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.