Ezell, Walter S.

The following data is extracted from A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans.

Walter S. Ezell. Contributing to the prestige of the City of Wichita as an educational center are a number of well ordered business and technical institutions, and prominent among the number is the Wichita Telegraph College, which was founded in the spring of 1912 by its present owner and manager, Walter S. Ezell, who as a mere boy had manifested a distinct predilection for the art of telegraphy and who contrived to pass much of his time in the telegraph office of the railway station of which his father was agent in the City of Memphis, Tennessee. As an expert operator his interest has never waned and it was through his appreciation of the educational and practical value of his profession that he was led to establish his present excellent school for the training of others for effective service as telegraphists.

Mr. Ezell was born at Memphis, Tennessee, on the 22d of May, 1872, and as a boy he absorbed a working knowledge of telegraphy under the conditions noted in the preceding paragraph. After having profited duly by the advantages of the public schools of his native city he went to the City of Nashville, Tennessee, where he completed a two years' course in Vanderbilt University. After leaving the university he served as telegraph operator and railway station agent in several southern cities, and he was thus engaged until 1900, when he effected the establishing of the Houston Telegraph College in the City of Houston, Texas. He conducted this school six years, within which period he developed the same into the largest and most important institution of its kind in the South. Impaired health virtually compelled him to dispose of the school, and after selling the same he passed two years in California, where he recuperated his physical energies and where he held the position of train dispatcher at Sacramento for the Western Pacific Railroad. At the expiration of the two years he went to Denver, Colorado, and became traveling representative for the Denver Business College. As an executive he proved specially valuable in this field of endeavor, and later he was similarly retained by other business colleges until 1912, when he established his home at Wichita and became the founder of his present splendidly equipped and successful telegraph college. The institution under his progressive and able management has had a steady and substantial advancement in the number of students enrolled and it now ranks as one of the best colleges of the kind in the West. Both regular and wireless telegraphy is taught in the school, with the most approved and modern of apparatus and accessories, and graduates of the college are most thoroughly fortified for their work, as shown by the fact that they are able to pass the rigid examinations demanded by the Government for service in its wireless and other telegraph stations. The course in the Wichita Telegraph College is also such as to prepare students for efficient railway-telegraph service and all other phases of practical telegraphic work. Wichita is fortunate in having been made the seat of this excellent school and its proprietor is known and valued as a loyal and public-spirited citizen and successful business man. He was recently elected a member of the Institute of Engineers.

Source: A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans

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