Number
Please...
“I’m
taking a selfie of me and my bestie and posting it to Instagram, Twitter and
Facebook!”
“You
used to call me on my cell phone”
“Six
callers ahead of us, Jimmy.”
“Can
you hear me now?”
“E.T.
phone home.”
“Operator,
uh can you help me with this call?”
“And
the operator says 40 cents more, for the next 3 minutes, Please Mrs. Avery!”
“One
ringy, dingy”
“Number
Please...”
On a
hot summer day in 1937, 2 beautiful girls adorned in light summer dresses and
heels would arrive on Court Street in Prestonsburg to begin their shift for Ma
Bell. They would walk up the stairs beside Rose’s Drug Store to the
switchboard, the heart of the local phone service and relieve from duty the
night shift operator. As the country made the changes from telegraph to
telephone, an interesting observation was noted. Historically boys were used
for telegraph delivery for their foot speed, but it was soon noticed that men
lacked the patience needed to switch calls and their behavior at the
switchboard was undesired and crude. So early on women were sought after to
become telephone operators. In 1937, Jean Burke was one of those beautiful
phone operators and the Prestonsburg exchange of Southern Bell had six of them.
And so their long day of interacting with folks from near and far began. “We
got 25 cents an hour, I got pretty close to 40 dollars every 2 weeks. I got a
beaver coat and I thought I was the fanciest thing ever was. From Spiegel
catalog I ordered a bedroom suite and kept it for years.” Jean proudly exclaimed.
“Number
please...” Jean and the other operators would answer each call. “Can you call
me at 10 o’clock so I can feed my baby?”, a young woman asked one early
morning. Jean politely replied, “I’m very busy this morning.” And so the young
mother had to seek help elsewhere. “What time does the movie start and what’s
playing?”, Jean laughed as she told me that they answered many calls each day
such as this. Each operator had a list of numbers and names but since the
exchange only had about 200 phones, they rarely had to look a number up. The
tricky part was that they had to know all the names of the members of a
household, even the children and sometimes even the family dog. And as almost
every phone belonged to a party line, operators had to check the ring pattern
for each phone. “Some people had two or three short rings and then a long ring,
everybody’s was different so the households knew which family should pick up.
“Don’t tell, but when we were not busy, we heard some interesting conversations
and all for 25 cents an hour!”
Dr.
John Archer had his office right across the street, above where Burchett’s
Jewelry store was located later. Jean explained, “If a patient needed him and
he didn’t answer, often we would look out the window and see him standing on Court
Street talking to somebody, so we would holler ‘Dr. John, you got a call!’ and
then he would go upstairs and we would hook him up.”
Two
operators worked the busy day shift and only one worked the overnight shift.
“We had a cot to sleep on during the overnight shift because you would only get
one or two calls at night. I was working night shift one night and a call came
in and it was from my house. I was afraid something was wrong with mom or dad
and I answered and it was the doctor. He had been out on a call and he stopped
at my parent’s house, woke them up, used their phone to call and wake me up for
me to call and wake his wife up. He wanted to see if he had other emergency
calls to tend to before coming home. She told him to come home, you fool!”
Naturally
pay phones were on every street corner, in every restaurant and the latest
craze. A caller could place a local call for a nickel, a dime or a quarter and
receive the number of minutes that coin could buy at the time. The operators
had to listen to the sound that each coin made when it hit the tube to
determine how much money the caller had deposited. Then the operator had to
watch the time manually and interrupt the caller to ask for more coins when
they reached their time limit.
In
September 1941, dial phones were installed and the last girls to inquire,
“Number please” were retired from their duty. Jean used her savings to visit a
favorite aunt in Chicago for a few weeks. She elevated in an elevator at
Marshall Fields and bought some new clothes and shoes. Jean arrived back home
on a Friday in early December 1941 and was listening to the radio that fateful
Sunday morning with her family as the first Pearl Harbor reports were aired.
The last operators at the Prestonsburg exchange were: supervisor Minnie Hale,
Fern Hale, Toots Parsley, Ruth Crabtree, Orb Vaughn and Jean Herald (Burke). As
Jean honestly exclaims, “My how times have changed!”
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