Historical Context

A telegram delivered to Evan on or around May 10, 1933. It's unlikely that the missionaries' quarters had a telephone, so urgent messages from the mission office would likely need to be sent via telegram.

The Postal Telegraph Company (originally the Postal Telegraph Cable Company) was a major American telecommunications corporation that operated a nationwide telegraph and data network from the 1880s until 1943.  For over half a century, it was the only major, viable competitor to the market giant Western Union.  Like Western Union, Postal Telegraph utilized a vast fleet of uniformed courier boys to hand-deliver typed or handwritten messages directly to homes and offices, especially if a recipient couldn't be reached by telephone.

By the mid-20th century, the rapid growth of long-distance commercial telephones and the dawn of early teletype networks drastically choked out the telegraph-only business model.  With the added pressures and resource constraints of World War II, the federal government authorized a consolidation of the industry to maximize wartime efficiency. On October 3, 1943, Postal Telegraph officially merged into Western Union, ending its decades-long run as America’s alternative wire service.