Miscellany: Vail Medals

When Theodore Newton Vail, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., died in 1920, his associates started a fund to give awards to employes who had distinguished themselves by “conspicuous public service.” Last week the Vail Medals were given for 1925—five in all, three to women. And so the public heard how Mrs. Josephine L. August, night operator at Cassopolis, Mich., frustrated an attempt to rob the First National Bank; how Miss Ruby LaVerne Wilson, at Washington, Ark., tried to stop some bandits; why Emory Daniel Stine, lineman, waded into an icy stream at York, Pa.; what Repairer Everett C. Nelson did on top of a 45-foot pole near Niagara Falls. But most extraordinary of all was a curt report concerning a certain Mrs. Mary Regina Smith of Fabens, Tex.:

It was four o’clock of an August morning when a voice spoke to Mrs. Smith on the telephone. “Thank you”, she said to the voice. Then she called up a housewife whose name began with A and repeated to her what the voice had said. She put in another call and another, repeating to sleepy storekeepers and clerks and villagers what the voice had said: “The Reservoir has broken. A flood is coming.” Before she got to H in the directory the flood was up to her knees; when she got through Z the switchboard was swamped, the walls were crumbling. She had her husband splice the toll line to a phone in the wall, talked to El Paso—”Send us help.”Then the ceiling fell in.