# Kefauver Part 19: Western Union racing-wire drops in Reading and the "Treasury balance" wire (1951)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/kefauver-p19-reading-western-union-1951/

At the committee's 1951 Pennsylvania hearings a Western Union letter identifying "two racing-wire drops or tickers in Reading" was read into the record, and Western Union's Washington superintendent described the daily wire of the Treasury balance to subscribers in eastern cities.

Part 19 prints the committee's 1951 hearings on Reading and Scranton, Pennsylvania. At the session of 28 June 1951 (p. 11) the committee had read into the record a letter of June 7, 1951 from Western Union vice president E. R. Shute, answering its request for the locations of the company's racing-wire drops in Pennsylvania: "as of June 7, 1951, there were two racing-wire drops or tickers in Reading." One had been installed for the last time on March 22, 1950 "and it was discontinued on May 28, 1951," which "happened to be the date" when "it was announced that the committee was doing some investigative work in Reading." The other was still in service.

At the session of 7 August 1951 (pp. 160-161), George T. Harris, superintendent of Western Union's Washington office, described a different wire: "Each morning we send an operator to the Treasury Department, who transmits the Treasury balance" to the company's commercial news department in New York, which relayed it to its Chicago news center. He said there were 67 subscribers in the eastern part of the country, and that he did not know what use they made of the figures. Counsel King said the subscriber list showed "the extent of this Treasury numbers operation"; the inference about a numbers game is counsel's.

The names and addresses of the lessees of the Reading drops are in the printed record and are not copied.

## Sources

- U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, printed hearings, Part 19: Pennsylvania, via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/investigationofo19unit
- Full text of the volume (Internet Archive, OCR): https://archive.org/download/investigationofo19unit/investigationofo19unit_djvu.txt