Past Present Feature
Jim Munsey, left, and his pal Bill Buchanan, two of the 66 members of the Edmonton chapter of the Morse Telegraph Club, were guests at the MACT 2012 Spring Institute this morning at the University of Alberta. Gordon Gow , who directs the program, invited me to drop by and listen in, and it was a fascinating hour as the present intersected with the past. The gentlemen railway operators talked about their love of telegraphy, the history of the invention, the meaning of What Hath God Wrought!, railway timetables, and the characters who used the electric dots and dashes to tell the stories of their time. A lot of thoughts struck me as I sat there, and most of them had to do with the passage of time. To hear the pair talk about picture shows preserved a sense of the newness of movies for them. To have someone standing in front of you saying his father was in the First World War was not like reading those words in a book or diary. To hear them explain, and see the spark in t...