Mid-century Florida press agent · father of science writer Timothy Ferris
Thomas A. Ferris worked in Florida as a press agent for the New York publicist Steve Hannagan, whose habit of firing off trivial telegram queries set up the joke. Columnist George Dixon named Ferris as the sender of the famous reply in 1961, and Ferris’s son — the science writer Timothy Ferris, born in Miami in 1944 to a publicist father — told Quote Investigator in 2011 that he had heard his father quote the exchange within the family. His life dates are not documented in the sources that record the anecdote; he survives in print mainly as the punchline’s author.