Telegraph Operator in Virginia City. John Uriel Hayes just wasn’t cut out for the priesthood. He knew that. His mother and religious mentors did not.
“He kept running away from home,” says Juanita Swinehart of Vancouver, his granddaughter. “And every time the priest would go after him and bring him back again.”
About age 14 , he changed his name to Jeff W. Hayes and lit out as a 19th-century version of the computer geek: a telegraph operator. Eventually he was highly regarded in the Portland business community and as one of the city’s literary lights.
Hayes was born in March 1853 in Cleveland, Ohio, according to a history by his late daughter, Evangeline Rydman. He was the son of immigrants: his father, William Henry Hayes, from Ireland; his mother, Mary Elizabeth (Henry) Hayes, from Scotland.
His father prospered as a shoe and boot merchant, then served as Cleveland city assessor and later as Cuyahoga County treasurer. His mother, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, converted to Catholicism and promised a son and a daughter to the church. John/Jeff, the third of five children, was the priest-designate.
He was having none of it. He taught himself Morse code and excelled at its technology. After leaving home, he worked as a telegraph operator on the Lake Shore Railroad in Pennsylvania.
“The telegraph, in its inception, had identified with it men of a high order of literary attainment,” Hayes wrote in his 1916 book, “Autographs and Memoirs of the Telegraph.” “Professor Morse was an artist of international reputation.”
Western Union Telegraph opened in Virginia City, Nevada. The operator there was Jeff W. Hayes, he helped to organize the Nevada & California Telegraph Company, superintending the construction of the telegraph from Carson City, Nevada to Bodie, California. Eighteen months later he made a small fortune as one-third owner of the Great Sierra Mine, which was sold for $100,000.