The Telegraph That Penciled In Irving Berlin’s Love Story

One of America’s most famous songwriters. His disinherited flapper heiress fianceé. Her silver miner grandpa who hit the the mother lode. Their stories are all united with a simple pencil.

It’s the height of the Great Depression, jobs are scarce and money is tight. You’re heading down to “The Postal” with a quarter clenched in your fist, ready to send a life-changing note to your wife-to-be, parents, or boss. But first, you need to grab this unassuming purple pencil with “Postal Telegraph” written in a lightning bolt font up the side, and jot down your dire communique in 10 words or less, not including punctuation. STOP.

Postal Telegraph, which the New York Times once called “the only successful rival which the Western Union has ever found,” went out of business in 1943, but this 1930’s PT pencil has survived to remind us of a time when everyone from paupers to presidents marched down to “The Postal” to send their era’s version of a text message.

Walt Disney did. So did pencil enthusiast John Steinbeck (in a long missive to President Franklin Roosevelt) and a pre-presidential JFK did too. Bob Hope, Babe Ruth, you name ‘em, they sent or received Postal Telegrams. And in an earlier era, so did a Wright Brother, and radio pioneer Marconi had a back and forth with Alexander Graham Bell. Yes, THAT Alexander Graham Bell.

And it would not have been possible without an army of these purple pencils, waiting at the ready at the coast-to-coast offices of the Postal Telegraph, a company that had sprung to life when Irish-born John Mackay hit a bonanza of silver in Nevada’s Comstock Lode in the 1860s and decided to start a cable and telegraph company.

By 1893, PT had hoarded so much coin that Mackay built a newfangled 14 story “skyscraper,” in downtown Manhattan that still stands to this day. Landmarked in 1991 [pdf], New York’s Postal Telegraph building sits across the street from City Hall and what was once “newspaper row.” So you can just imagine how many politicos and jittery reporters stomped into the ground floor office of the building to pencil in telegram blanks that sent huge scoops and other world-moving news across the city, state and country.

As early as 1892, female Postal Telegraph operators were recognized as being on the forefront of a movement for greater careers for women. Eventually, college-aged girls could be PT messengers too, but barred from using bikes like the boys, they ended up walking upwards of 12 miles a day, often bearing the heart-rending strain of delivering terrible news, usually the death or illness of a loved one pencilled in by a bereaved relative far away.

By the time John Mackay passed away in 1902, his son Clarence was running the company. Just a year later, Clarence’s lovely daughter Ellin would be born. But she was destined to become a thoroughly modern woman. Around the time this Postal Telegraph pencil began to be mass-produced, 21-year-old Ellin, a respected writer and future novelist, and 36-year-old superstar jazz age songwriter Irving Berlin fell in love. Her daddy Clarence vehemently opposed the relationship because their family was staunchly Roman Catholic, while Berlin was Russian and Jewish. A couple days after New Year’s 1926, Ellin Mackay and Irving Berlin snuck off to the New York City Clerk’s office, literally 700 feet from her dad’s Postal Telegraph Building, and secretly got married, which amounts to a pretty colossal middle finger to dear old dad.

All the papers (also about 700 feet away) carried screaming headlines the next day, and dear old dad disinherited Ellin and wouldn’t even let her visit home for five years. Irving would write her many a love song, including the classic “Always” that he gave her for a wedding present (and we hope he used a Postal Telegraph pencil to compose it). Ellin and Irving were ultimately married for 62 years, until her death when she was 85. Irving died a year later at age 101!

And who knows just how many singing telegrams, a format Postal Telegraph invented in 1933, featuring one of Berlin’s love songs for Ellin were ordered with one of these purple PT pencils before the last one was delivered in person in 1942? Only the pencil knows.

The Postal Telegraph company would finally be eaten whole by its more famous rival, Western Union, in 1943, the 540th company forcibly acquired by telegraphy giant. In a perfect karmic twist, Western Union spent the rest of WWII using up Postal Telegraph blanks, uniforms, and yes, pencils like this one.

Neither company sends telegrams anymore, but once upon a time a purple Postal Telegraph pencil like this bore witness to the most important moments of American lives, great and ordinary.  -Jessica Letkemann

Graphite Confidential Newsreel Edition: Ad Pencils That Advertise Pencils

Dateline - New York. March 30, 2018. It’s National Pencil Day, and Graphite Confidential is celebrating with a long lost, newly discovered newsreel that uncovers the shocking truth about the advertising pencils that companies around the U.S.A. made to — you guessed it — advertise pencils.

But seriously, we put on our finest fake 1950s announcer voices and ginned up this historical black-and-white "filmstrip" on ye olde iPhones for your viewing pleasure. Happy National Pencil Day, and may the Hymen Lipman* be with you.

*Hymen Lipman, which you probably already know because you’re reading a niche pencil site right now, was the first person to patent a pencil with an attached eraser in the United States. National Pencil Day celebrates the day his patent was filed in 1858, exactly 160 years ago.

Blind New Yorkers Take Pencils Off The Streets

Picture it: a famous New York governor at the top of the Empire State Building ostentatiously buying a pencil from a little blind girl in 1933, mugging for reporters and newsreel cameras. Now imagine one of those pencils in your own hand, spat out of a Lower Manhattan vending machine over 80 years later.

Its eraser died a dried-out death before your parents were born, and the type along its hexagonal barrel looks like boring fine print from an ancient IRS tax form, but this maroon pencil was actually an instrument wielded not only by that governor, but by mayors, socialites and everyday New Yorkers in one of the first successful efforts to treat people with disabilities like the full-fledged members of human society they are.

The idea of the blind beggar selling pencils on city streets was already a stereotype by the time legendary journalist/reformer Jacob Riis wrote How The Other Half Lives in 1890 in New York: “There is no provision for him anywhere…The annual pittance of 30 or 40 dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide.”

It would be Jewish New Yorkers, another oppressed group that Riis wrote about, who would proudly appropriate that blind man stereotype 24 years later and turn it into a decades-long, city-wide movement greater than simple or individual charity.

When the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind was founded in 1914, its officers set up a Pencil Office and launched its first pencil drive to fund the guild’s welfare department, the Yonkers home for the blind eventually built in 1920, and other services including education and jobs for the blind.

By 1930, the Pencil Office was located on west 72nd street and employed five blind girls stamping “To Aid N.Y. Guild For The Jewish Blind” on thousands of pencils annually, including the specimen that we discovered. 

Ex-New York governor Al Smith, Democratic nominee for president of the United States just a few years earlier, was the celebrity face kicking off the 1933 drive by buying one of these maroon “To Aid N.Y. Guild For the Jewish Blind” pencils from seven-year-old Hannah Seidenfeld at the top of the Empire State Building that September. 

The next year, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia launched the 20th annual pencil drive at City Hall on September 18, 1934 by purchasing the first package of the campaign from a blind nine-year-old ward of the Guild named Bertha.

As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency put it in their preview of the ceremonial event at City Hall that day, “The Guild’s pencils, bearing the inscription: ‘To Aid N. Y. Guild for the Jewish Blind,’ are today known in thousands of homes and offices, and have come to be a symbol of help for the destitute blind.”

The New York Guild for the Jewish Blind would later change its name to the Jewish Guild For the Blind, to underline the fact that its services were open to all, not just Jewish New Yorkers. Today, over a century after that first pencil drive in gilded-age Manhattan, the Guild has merged with Lighthouse International to become one of the biggest organizations in the world for the blind.

And it was all because a few New Yorkers in 1914 thought that selling blind folks selling pencils might actually be the start of something great. -Jessica Letkemann