Western Union delivers its first singing telegram - July 28th, 1933

On this day in 1933, a Western Union operator named Lucille Lipps delivered the company’s first singing telegram.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show for those who can never know enough about history.

(00:20):
I'm Gabe Lousier, and in this episode we're talking about
a whimsical milestone in communications history, the day when singing
telegrams took center stage. The day was July three. A

(00:43):
Western Union operator named Lucille Lips delivered the company's first
singing telegram. The musical message was delivered by phone to
American crooner turned band leader Rudy Valley on the occasion
of his thirty second birthday. The song that was sung
to him was, of course, Happy Birthday. In the months

(01:04):
and years that followed, customers could choose from a selection
of well known tunes and even supply their own lyrical
changes to better suit the occasion they were marking, from
birthdays and anniversaries to baby announcements and job promotions. The
singing telegram was a charmingly silly way to celebrate them all.
Although Western Union would later become synonymous with the singing service,

(01:29):
it's believed the concept originated with its chief rival, the
Postal Telegraph Cable Company. One of Postals messengers delivered what
it claimed was the world's first singing telegram on February tenth,
thirty three, five months before Western Union. The idea was
clearly good enough to copy, but it wasn't good enough

(01:50):
to keep postal afloat. Within ten years, the company was
on the verge of bankruptcy and had no choice but
to merge with the much larger Western Union. It's worth
noting that Western Union doesn't officially acknowledge the singing telegram
delivered by its competition. According to the company, the idea
of setting telegrams to song came from its own public

(02:13):
relations director, George P. Oslin. As the story goes, on
July twenty eighth, Oslin was reading the morning paper in
his New York City office when he noticed the accompanying
illustration for one of the articles. It showed a distraught,
elderly woman fainting on her doorstep at the sight of
a Western Union messenger. The caption read, quote the U.

(02:36):
S Government regrets to inform you. The comic played into
the public perception of telegrams at the time. In the
midst of the Great Depression, few people could afford to
send the costly little messages, and those that could were
careful to do so only when truly necessary. After all,
as the newspaper drawing implied, most people only sent telegrams

(02:58):
to deliver bad news. The realization hit Oslin like a
ton of bricks. He had a product that wasn't fun
to send or to receive. With that in mind, he
began looking through the messages that had come in for
delivery that morning. Among the various notices of death and
other grim tidings, he came across a message from a

(03:19):
fan of Rudy Valley wishing the singer a happy birthday.
This lighthearted note gave Oslin an idea of how to
get the public to associate telegrams with fun and frivolity
rather than disappointment and tragic news. He asked around the
office for an operator who was, as he put it,
a dead game sport, or, in other words, someone who

(03:42):
was willing to sing happy birthday to a famous singer
over the phone. The search led him to Lucille Lips,
an aptly named operator who was able to track down
Valley's phone number and get the star on the line.
After explaining that the message was from one of his fans,
lips launched into a lively condition of happy Birthday. According

(04:02):
to Oslin, the performance was met by confused silence and
then a kurt thank you before the line went dead.
Of course, the whole exercise would have been pointless if
the public didn't hear about it, so to make sure
they did, Oslin leaked the story to the press, and
soon after, requests came pouring in for singing telegrams, just

(04:24):
like the one delivered to Rudy Valley. Decades later, the
former teen idol referred to the incident as quote a
phony stunt by the publicity people at Western Union. That's
one way to look at it, but the company prefers
to think of it as the birth of the singing telegram. However,
Valley wasn't alone in his criticism of the new medium.

(04:47):
Western Union executives weren't sold on it either. They worried
the consumers wouldn't take the company seriously if their messengers
started bursting into song on people's doorsteps. Nonetheless, singing to
telegrams were offered on a trial basis. Due to the
public's enthusiastic response to the idea, Sales were strong, particularly

(05:08):
around holidays and especially around Valentine's Day. At first, customers
could choose whether they wanted their song delivered by a
phone operator were sung in person by a uniformed messenger.
Most customers chose the latter option, as relatively few people
own telephones in the early nineteen thirties, though of course
they soon would. Western unions suspended the service altogether during

(05:32):
World War Two, but when it resumed in nineteen fifty,
all the singing was done over the phone. By then,
the singing telegram was no longer the novelty it once was.
The services popularity steadily declined over the next two decades,
and by nine seventy less than two tenths of one
percent of all telegrams were singing messages. That poor showing

(05:56):
looks even worse when you consider that regular telegram usage
had also fallen sharply thanks to the rise of the telephone.
In nineteen forty two, at the telegram's peak, Americans sent
roughly two hundred and forty five million of them. By
nineteen seventy that number had fallen to forty million, and
when a strike was called the following year, it plunged

(06:19):
to just fourteen million. With singing telegrams. Accounting for such
a minor slice of that business, it was only a
matter of time until the service was axed for good.
In nineteen seventy two, Western Union spokesman Kenneth maw heralded
the emminent demise, saying, quote, the singing telegram is no
longer a service that people are asking for, and we're

(06:42):
having a lot of trouble getting operators to do the singing.
The company began phasing out the service state by state
that same year, and in nineteen seventy four it was
dropped completely. From then on, Western Union shifted its focus
from communications services to financial services such as money wiring.
But a funny thing happened. When the company gave up

(07:04):
on singing telegrams, other companies stepped in to fill the void.
In the late nineteen seventies, thousands of small businesses resurrected
the idea and turned it into a multimillion dollar industry.
They offered traditional singing telegrams delivered by employees in sharp
uniforms or costumes, but there was also a host of

(07:24):
other options that Western Union never thought of. Balloon grams,
cookie grams, kisso grams, and even stripper grams. The success
of these services alured Western Union back into the game,
and in the company began offering singing telegrams once again,
though still only over the phone and with a much

(07:44):
smaller selection of songs to choose from. This unexpected revival
never fully recaptured the services former glory, but it continued
to be offered with limited availability until two thousand six,
when Western Union finally stopped a ring telegrams of any kind.
The singing telegram may be gone, but the idea of

(08:06):
it lives on. Some companies still offer live singing messengers,
and digital services like Cameo, as well as social media platforms,
make it easier than ever to send a musical greeting
to someone you know. That's not the same as having
a singer in a spiffy uniform sarenh ade you on
your doorstep, But as fans of the movie Clue can

(08:26):
tell you, not everyone was a fan of that in
the first place. I your singing telegrams. I'm Gabe Lousier
and hopefully you now know a little more about history

(08:48):
today than you did yesterday. You can learn even more
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At t d i HC show. You can also rate
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write to me directly at this day at I heart
media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,

(09:10):
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another day in History class