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Speaker 1: This Day in History Class is a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,

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Speaker 1: a show for those who can never know enough about history.

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Speaker 1: I'm Gabe Lousier, and in this episode we're talking about

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Speaker 1: a whimsical milestone in communications history, the day when singing

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Speaker 1: telegrams took center stage. The day was July three. A

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Speaker 1: Western Union operator named Lucille Lips delivered the company's first

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Speaker 1: singing telegram. The musical message was delivered by phone to

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Speaker 1: American crooner turned band leader Rudy Valley on the occasion

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Speaker 1: of his thirty second birthday. The song that was sung

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Speaker 1: to him was, of course, Happy Birthday. In the months

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Speaker 1: and years that followed, customers could choose from a selection

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Speaker 1: of well known tunes and even supply their own lyrical

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Speaker 1: changes to better suit the occasion they were marking, from

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Speaker 1: birthdays and anniversaries to baby announcements and job promotions. The

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Speaker 1: singing telegram was a charmingly silly way to celebrate them all.

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Speaker 1: Although Western Union would later become synonymous with the singing service,

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Speaker 1: it's believed the concept originated with its chief rival, the

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Speaker 1: Postal Telegraph Cable Company. One of Postals messengers delivered what

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Speaker 1: it claimed was the world's first singing telegram on February tenth,

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Speaker 1: thirty three, five months before Western Union. The idea was

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Speaker 1: clearly good enough to copy, but it wasn't good enough

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Speaker 1: to keep postal afloat. Within ten years, the company was

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Speaker 1: on the verge of bankruptcy and had no choice but

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Speaker 1: to merge with the much larger Western Union. It's worth

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Speaker 1: noting that Western Union doesn't officially acknowledge the singing telegram

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Speaker 1: delivered by its competition. According to the company, the idea

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Speaker 1: of setting telegrams to song came from its own public

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Speaker 1: relations director, George P. Oslin. As the story goes, on

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Speaker 1: July twenty eighth, Oslin was reading the morning paper in

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Speaker 1: his New York City office when he noticed the accompanying

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Speaker 1: illustration for one of the articles. It showed a distraught,

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Speaker 1: elderly woman fainting on her doorstep at the sight of

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Speaker 1: a Western Union messenger. The caption read, quote the U.

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Speaker 1: S Government regrets to inform you. The comic played into

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Speaker 1: the public perception of telegrams at the time. In the

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Speaker 1: midst of the Great Depression, few people could afford to

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Speaker 1: send the costly little messages, and those that could were

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Speaker 1: careful to do so only when truly necessary. After all,

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Speaker 1: as the newspaper drawing implied, most people only sent telegrams

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Speaker 1: to deliver bad news. The realization hit Oslin like a

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Speaker 1: ton of bricks. He had a product that wasn't fun

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Speaker 1: to send or to receive. With that in mind, he

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Speaker 1: began looking through the messages that had come in for

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Speaker 1: delivery that morning. Among the various notices of death and

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Speaker 1: other grim tidings, he came across a message from a

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Speaker 1: fan of Rudy Valley wishing the singer a happy birthday.

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Speaker 1: This lighthearted note gave Oslin an idea of how to

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Speaker 1: get the public to associate telegrams with fun and frivolity

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Speaker 1: rather than disappointment and tragic news. He asked around the

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Speaker 1: office for an operator who was, as he put it,

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Speaker 1: a dead game sport, or, in other words, someone who

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Speaker 1: was willing to sing happy birthday to a famous singer

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Speaker 1: over the phone. The search led him to Lucille Lips,

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Speaker 1: an aptly named operator who was able to track down

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Speaker 1: Valley's phone number and get the star on the line.

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Speaker 1: After explaining that the message was from one of his fans,

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Speaker 1: lips launched into a lively condition of happy Birthday. According

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Speaker 1: to Oslin, the performance was met by confused silence and

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Speaker 1: then a kurt thank you before the line went dead.

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Speaker 1: Of course, the whole exercise would have been pointless if

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Speaker 1: the public didn't hear about it, so to make sure

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Speaker 1: they did, Oslin leaked the story to the press, and

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Speaker 1: soon after, requests came pouring in for singing telegrams, just

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Speaker 1: like the one delivered to Rudy Valley. Decades later, the

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Speaker 1: former teen idol referred to the incident as quote a

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Speaker 1: phony stunt by the publicity people at Western Union. That's

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Speaker 1: one way to look at it, but the company prefers

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Speaker 1: to think of it as the birth of the singing telegram. However,

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Speaker 1: Valley wasn't alone in his criticism of the new medium.

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Speaker 1: Western Union executives weren't sold on it either. They worried

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Speaker 1: the consumers wouldn't take the company seriously if their messengers

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Speaker 1: started bursting into song on people's doorsteps. Nonetheless, singing to

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Speaker 1: telegrams were offered on a trial basis. Due to the

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Speaker 1: public's enthusiastic response to the idea, Sales were strong, particularly

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Speaker 1: around holidays and especially around Valentine's Day. At first, customers

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Speaker 1: could choose whether they wanted their song delivered by a

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Speaker 1: phone operator were sung in person by a uniformed messenger.

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Speaker 1: Most customers chose the latter option, as relatively few people

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Speaker 1: own telephones in the early nineteen thirties, though of course

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Speaker 1: they soon would. Western unions suspended the service altogether during

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Speaker 1: World War Two, but when it resumed in nineteen fifty,

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Speaker 1: all the singing was done over the phone. By then,

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Speaker 1: the singing telegram was no longer the novelty it once was.

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Speaker 1: The services popularity steadily declined over the next two decades,

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Speaker 1: and by nine seventy less than two tenths of one

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Speaker 1: percent of all telegrams were singing messages. That poor showing

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Speaker 1: looks even worse when you consider that regular telegram usage

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Speaker 1: had also fallen sharply thanks to the rise of the telephone.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen forty two, at the telegram's peak, Americans sent

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Speaker 1: roughly two hundred and forty five million of them. By

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy that number had fallen to forty million, and

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Speaker 1: when a strike was called the following year, it plunged

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Speaker 1: to just fourteen million. With singing telegrams. Accounting for such

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Speaker 1: a minor slice of that business, it was only a

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Speaker 1: matter of time until the service was axed for good.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, Western Union spokesman Kenneth maw heralded

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Speaker 1: the emminent demise, saying, quote, the singing telegram is no

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Speaker 1: longer a service that people are asking for, and we're

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Speaker 1: having a lot of trouble getting operators to do the singing.

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Speaker 1: The company began phasing out the service state by state

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Speaker 1: that same year, and in nineteen seventy four it was

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Speaker 1: dropped completely. From then on, Western Union shifted its focus

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Speaker 1: from communications services to financial services such as money wiring.

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Speaker 1: But a funny thing happened. When the company gave up

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Speaker 1: on singing telegrams, other companies stepped in to fill the void.

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Speaker 1: In the late nineteen seventies, thousands of small businesses resurrected

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Speaker 1: the idea and turned it into a multimillion dollar industry.

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Speaker 1: They offered traditional singing telegrams delivered by employees in sharp

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Speaker 1: uniforms or costumes, but there was also a host of

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Speaker 1: other options that Western Union never thought of. Balloon grams,

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Speaker 1: cookie grams, kisso grams, and even stripper grams. The success

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Speaker 1: of these services alured Western Union back into the game,

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Speaker 1: and in the company began offering singing telegrams once again,

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Speaker 1: though still only over the phone and with a much

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Speaker 1: smaller selection of songs to choose from. This unexpected revival

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Speaker 1: never fully recaptured the services former glory, but it continued

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Speaker 1: to be offered with limited availability until two thousand six,

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Speaker 1: when Western Union finally stopped a ring telegrams of any kind.

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Speaker 1: The singing telegram may be gone, but the idea of

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Speaker 1: it lives on. Some companies still offer live singing messengers,

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Speaker 1: and digital services like Cameo, as well as social media platforms,

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Speaker 1: make it easier than ever to send a musical greeting

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Speaker 1: to someone you know. That's not the same as having

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Speaker 1: a singer in a spiffy uniform sarenh ade you on

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Speaker 1: your doorstep, But as fans of the movie Clue can

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Speaker 1: tell you, not everyone was a fan of that in

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Speaker 1: the first place. I your singing telegrams. I'm Gabe Lousier

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Speaker 1: and hopefully you now know a little more about history

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Speaker 1: today than you did yesterday. You can learn even more

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Speaker 1: about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Speaker 1: At t d i HC show. You can also rate

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Speaker 1: and review the show on Apple Podcasts, or you can

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Speaker 1: write to me directly at this day at I heart

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Speaker 1: media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,

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Speaker 1: and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here

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Speaker 1: again tomorrow for another day in History class