A post to a “spook” email list to which I subscribe mentioned that Johnny Cash copied morse code when he was an airman stationed in Germany in the 1950’s. Cash could copy CW at over 35 words per minute, and apparently never lost the ability.
A few quotes from his autobiography:
“The Air Force taught me the things every military service imparts to its enlisted men . . . plus one skill that’s pretty unusual: if you ever need to know what one Russian is signaling to another in Morse code, I’m your man.
I had such a talent for that particular line of work and such a good left ear, that in Landsberg, where the United States Air Force Security Service ran radio intercept operations worldwide, I was the ace. I was who they called when the hardest jobs came up. I copied the first news
of Stalin’s death. I located the signal when the first Soviet jet bomber made its first flight from Moscow to Smolensk; we all knew what to listen for, but I was the one who heard it. I couldn’t believe that Russian operator. He was sending at thirty-five words a minute by hand, a rate so fast I thought it was a machine transmitting until I heard him screw up.He was truly exceptional, but most of his comrades were fast enough to make the best Americans sound like amateurs, sloppy and slow. It didn’t matter, though. Our equipment was so good that they couldn’t make a noise anywhere in the world without us hearing it. Our receiver worked pretty well bringing in WSM, too. Some Sunday mornings I could sit there
in Germany and listen to Saturday night at the Grand Ole Opry live from Nashville, Tennessee, just like at home.I heard the enemy every day in the Air Force, but I never saw combat or even came close to it. I enlisted a week before the Korean War broke out, so I was already in the system, and once they’d discovered my aptitude, trained me, and assigned me to the Security Service, Korea wasn’t an option. My only choice was between Germany and Adak Island,
the Aleutian archipelago off Alaska. that wasn’t hard: frozen everything or food and Frauleins? I chose Landsberg.”[…]
“That rhythm of the Morse code had a lot to do with the rhythm I felt in my music,” says Cash. “Every once in a while, I hear Morse code on my shortwave radio, and I scribble it down. I can still copy it pretty fast, and I wonder why that’s stuck with me for so long. I realized that it’s got a rhythm that just begs to have a drum added to it, or a guitar. After I got out of the Air Force, I could still hear it, and when I started writing songs again, I had that rhythm in my head. And those three years in Germany, where I thought I’d thrown away my personal life well, I like to feel that’s where I got it from.”
I had forgotten he was a fellow code jockey, though now I recall my shipmates mentioning it once when I was just getting started. It’s all just one more reason to tip my hat (once I get me a nice black hat) to the Man In Black.
(sources: Johnny Cash: The Biography, Harpers, 1997
http://www.qsl.net/prc/bulletin/2003/sep_2003.PDF)