High-tech Communications

By Gary White (CVHS, Class of 1955)

The telephone office was a communications hub for Cedar Vale, Kansas and the surrounding rural communities. Located in a house on Highway 166 just south of the high school, the office was run by a woman named Molly Leniton who lived at the back of the house and was the Chief Operator. Molly’s house was just two rooms at the back and the bathroom down the hall from the living room, which functioned as the central telephone office for the town. In the living room/office were a pay phone booth, the switchboard, and all the electronics to operate the phone system, along with two desks where people could come in and subscribe for service or pay their bills. Molly hired several operators to help her run the switchboard, which had to be working 24-hours per day, seven days per week, with no closing for holidays. She hired my mother as an operator when I was about seven years of age and we were living across the street from the office. Since I spent considerable time in the office when my mother was working evenings, I’ll do a detailed description of the place.

Cedar Vale had an old magneto telephone system where all the lines came directly into the central office and were connected to the switchboard by an electronic mainframe on the back of the board. Power was supplied by a transformer on an adjoining rack, with banks of wet cell batteries to provide backup in case of power failure. I can remember that the batteries were clear glass and I could see the electrical components floating in acid within.

The switchboard had a jack (hole in the board) for each line in and out of the system and a little trap door above each jack that would open up when the party on the other end cranked their phone. (Yes, you youngsters, all phones had hand cranks on the sides of them in those days.) When a drop (the little trap door was called a drop) fell, the operator connected a plug to the jack and answered the call with the standard “number please” that was required of all Bell Telephone operators. Then the party would give the number and the operator would connect the call using the other half of the pair of plugs that were recessed into the base of the switchboard toward the back. If the number was busy, my mother would say “that number is busy” and remember to call the party back when the line was free. Her memory for such details was unerring and she would often be able to tell a caller that a party wasn’t home but had called in from some other place in town and they might try for them at that number. As you can see, the telephone operator had a unique, and fairly complete, picture of what was going on in that little town.

When a caller completed a call they were supposed to “ring off” by turning the crank on their phone. Many people forgot that part of the bargain and the operators had to poll all active connections from time to time to see if they were still talking. That this led to overhearing parts of conversations and some outright eavesdropping goes without saying. My mother was not above listening in when business was slow. I well remember her coming home steaming mad at my father after one such overheard conversation. Of course, the callers would recognize the voice of the operator and might assume that my mother would be listening in, which in the following instance, she was. In a conversation between two ladies of doubtful reputation in the town, mother heard one say to the other, “That Charlie White is a handsome man. He could put his shoes under my bed any day.” Well, mother arrived home with steam coming out of both ears and my father, who was totally innocent, didn’t hear the last of it for months. Such were the “wages of sin” in Cedar Vale—in this case, the sin of listening in on other people’s conversations.

The telephone switchboard was the best predictor of weather in the region, far beyond anything you could hear on the radio. When lightning struck anywhere in the western half of Chautauqua County drops on the switchboard for that area would all fall at the same time. Really big storms would result in all the drops falling at once and the operator would have a full-time job replacing them. The job of operator was not without danger and all the operators could report situations where balls of lightning fire would come out of the face of the switchboard and dance around the office.

The “country lines” were party lines with two to six people on a single line. (Many of the town lines were also shared in that way.) The operator had to remember how many rings each party on a party line was assigned and ring their phones accordingly. People on party lines had to put up with constant eavesdropping from other people on the line. I can well remember a farmer who was one of my dad’s customers who would always answer his phone, “good evening friends and neighbors” which would be followed by clicks on the line as the guilty parties hung up their phones.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the telephone office was the hub of local communications. When the Cedar Vale system was replaced by dial phones many people told my mother, who had by that time become the Chief Operator, that the new service just couldn’t compare with the old hand cranked system. People missed the personalized attention they were used to, even if it meant that others always knew all their business.