Just so you know, newspaper carriers still exist - but these days almost all newspapers use "motor routes" and deliver the papers by car. One of my outlying properties who only publishes twice per week and only prints about 900 copies per run decided to bring back kids delivering the papers, and they've been successful with it. But yeah, if you're going to be a carrier these days you need a car.
Okay, so back to my no-longer-around job. When I first joined the Army in 1981, I knew I wanted to be in the Military Intelligence field. The classifier (the sergeant you get your job from) brought up six different jobs. Five of them were linguist positions, and I was thinking I already had to know how to speak Polish or Chinese to get one...not knowing, of course, that the Army has a language school. The sixth was Signal Security Specialist. "What's that?" "You get to tap phones." "Excellent!" So, off I go to the US Army Intelligence School, Fort Devens, MA, to learn how to tap phones. We only tapped Army phones and every unit had to get this done one week a year so we could be sure they weren't talking about secret stuff on unsecured phone lines.
When I tapped phones, we used a tool called the AN/GTA-19. It's a box about the size of a stereo receiver with the capability of listening to 15 phone calls at once. "But you'll never use more than 13 channels on this because the standard Signal Corps cable coming out of the comm center has 26 pairs of wires in it and each channel on the GTA-19 uses two pairs." By the time I got into the business most of them only had 13 channels that even worked because Channel 14 and Channel 15 had been cannibalized for repair parts. This cable was the reason this MOS had a Heavy strength rating - a 250-foot reel of 26-pair hock-to-hock cable weighs a ton, and you've got to load and unload it from a pickup truck on a fairly regular basis. Every Army telephone exchange had two junction boxes - I will explain shortly - hanging on the outside wall; when you got a conventional telephone mission you'd give the employees there a list of the phones you wanted tapped, they'd connect the lines to them, and you'd run 26-pair between the junction box and the GTA-19. Either they had to do the taps, or someone would stand behind you watching you do them to be sure you were hooked to the right line. Usually they did them because the room with the automatic switches in it is one of the most controlled-access areas on an Army base.
The GTA-19 had two problems: they bought these right after the Korean War ended so there were still vacuum tubes in it, and you could only listen to one line at a time so you never could get a real handle on the unit's communication security posture. While I was in Korea they announced the Great New Monitoring Machine, the AN/GSH-53. (How I'm remembering the nomenclature for all this obscure shit is a mystery to me...I can't remember I'm out of eggs half the time but I can tell you exactly how to tap a Strowger-based telephone switch, which I haven't even done since 1985.) The "Gish-53" would monitor 13 lines, and every time someone on those lines picked up the phone it would turn on a stereo cassette recorder that recorded the phone call on one track and time code on the other so you could look at a display and tell when the call was made. This wasn't a labor-saving thing; a GTA-19 could be run by three people, a sergeant to provide oversight, one to run the machine and one to analyze the tapes, but a GSH-53 needed a team chief and eight people to analyze all the tapes it could make. (However, a lot of times it required four people - we had a monitoring system called a TTR-1A which was two GTA-19s in a pickup-mounted communications shelter, and each GTA-19 needed its own operator. One person could analyze two operators' tape production.) The first unit scheduled to get the GSH-53 was the 163d Military Intelligence Battalion at Fort Hood, TX.
After I left Korea I was assigned to the 163d and I was SUPER excited to be able to use a piece of equipment that wasn't older than me to do the mission. My first task in that unit was to crate up the GSH-53 and ship it back to Intelligence and Security Command headquarters at Arlington Hall Station, VA. The Army regulation governing my job says that someone has to listen to every phone call as it is recorded and stop the recording - or not start recording it in the first place - if any non-US Government employees are on the call. So, if the first sergeant of Alpha Company calls the first sergeant of Bravo Company to tell him to get that fucking tank out of the driveway it's legal to record the call, but if the first sergeant of Alpha Company calls his wife to tell her he would really like to have pork chops for dinner tonight it is not legal to record it or even to listen to it. (The Army was EXTREMELY big on this - to the point of it being a court-martial offense - because Army Security Agency people doing what I did, using GTA-19s, were illegally tapping the phones at the Democratic National Committee under orders of President Nixon. That's what caused the Justice Department to force the Army to close the Army Security Agency and put the signals intelligence troops under adult supervision in the new Intelligence and Security Command.) The GSH-53, which only had the ability to turn on a tape recorder the second it detected an off-hook condition on a connected line, would record both calls. The second US Attorney General Edwin Meese - yes, THAT Edwin Meese, who you'd think would like something like the GSH-53 - got wind of the existence of this system he ordered the Army to stop making GSH-53s and destroy all they had. Oops. And of course the Army in its infinite wisdom collected up all the GTA-19s and destroyed them before they started issuing the GSH-53s. I spent the rest of my time at Hood running generators for field problems - we abrasively called our platoon "SIGSEC Power and Light."
I went on to become a Signals Intelligence Analyst and was sent to Berlin to watch communism die in Eastern Europe.
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