoes down. At the far end of the depot was an outhouse and we did have running water, but there was no bathtub or anything like that. I remember getting a bath in a galvanized metal tub and mother would heat water on the stove and that was the only way we had hot water. I think I got a bath in the tub once or twice a week.
We used a kerosene lamp and candles and I remember one lamp that we had was called a land lamp and it had a real white wick that made a real bright light and we loved that. I still have that lamp and had it converted to an electric lamp.
At night, instead of the outhouse, we used a chamber pot or sometimes called a slop jar with a lid on the top. Mother kept it smelling good with something like Creole in it—sort of like a disinfectant and it had a piney smell to it.
In the freight room, there were two long boards called “skids” and they were used when the train came and the box car door opened, those two skids would be put in the box car and that was the way to bring the freight up from the box card to the freight room. That was something interesting to watch when the train crew would come, it would be a happy time for me because the train crew all knew me and they, of course, would first play with me a little bit, and then they would get with mother about the work that was to be done. Sometimes they took me for a ride on the engine up into the mill yard and I got to sit way up high where the engineer sits. I could feel the heat from the firebox where they put the coal which was red hot. So much heat came out it almost scared you and it was at the same time a very exciting time for me and a little bit scary—the heat and seeing those red coals when they would put fresh coal in with a shovel to the coal. That’s what made the train go.
Another interesting part of the train to me was the caboose (that’s the last car on the train that has the little light hanging down from it). That was always the end of the train. At one time I would go in and see the caboose inside—that was where they kept their papers and important things in a little desk for a long desk. For a long time I had the little desk…it had little pigeonholes in it that they kept different pieces of their mail and papers.
The little town where mother had her station was called Clearwater and my father’s station was Bath, and so some of us said you go to Clearwater and take a Bath. Anyway, that was just a funny thing, but the little town itself was owned practically by the mill company—the manufacturing company that manufactured textiles. It was very small, just a couple hundred people maybe, and it had a church, I think it was a Methodist Church. Everybody went to the same church and I remember Mother used to play the piano some. She was taking music lessons on the side and there was a music teacher in that town. She was very good. She later moved to Aiken and I took music lessons from her for quite some time. I would ride up to Aiken on the streetcar.
Besides the church in Clearwater there was a company store. That was the only store in the town and I think they had a little bit of everything—kind of like a country store. There was a community center and there was a nice lady that ran that. She taught the girls courses like home ec. She taught us how to make simple things. You could go there to play games and they would have entertainment at times. The school that I first went to in the first grade, I remember, was very small—like a one room school house. They later built a nice grammar school there and I went through the 5th grade there. My 5th grade teacher was Mrs. Mimms and she seemed to take a liking to me and I made a scrapbook during the 5th grade. She gave me magazines and things that I cut out and pasted into an album and strangely enough, I found through a friend of mine, that they had placed that book in the education department there in Aiken which is the County seat and it was on display there. I had never known that and I was a little bit proud to know that happened. It was all about South Carolina.
After the 5th grade my Dad found a home in Bath where he worked, which was just a mile away, and we moved from the depot to Bath and I transferred to the public school there.
We moved into a much bigger house and it had running water. Dad had installed a pump and we had a Delco system, and we had a bathroom. I think by this time we had electricity. I was older and I went to the latter part of grammar school at Bath. After that, I went to a high school called Langley- Bath which was from two small towns—Langley (just beyond Bath) and they combined to have the school named Langley-Bath High School.
Telegraphy Instruments
(M's note; this was to be the next chapter. Kathleen had some actual telegraph instruments in her apartment. We gave these to Mr. Prince for him to donate to any institution that would like to display them.)
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