Alma Lanzaro
1939
Alma got her first job at age 17 with Western Union, earning $1,000 a year. When the stock market crashed in 1929 and The Great Depression hit, she was the only person in her family with a job.
"My brothers (Joseph and Dominick), my uncle ... they were all out of work. It was a terrible time. But Western Union kept its employees because we had been trained three months for the job." "But they made us work longer hours, and a lot of Sundays," she says. "And they cut everybody's wage by 40 percent."
Western Union's Manhattan headquarters, where she worked, was the first in the country to start selling singing telegrams, and Alma and two other women were America's original singers.
"It all started with birthday telegrams, then we branched out to whatever else people wanted: Happy Easter, Merry Christmas or whatever," she says. "But everything we did was to the 'Happy Birthday' music because it was the only tune that didn't require Western Union to pay any royalties."
