A Word from a Typesetter’s Daughter on President Obama’s Birth Certificate

It was just enough today when I heard Donald Trump talking about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He’s talking as though the internet, I-Phones and even fax machines were around back in 1961. Back then a call from Kenya would have required someone to travel potentially more than several days just to make the call then what, how did it get in the paper? How did it make it with the other birth announcements from the same day?

People didn’t have cell phones and there were probably no public telephones in villages, so a person would have to travel by foot, mule or however they traveled to a major city to make a phone call.It could definitely have taken more than one day as some villagers in Africa travel more than a full day to travel to a major city on the transportation system they currently have. This was 50 years ago.

With that how would the announcement below get in the paper by August 13 then, the same date when many other people were born at the hospital appeared in the paper.  It is interesting that August 4th, 1961, the date President Obama was born on was a Friday, just before the weekend in Hawaii.

http://anndiener.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/hawaii907280345V4_b.jpg

Back then, if some people can remember, the world did not work at a lightening fast pace as it does today. As President Obama was born on a Friday, just like the three babies typed below in the photo above, it is possible that the birth announcement was not typed out by the hospital and mailed until Monday or Tuesday.  Notice above how the President is below the daughter born to Mr. and Mrs. D. Wright born on Saturday, August 5 yet still in the paper on the same day. 

So let’s say the envelope was typed Monday and mailed Tuesday, August 8th. It potentially arrived at the newspaper office  on Wednesday, August 9. Then the secretary or administrative assistant, as we would call probably her today, opened the mail late Wednesday or Thursday morning. It may have been late in the day when it arrived, so she may have waited and opened the mail the following day. She then would have placed the paper copy from the hospital with the birth announcements in the in-box for the typesetter, who could have typed it in either Thursday or Friday and it was then output in gullies, pasted up Saturday, and printed Saturday night for Sunday’s paper.

There were no zip codes back then as zip codes were not implemented until 1963. People were not in a hurry to publish birth announcements, they were just like they are today, nice but not critical urgent news.

No one would have known that President Wright would have caused such a problem, wait, I was just reading the birth announcement from August 5th, that’s not the President. Would anyone have questioned President Wright? Oh wait! She is a daughter.