James Proctor Thorne

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Some men are known by their sending, and on the Pacific wires of the middle century there was an operator whose Morse was so even that colleagues in Honolulu and Seattle said they could have set a clock by it. He was James Proctor Thorne, born in 1917 at San Francisco, California, who lived eighty-three years as a telegraph operator in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. He belonged to the House of Thorne and the White Ledger, and he was never called to hunt. He was the elder child of the telegraph operator Alexander Proctor Thorne and the seamstress Adriana Navarro, and the brother of the vampire slayer Norma Proctor Thorne. In 1944 he married the schoolteacher Edna Bishop, and they raised two children, Doris Thorne and Clifford Thorne, both of whom are living and neither of whom is a slayer. James died in 2000 of a stroke, aged eighty-three. The family remembers him as the operator who kept the western wire open for the Ledger, and who had the family's one unbroken record for patience. He was born in San Francisco because the wire sent his father there. Alexander Proctor Thorne, a steady young man of twenty-five from the Kentucky Thornes, had come to San Antonio in 1914 to take a post at the telegraph office, had married Adriana Navarro there in 1916, in the church on the Westside, and had been offered, the following spring, a better place with the Postal Telegraph company on Market Street in San Francisco. It was a promotion, and he took it. Adriana, who was four months gone and had never been west of the Pecos, came with him on the Southern Pacific, with a sewing machine in the baggage car and her father's blessing in a letter. The boy arrived in the autumn of 1917, in a rented flat on Hayes Street, in the great fog of a Bay Area October. He was long, thin and wakeful, with his father's fair hair and his mother's dark eyes, and he spent his first week looking at the ceiling as though it had been sending him something. The family did not stay in San Francisco. In 1919, after Vicente Navarro's death in San Antonio had called Adriana home for a month and Alexander had been transferred down the coast, they settled in Oakland, in a frame house near the Southern Pacific mole, and then, in the next decade, in a succession of rented places in Alameda, Sacramento and the Bay towns, following the wire. James learned the geography of the West as other boys learned the alphabet, by railway time-table. He liked the ferries, the cable cars and the great steel bridges that were going up in the thirties. He liked the smell of the machine shops at the Oakland yards, and the long clean beaches at Alameda in the early morning, when the fog was still on the water and the bay looked like a sheet of lead. He was taught the key by his father at the kitchen table. Alexander, who was patient and exact, set a practice sounder on the oilcloth, with a small battery, and tapped out the alphabet one letter a night, and the boy, who was seven, repeated it. It was a game, and then it was a discipline. By ten he was sending a fair hand, and by thirteen he was copying the press wire for a newspaper in Oakland, after school, at fifty cents an evening, with the headphones over his ears and a sandwich at his elbow. His mother, who made hats and linings for a Market Street dress firm and who had learned to type before her marriage, taught him the other thing, which was to keep the carbon copy. They were a quiet house. Adriana was a small, dark, humorous woman who talked all day and said nothing, and Alexander was a large, fair, silent man who said little and meant all of it. The Ledger came to him by way of the wire. He was told by his father, in the winter of 1931, in the course of a long evening in the Oakland office, that the telegraph had a custom among the Thornes and Proctors that went back to the Civil War, and that it had to do with certain messages. It was a great trust. A hunter in the field, said Alexander, could not carry a letter, and could not always find a telephone, but he could walk into any railway station in the country and ask the operator to send a line of numbers, and the operator would send it, and no one would read it who ought not to. It was the oldest form of the White Ledger's post. James did not ask what the numbers meant. He asked what the fee was, and his father, who had not expected the question, laughed for a quarter of an hour. He took his first job in 1935, at eighteen, with Western Union, at the main office in Oakland, and was an operator on the transcontinental circuit by twenty. It was a hard trade, and a skilled one, a long chair, a hot room and a thousand words an hour, with the whole country coming through one sounder. He was good. He had a perfect ear and no nerves, and he found that he could hold a line open for twelve hours without fatigue. He was transferred to San Francisco in 1938, and took a flat in the Sunset district, near the dunes. In 1941, in December, when the first wire came in from Honolulu, he was in the operating room, and he took the message himself, in a hand that his supervisor said did not shake, and passed it on without a comment. He used to say that it was the only occasion on which he had been glad of the discipline. He served in the war years as a radioman in the Navy, on a transport in the Pacific, from the spring of 1943, and sent and received more traffic than he was ever able to count. He did not talk about it afterward. He came home on leave in the autumn of 1944 to San Francisco, to a city that had filled with soldiers and sailors and in which every hotel, hall and church had its cots, and married, in a rush, in the week before he sailed, Edna Bishop, the schoolteacher whom he had been writing to for two years. She was a slim, grave, red-headed girl of twenty-two, from a family of Berkeley schoolteachers, who taught fourth grade in the Mission and who had met him on a ferry. She said that she had liked his handwriting. They were married in a chapel on Nob Hill, with his sister Norma as the only witness, who sat in the front pew with her coat on and her hat down, and watched the door. He was demobilised in 1946, and went back to Western Union, and in due course to the telephone company's long lines, where the work paid better and the hours were shorter. Their daughter Doris Thorne was born in 1947 and their son Clifford Thorne in 1950, in a small house in the suburbs south of the city, near the airport, among the new streets of the post-war boom. They are living. Neither was called, and both took the news with an equanimity that their father found a little bewildering. Edna, who taught for thirty-five years, brought them up on a regimen of reading, music and early bed, and was known in the district as the strictest and most loved teacher in her school. James, who was a patient father, taught the children Morse, as his own father had, and taught them what his sister Norma, the slayer, had taught him, which was how to be quiet in a house. In the Korean War years the wire grew busier than ever, and in the sixties and the Vietnam years it began its long decline. Telegrams gave way to the telephone and the teleprinter, and the old operators, who had been the aristocracy of the office, were retired one by one. James moved, in 1962, to the telephone company's data centre in San Jose, where he spent the last twenty years of his working life keeping the lines to the new computers open, which he did with the same quiet competence. He retired in 1982. His sister was by then a legend in the Ledger and his father had been dead for eight years, and he spent his time with Edna and the grandchildren, in a house in the suburbs, tapping on the arm of his chair, in the old code, when he wanted the salt. He died in the spring of 2000, of a stroke, at eighty-three, on a Sunday afternoon, while Edna was reading to him from the paper. He had put down his tea, and tapped once on the arm of his chair, and stopped. Edna, who lived ten years more, said that it was the only time in fifty-six years of marriage that he had left a message unfinished. James Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the operator whose hand never shook, the quiet elder brother who kept the wire clear for the Ledger on the Pacific coast. In the Slayerverse he stands for the signalmen and clerks of the House of Thorne, the ones who held the line, copied the numbers and never asked what they meant, because the message, as his father taught him, belongs to the one who sends it.