Ben Naddaff-Hafrey
Ben Naddaff-Hafrey is a Senior Producer at Pushkin Industries and host of The Last Archive. Prior to hosting, Ben was the lead producer on The Last Archive. Prior to Pushkin, Ben…
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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
The Hosts
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics,…
