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4A

July 20, 1972

Dear Wanda & Co:

It is many years now since I last saw the word "semaphore" in print, except in dictionaries.  Once it was in more common use.  In the early 1900's every Boy Scout learned to send and receive messages by semaphore.  I was never a Boy Scout, but I acquired a modest proficiency at semaphoring in my one year at the University of Tennessee.  It was part of the military training then required of every able-bodied male student at UT.

The semaphore was a means of exchanging messages between people who were beyond shouting distance, but still within sight of each other (the range could be extended by using field glasses).  It was an important item in the repertoire of the Army Signal Corps, for the field telephone was the only other means of quick communication over such a distance.  The semaphore saved rolling and unrolling a lot of telephone wire.  Nowadays the walkie-talkie has put both the semaphore and the field telephone out of business, but in World War 1 the walkie-talkie had not yet been invented.

In practice, the sender of a semaphore message stood upright, in view if the recipient.  In each hand he held a small flag.  He spelled out the message, one letter at a time, by assuming a succession of postures with the flags.  Each letter of the alphabet was represented by holding the flags in a special pattern.  Ina somewhat similar way Sally Rand, the nude dancer of the 1930's, used to manipulate two big fans, one held in each hand.  In her act she always kept the fans modestly below the level of her shoulders.  She could easily have sent semaphore messages with them, if she had only extended their range of movement to include overhead angles.

Late in the afternoon of Thursday, September 20, 1917, I stood at the rail on the main deck of the White Star liner [[underline]]Adriatic.[[/underline  We were in a convoy of eight ships.  There was one other passenger liner, the [[underline]]Orduna,[[/underline]] and six freighters.  That explains why we had been eight days at sea and were not yet in sight of land.  We had left Halifax on the 12th, and Halifax is not as far from England as New York is.  Our voyage had been further slowed because we had not followed a straight course.  We had done a lot of zigzagging, which was supposed to help toward evading submarines.  The only armed escort