Years ago when I was in my twenties I worked for the telegraph company as a teletype operator. The one thing I hated about the job was when I had to deliver singing telegrams. This was usually done by telephone and I was not especially proud of my singing voice.

I was working for the telegraph office in Hayward, California and we had a regular customer, let's call her Mrs. M, who was a bit eccentric. Mrs. M would call in and dictate long, rambling, non-sensical telegrams to the Pope, the President, her Congressman, and anybody else who happened to annoy her. These telegrams went on sometimes for several pages and didn't make a lot of sense. The girls in our office hated to take these telegrams from her because she was sometimes a little abusive with them as well. But she was one of our better customers. The telegrams were charged by the word and her telegrams would sometimes run over $100. As I said she was a little eccentric, but she was also wealthy.

I didn't mind talking to her and the girls in the office hated it, so I made them a deal. If they would handle any singing telegrams we got, I would handle the calls from Mrs. M.

Years later I was working as a backlot timekeeper for Paramount Pictures. I told some of my co-workers about this experience and they found it quite amusing. As we started joking about it, we came up with a funny joke based on my experiences. The joke got told and was soon passed on all around the movie studio lot.

A few more years later after I had left my job at Paramount, I was watching a program on TV and John Wayne was a guest star. He did something I had never seen him do before -- he told a joke. To my surprise, it was the joke my friends and I had created years earlier.

Although I met a lot of stars when I worked at Paramount, I never had the honor of meeting John Wayne. I was very flattered, though, to see that he liked my joke. Here, for your enjoyment, is the joke that John Wayne stole from me and my friends:

A woman was sitting in her home when she heard a knock on the door. She got up and found a telegraph delivery man at her doorway. As he was explaining he had a telegram for her, she got very excited.

"Oh boy, sing it to me!" she exclaimed.

"Oh ma'am, I couldn't do that," the delivery man replied.

"Don't be bashful," she said. "Please sing it to me! I insist!"

"Well, okay" he said. And he burst out into song:

"La, da, ta, da, da, da! Your sister Rose is dead."

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