Charles Smith

Colorado Springs is familiar with the School for the Deaf and the Blind, but many of the blind men and women who worked, lived, and played in the Springs, never attended the school or received services from it.  One such blind man was Charles Smith.

July 1933, the telegraph in the Associated Press (AP) offices at the Denver Post transmitted its last message just before dawn. Slowly, the reporters, copy boys, and teletype operators left the room. The long-time, telegraph operator, Charles Smith, sat over the telegraph machine with his hands on the keys. With a tear in his eye, he stood up and left the room. His career of more than forty-one years was over.

Born in 1878, in Illinois, Charles left school at age eleven to work as a messenger boy for Western Union in Muscatine, Iowa after the death of his father. In 1899 he moved to Denver.

On August 29, 1905, Charles was playing catch with friends and was hit in the head with a baseball. He lost all his eyesight and his job.

His old firm reluctantly took Charles back part-time to take down New York stock quotes over the telegraph with a pencil. Although he could not see what he was writing, his handwriting was legible enough for the staff to read what he wrote. Charles taught himself to type.

Charles applied for a job with the AP but was turned down. A friend took Charles’s application up to the general manager of the AP. The manager instructed the Denver office to give him a trial at the next job opening.

Managers watched Charles listen and transcribe using the typewriter, and he was faster than some of the employees. His first copy was clean. They asked Charles to start as a vacation relief operator. His first assignment for the AP was Colorado Springs. The editors were impressed with his typing and clean copy right off the wire. The job became permanent in the spring of 1912.

Charles took down the news by rolling in three sheets of paper with carbon paper between each into his typewriter. The first copy was for the Colorado Springs Gazette, the second was for the Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph. The third went to the files. Charles typed directly to the typewriter, meaning that he took less time getting his copy to the editors. He averaged 17,000 words in an eight-hour shift.

News of how fast Charles could take down the messages spread throughout the company. Several sighted operators came to Colorado Springs for competitions to out transcribe the blind guy. None of them could.

One evening, Will Rogers came to get local news for his performance at the theater across the street. Time passed quickly. When Rogers walked on stage, he apologized to the audience. “I am sorry for being late. I was talking with the most remarkable man I ever met, Charlie Smith, the blind telegraph operator.” Everyone in town knew of Charlie, and all was forgiven.

Crowds gathered outside the newspaper. Charles got the sports scores, and they were rushed to the man with the bullhorn who announced them to the crowds in the streets. It was a real-time broadcast (before radio was invented) from the wire to the typewriter, to the bull horn. National games and Sky Socks news sometimes meant the street below was so crowded for a block in each direction of the Gazette that no buggy or man on horseback could get through. Even when the paper installed an electric scoreboard, Charles still yelled the scores to the copyboy.

Colorado Springs kept Charles until the telegraph was no longer used at its papers. He was replaced with a teletype machine. AP sent him to New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Casper, Wyoming, where they still used a telegraph. In 1928, Charles moved back to Denver, working for the AP at the Denver Post until 1933.

Charles suffered a heart attack that cost him his speech. He entered a nursing home. One of the healthcare staff knew Morse code. The two communicated by the staff member tapping Morse code into Charles’s hand and Charles doing the same. He died October 17, 1963, in Colorado Springs.