Episode 5: Callings

In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous evangelist in America. This week on The Last Archive: The ballad of Big Jim and what the intersections of telephone history and American spirituality reveal about how we understand the phone.

KEY SOURCES

• The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States by Brian Hochman

• The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy by Hannah Zeavin

• “Connecting Lines: L.A.'s Telephone History and the Binding of the Region” by Emily Bills, Southern California Quarterly , Spring 2009, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 27-67

• Collection 693 Papers of Jim Vaus in the Evangelism & Missions Archives Repository at Wheaton College

• L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City by John Buntin

• God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America by Aaron Griffith

• Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters

• Gary’s Antique Telephone Collection by Gary Goff

• My Father Was a Gangster: The Jim Vaus Story by Will Vaus

• They Called My Husband A Gangster by Alice Vaus

• Why I Quit Syndicated Crime by Jim Vaus

• The Devil Loves A Shining Mark by Jim Vaus

• Thicker’n Thieves: The 1950 Factual Expose of Police Pay-Offs, Graft, Political Corruption and Prostitution In Los Angeles and Hollywood by Charles Stoker

• Wiretapper (1955)

• America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 by Claude S. Fischer

• The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 by Stephen Kern

• The Phone Boom of the 1950s (AT&T Archival Film)

• Along Party Lines (Bell System Archival Film)

• 1946 Telephone and Telegraph Careers (Archival Instructional Film)

• Billy Graham Newsreel (1949)

• “CALIFORNIA: Brenda’s Revenge,” TIME magazine, July 11, 1949

• “NEW YORK: Reaching the Unreachables,” TIME magazine, December 19, 1960

• “Nation’s Telephone System Expansion Tops All Records” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California) · 28 Apr 1946, Sun · Page 13.

• 'Wiretapper' Will Bring Bill Williams' Return; 'Pompey' Plans Shaped

• Schallert, Edwin Los Angeles Times (1923-1995); Dec 27, 1954; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times pg. B9