To encourage greetings back in 1914, telegraph officials provided a special "Holiday Greeting" blank with a spray of holly and red candles across the top.  This was followed by Easter, Mother's Day, and other blank headings in four colors, and changed from time to time with paintings by famous artists.  Suggested messages were provided to help pencil chewers compose their own, and millions were sent each year.  They were sent for business as well as social reasons.  Congratulatory telegrams were sent on birthdays, weddings, births, appointments, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, the Jewish New Year, Thanksgiving, and other occasions.

One of the nonessential greeting services discontinued in World War II was the Singing Telegram.  Since World War I, newspapers and magazines often had depicted the telegram as a death message, and most people stopped using them for social correspondence for fear delivery would alarm the recipients.  I myself realized that was one reason ten million former birthday anniversary, and holiday greetings, and social telegrams were not being sent during the 1930s depression.  Western Union was losing a million dollars a month and was desperate for cash.

"What kind of telegram would be so novel and amusing that it would convince people that sending and receiving telegrams would be fun?" I asked myself in 1933.  Then the idea dawned that no one ever sent a telegram in song.  I looked for someone to receive the first one and learned that the birthday of Rudy Vallee -- then a popular singer and whom I knew -- was the next day, July 28.  So I called an operator to my office, and a plump, jolly girl, surprisingly named Lucille Lipps, arrived.  She called Vallee and sang, "Happy Birthday, Dear Rudy. . . ."

Mention of that first singing telegram appeared in Walter Winchell's and other newspaper columns.  People called Western Union to send them, and good-natured operators obliged, though there was officially no such service.  The idea spread quickly, and switchboards lit up like Christmas trees with calls.

J. J. Welch, traffic vice president, protested to First Vice President J. C. Willever that the company was not prepared to render such a service.  Called to Willever's office, I was angrily informed that I was making a laughing stock of the company, and Willever refused to listen to the reason for the service.  Public demand soon convinced him, however, that Singing Telegrams produced cash and they did give pleasure to millions.  Operators crooned them over the telephone and, later, uniformed messengers delivered them for an extra fee.

Every cartoonist, newspaper columnist, and radio comedian capitalized on the humorous possibilities of messengers singing at homes and offices, and the more they kidded the service, the more gleefully he public seized upon it.  Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and Edgar Bergen were among those who often exercised their sharp wits on the service on their network radio programs.  One messenger with a singing voice like Donald Duck was in constant demand by the public and broadcasters.  The Singing Telegram continued on the wackiest, zaniest musical spree ever until World War II.

When the messengers returned from the war, they joined unions that banned uniforms and demanded high pay and professional singers, so personal deliveries were not resumed.  However, telephone operators sang for birthdays and anniversaries, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day.  Mary Martin, of "South Pacific" and "Peter Pan" fame, launched the postwar revival at New York; the Andrews Sisters did on the Pacific Coast.

Because of the dwindling number of public telegraph offices, Western Union discontinued the Singing Telegram in 1974, but local enterprises sprang up in hundreds of cities.  They provided personal delivery by dancers and singers in a wide variety of costumes, including tuxedo, clown, gorilla, belly dancer, and "Strip-a-Gram" strip tease.  Thirty such companies were listed in the New York telephone book fifty-three years after I created the Singing Telegram.  Western Union resumed accepting orders for personal delivery in 1980, using professional singers provided by Musicbox, Inc., but at prices too high to gain wide popular use.