Intense Work Fostered Close-Knit Community At WCC

Second of Two Parts

by Tim Wood

March, 1993. The previous November, many of the long-time employees at WCC, once the nation's largest marine radio facility, had taken early retirement. Now owner MCI International, which had purchased the station in 1988, was automating transmitting and receiving facilities and laying off most of the remaining employees, leaving only a skeleton crew to maintain the equipment. It was not a happy place.

The contrast with earlier years, when dozens of radio and teletype operators worked the airwaves for RCA, a company known for taking care of its employees, was stark. The spring of 1993 marked the beginning of the end for the historic station, which was shut down for good in 1997.

"It was a cost reduction thing," said William Ferris, who was station manager at the time of the automation. "It was supposed to improve the efficiency of the operation."

Technology, too, had overcome the station; telex and satellite communications was leaving Morse Code in the dust. The final blow came just last week, when a world-wide agreement sponsored by the United Nations ended the familiar dot-and-dash system as the official means of maritime communications.

For more than 70 years, however, WCC was perhaps the most familiar call letters to radio operators working the sea lanes the world over. For the men and women who worked at the station's receiving facilities in Chathamport and transmitter in South Chatham, those were days of often feverish, intense shifts, but the collegial atmosphere and love of the work made it worthwhile.

"For me, it was complete enjoyment," said Lee Baumlin, a radio operator at the station for 30 years. When he began in 1962, he was paid $100 a week, good money at the time. But there was also a certain prestige to the job. Because of the volume of Morse Code messages -- ranging from distress calls and weather reports to personal messages -- received by the station, operators had to be fast and accurate.

"Only experts could work at Chatham," said Baumlin, a Harwich resident who still has his old "Mac" telegraph key.

The station's ivy-covered operations center, where radio operators worked and "wire men" transferred messages to telex and telegrams, was the nerve center of WCC. Eight-hour shifts were manned by up to nine operators during the day, fewer at night; in later years, when traffic slowed, a single operator stood watch during the graveyard shift. With banks radio equipment lining the open room, the atmosphere inside often grew hot and smelled of ozone given off by hundreds of vacuum tubes; it wasn't unusual to see a haze of cigarette and pipe smoke swirling around the rotating conveyor where the operators placed messages as they came in. The click-clack of teletypes and telegraph keys filled the air.

"It was an occupation you had to like," said radio operator William Pyne. "Not many people could hack sitting there eight hours a day."

"It was always kind of intense," recalled E. Fletcher Davis, whose father, Everett, worked at the station from 1931 to 1957. "You never saw guys sitting around. They were always working ships."

From inside the station, operators controlled the diamond-shaped, rhombic antennae that received signals from distant ships. Outgoing messages were sent first to the RCA transmitting station in Marion, via land line and later one of the earliest microwave transmission systems, and after 1947, via radio signal to the South Chatham transmitting station. The handful of technicians who kept the transmitters running were initially somewhat isolated on the hill overlooking the Forest Beach marsh.

"We were still under the Chathamport station as far as personnel went," said William Ryder, who was technician in charge of the South Chatham facility from 1961 to 1983. "But they left us pretty much on our own, as long as things were going along well. It could be a long period of time between seeing people from Chathamport."

Employees of the station formed a tightly-knit community, socializing as well as working together. In some ways the Chathamport compound was an enclave separate from the rest of the town. When the Marconi Wireless Company of America built the station in 1914, there was a need to take care of workers' living quarters as well as house the core operations. Six single-family homes were built on the site, overlooking Ryder's Cove (chosen because it was sheltered from the ocean, unlike the earlier Marconi station on the outer beach of Wellfleet), along with a two-story dormitory. Married operators were housed in the bungalow-style cottages, while bachelors lived in the dorm, sometimes called "Degink" by operators, a slang reference to the fact that many of the operators were what we would today call nerds. The building eventually became known simply as "the hotel."

The station maintained a swimming float in Ryder's Cove and a picnic area along the shore, which eventually became so popular it had to be closed, according to Bruce Macintosh, whose father, Gordon Macintosh, was a radio operator at the station. His family lived in one of the bungalows and he recalled bringing his father lunch in the operations center. Having to eat his lunch at his listening station was the only thing about the job his father didn't like, Macintosh said.

"It was fascinating to a little kid," said Macintosh, who now lives in Harwich. "There were all these guys concentrating. They were so focused. I'd go around and say hi to all of them, and they'd be polite, but they were focused."

Macintosh's family was forced to move out when the military took over the facility in 1942. For the next three years, Chatham Navy Radio intercepted German Navy radio traffic, pinpointing transmissions and sending the copied messages on to Washington. Dick Lumpkin, who was chief of the teletype while stationed in Chathamport for 2½ years, said when signals were intercepted, the station would inform the Navy's direction finding sites, located elsewhere, which would then plot the location of ships and U-Boats. At the height of its operation under the military, some 300 people were stationed there, including more than 100 WAVES.

Personnel were housed at the Hawthorne Inn, the Wayside Inn, the Rose Acre Inn and other area locations. The hotel became the officers' quarters. Buses would bring personnel into the station and to activities around town, including USO shows at Chatham Bars Inn, baseball games, and the Red Men's Hall, next to the downtown post office.

Lumpkin, who married a Chatham girl and returned to town after the war, said the station also housed a sick bay at one of the residences Old Comers Road, with a doctor, dentist, four pharmacist mates and a Packard ambulance. Security was very tight; no one was allowed to talk about what went on there. It wasn't until a few years ago that information about the Navy's activities at the station was declassified, Lumpkin said.

William Pyne remembers living at compound as a good place to raise kids. They pretty much had the run of the station's 30-plus acres as well as surrounding woods and cranberry bogs.

"For the most part, it was a very close-knit community," said Pyne. It was like the neighborhoods of old, where people would watch out for each other. The homes were well-built and spacious, with four bedrooms, dining and living rooms and nine-foot ceilings. They were connected to the station by intercoms. Pyne's family lived in a station cottage for 27 years.

Many of the station workers lived in Chatham or the surrounding communities. But in some ways, they stood apart from the community at large, although several, such as Ryder, grew up here and were considered locals. They made good money for the time, had secure, year-round, indoor jobs at a time when fishing and seasonal tourism were the major economic forces in town.

"These people came from New York, New Jersey. They had accents," said Macintosh.

"They'd all go down to Dick Loraine's house Sunday afternoons," recalled Davis. "They were a very close group."

"People knew the radio station," said Thomas R. Pennypacker, a former selectmen whose father, a ship's radio operator, often called in to WCC. "In those days, code was a specialty, and people just weren't interested in it." But, he added, "it did provide a lot of employment around town."

As technology changed, so did WCC. In the late 1970s, SITOR (Simplex Telex Over Radio) and direct radio telex provided communications between ships and its agent, routed through the station but eliminating the need for an operator to transcribe and retransmit messages. Cubicles were installed at the operations center, giving it a modern, sterile feel.

Despite a substantial investment in the facilities by MCI International, which purchased RCA Global Communications in 1988, business continued to decline. U.S. shipping slowed. The international SOLAS convention required that all ships have satellite communications ability. Saying it was necessary to improve efficiency, MCI in 1993 automated the station, routing all signals to KPH, another marine radio station in Point Reyes, Calif.

"The whole maritime communications field was changing, with less emphasis placed on radio telegraphic traffic, which was really our bread and butter," said Farris, whose mother was one of the WAVES stationed at WCC during the war and whose brother, Ron, also worked at the station. Labor costs of maintaining radio operators drove the change, which he said was strictly a cost-reduction measure.

When Farris left, he took with him old logs and photo books that dated all the way back to the early years of the station. MCI was cleaning house and, he felt, did not care about the station's illustrious history. He still has those books, and said there may still be some antique radio equipment at the station. Ironically, the company Farris now works for, Globe Wireless, which provides e-mail services for ships at sea, owns the licenses for both WCC and KPH.

Town Meeting is set to vote on the purchase of the Chathamport and South Chatham properties by the town on Feb. 23. To a person, those who were formerly associated with the station endorse the deal; many would like to see at least one of the Chathamport buildings turned into a museum, so that the history of marine radio communications, WCC, and the people who worked there is not lost forever.

  PART ONE

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