Sunday, May 25, 1997

Evolving at telegram's speed

By Bob Greene

"In the last few days, the Air Force has received hundreds of letters and E-mail messages that are largely sympathetic to Lieutenant Flinn. One person even sent a Western Union telegram demanding that the Air Force end its persecution of her."

That paragraph - from a national news story about Air Force Lt. Kelly Flinn - inadvertently points out how American life is changing, just as, in far different ways, the case of Lt. Flinn herself points out other changes. Lt. Flinn - the United States' first female B-52 pilot - found herself in disciplinary trouble with the Air Force because of two personal relationships she allegedly had, one with a married civilian man, one with an enlisted Air Force man. Both were against the rules, and Lt. Flinn found her military career thrown into uncertainty because of this.

Many people immediately questioned whether a male officer would find himself in the same kind of trouble had that male officer been accused of committing the same kinds of transgressions. The hypothetical male officer's romances would have been ignored or forgiven, Lt. Flinn's supporters said - she was facing such harsh discipline because she was a woman who made some romantic mistakes, romantic mistakes a male officer might have been allowed to get away with.

Thus, the paragraph from the news story:

"In the last few days, the Air Force has received hundreds of letters and E-mail messages that are largely sympathetic to Lieutenant Flinn. One person even sent a Western Union telegram demanding that the Air Force end its persecution of her."

You have read and will read many analyses of what Lt. Flinn is going through. But as a societal sidelight, that one sentence about the person who "even sent a Western Union telegram" speaks volumes.

It was written with a tone of incredulity - it might as well have read, "One person even sent smoke signals to the Air Force." Sending a Western Union telegram is considered so odd these days, so man-bites-dog, that it is reported as a sign of weirdness. You think a female Air Force lieutenant being punished for out-of-bounds romances is strange?

How about this - someone even sent a telegram.

There was a time in this country when telegrams were the coin of the communications realm. As social commentator Mary Schmich wrote recently, "In this fax and phone and e-mail age, does anyone get any news by telegram? Are Midwesterners still traveling to California in Conestoga wagons?" But telegrams were once sent 200 million times a year by Americans. Today, according to one report, they are sent fewer than 200,000 times a year - the majority of those a special kind of telegram sent to relay opinions to Capitol Hill in Washington. In the rest of the country, according to the report, an average of 5.5 telegrams a day per state are sent.

And the surprising thing about that is not that only 5 or 6 telegrams a day are sent in, say, South Dakota. The surprising thing is that any telegrams at all are sent.

It costs more than $30 for a person to send a short telegram to another person. With inexpensive long-distance phone service, fax machines in most offices and in many homes, instantly delivered electronic mail available through the worldwide computer network, there seems to be no good reason to send a telegram.

Most people, even if they had the inclination to do it, wouldn't know how - the traditional Western Union telegraph office, for much of the century a familiar sight in big towns and small, and at railroad stations, has all but disappeared. Western Union transfers money from place to place - but Western Union as a sender of words, as a place to stop in in an effort to speed your thoughts from one part of the country to another, has vanished into the mists.

There was something important about a Western Union telegram - something that made the pulse race, something that was more than a little scary, something that had the potential to change the life of the person who opened the yellow envelope. There was something that promised to change a personal history. Like so many parts of our national life that gradually die, it takes an unexpected reference to make us realize that it is, indeed, just about gone. "

One person even sent a Western Union telegram." Stop the presses: Someone sent a telegram.

Chicago Tribune