Before we shut the book on 2017, let's close out 1987 with a look at what happened in our city 30 years ago this month.

* Just about everything in this article by John Barnett seems foreign today. It was this month when AT&T pulled the plug on Houston's last cord switchboard. In service since 1953, the board initially handled Houston's long-distance calls. By the time it was put into retirement, the board was handling 600 "special services" calls per day, calls involving mobile phones, conference calls and such. Computers had made this tech obsolete.

Letting her hand momentarily linger on the cool, black surface of the console, Terry Hale released a long sigh as she unplugged her headset from the old switchboard and said her goodbyes.

After 18 years at position 5335 on the 130-foot cordboard, Hale and 13 other AT&T operators are getting a new computerized operator system that will instantly display any information they need to provide the customer.

At the same time, Houston's last cord switchboard, the type made famous by Lily Tomlin with her Ernestine the operator character on television's "Laugh In", is being retired. Its manual plugs have been made obsolete by fast electronic switches; the thick tangle of wires that hides behind panels at the operator's feet now can be replaced by a single fiber optic cable.

Hale no longer will have to pull out one of 10 cords to answer a call and plug in another cord to dial the number, while writing down the phone number of the caller and the person being called, finding the area code in the flip chart beside her, stamping the beginning and ending time and filing the card in the appropriate slot in front of her. With the computer keyboard, everything will be done with the touch of a button.

"But this is the end of an era," she says. "I know the new computerized boards are better, but they don't have the history or the charm of the old cordboards."

The cordboard handled its last call at 10:15 a.m. Dec. 9 from a ship somewhere near Port Arthur to a number in Houston, said operator Judy Burleson, who handled the call.

Recently, the old switchboard's job was to handle the "special services" calls, such as mobile, marine, air-to-ground and conference calls. And as AT&T's technology grew, the number of calls moving through the old switchboard fell - to about 600 per day when it was shut down.

But that was not always the case. When the board went into service in 1953, it was one of eight that handled all types of long distance calls in the Houston/Galveston area. Each had positions for 40 operators and, with three shifts, there were 960 female employees working in four rooms lined with the cordboards. Another 40 operators were available to fill in during busy times or in case of sickness.

Harold Walden retired from AT&T in 1981 after working the boards for 25 years. Walden was one of eight switchboard repairmen, and proudly says that among his friends, he was known as the man who went to work with 1,000 women.

"All of the operators looked good to us," he says, as a grin starts to spread across his face. "We used to pretend to check out their headsets early in the morning when they were coming in to work but we were really checking out what they were wearing."

AT&T had a very strict dress code in those days and the women had to wear dresses. "They were neat as a pin, and it was required that they were always dressed up," he says. "Thechief operator would stand outside and inspect them to make sure they were dressed right."

Walden and the other repairmen had to crawl around under the boards to work, but the supervisor always cleared out three operators on either side of the work area, he says.

Operators also could not leave the switchboard until there was someone to fill in for them, he says. "Before air conditioning, there was a lot of throwing up at the board. They would wheel in big blocks of ice to each end of the room and put large fans behind them to try to keep it cool."

And Ma Bell never tolerated tardiness.

"We got to be experts in opening operators' car doors," he says.

"If they would be running late, they would jump out of the cars and lock the keys in them with the motor running and the radio on and call us over later to go down and turn it off and bring the keys back."

Shift changes were organized chaos, Burleson says. All of the operators who were going off duty stood by their stations while they brought in all of the next shift.

"You couldn't leave your post until your replacement was there to take over the calls," she says.

Hale remembers that the supervision was constant and intense.

"The supervisor walked up and down the line with her headset in her hand and the cord dangling like a whip," she said. "She would plug in beside you at any time to listen to the call or tell you to stop talking."

Hale was working on Sept. 9, 1985, when the old cordboard had its final claim to fame. A major earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico, causing hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries around Mexico City. AT&T created a new connection to Mexico and channeled all the calls through the Houston cordboard because the regular electronic equipment was not set up to handle the additional numbers required to complete a connection for rerouted calls.

"The first call through was from the White House and we didn't believe it," she said. "It was President Reagan calling to offer help to Mexico's president. After that, the board lit up."

During that emergency, the operators worked 10-hour shifts to cover all the calls, Hale said. They kept one trunk line open to the U.S.

Embassy for 21 days because they were afraid they would never be able to re-establish contact if they broke the connection.

Now, except for the cordboard stretching from wall to wall, the room is almost empty. AT&T sold most of the chairs to the operators, who wanted them as keepsakes.

But the solid cherry cabinet, something not seen at today's computerized operator stations, still gleams from years of care. Behind the switchboard, the polished wood panels are stacked haphazardly against the wall to provide easy access for the workmen, who will soon move in to sever the wires that once connected Houston to the world.

* Alice Cooper brought gore and more to the faithful at the Sam Houston Coliseum. There were plenty of bizarre and rather disturbing sights to behold, but perhaps the most humorous occurred after the concert, as Marty Racine wrote in the paper's Dec. 3 editions.

Women got stabbed and strangled. Human skeletons, dead babies and a giant black widow spider littered the stage. We bore witness to the beheaded and the bedeviled, the hunted and the haunted.

All the while, Alice the Malice Cooper sang the Executioner's Song to the delight of 3,000 rock 'n' ghoul fans at the Coliseum Saturday night.

It was an amusing night of horror, but the humorous part was in leaving the Coliseum, when the crazed fans, whooping and hollering like a college football team flashing from the tunnel before a big game, walked into a simultaneous exodus from the adjoining Music Hall, where the civilized set had attended the Houston Barbershop Singers' "The Magic of Christmas". From their perspective, it must have looked like the inmates had taken over the asylum.

The glory of life and the gory of death, only a city block apart.

Talk about cultural diversity.

Alice the Malice's show would have played well on Halloween. Not stumped, however, he ordered up a full moon for his Houston stop on the "Raise Your Fist and Yell" tour. Outside, the mist crept before the big moon, turning the night sinister.

Inside the Big Barn on Bagby, the booming sound of heavy metal running amok clattered and clanged against the rafters. Rock 'n' roll ambiance to the contrary, the Coliseum is an abysmal place to hear a concert, just a wretched acoustical nightmare. The bass drum rumbled in one direction, the lead guitar went zooming off in another, and the conductor of this runaway freight, Alice the Malice himself, was left to corral the sound with all the vocalizing and theatrics he could muster.

Or was it the Coliseum's fault? It could be that Cooper's band, under cover of theatrics, has simply come to be unconcerned with tight musicianship. It only matters if the drum roll coincides with Alice's long walk up to the hangman's noose - not whether it's part of a cohesive, rhythmic whole. I thought the "music" Saturday was quite inferior to Cooper's last concert here, about a year ago at the Music Hall.

The "Raise Your Fist And Yell" anthem, expressed in the new song " Freedom", is not a bad retort to those in our society who would deny the citizens rock 'n' roll based on a few objectionable lyrics and subject matter. It's defiant in the best rock tradition.

So what Vincent Furnier - Alice the Malice's real name - has done is to go completely in the opposite direction. You don't like violence?

Well, take "this!" says the one who in his other life is a family man back home in Phoenix.

Bravo to the one who can reduce such ugliness to theater. But as the theater unfolded Saturday, somewhere between Alice's ripping the legs off the big spider and slitting the throat of a comely woman, the red spewing forth, I had to admit: Boy, do we live in sick times or what? I find it alternately amusing and disturbing.

I mean, what comes first, the insight or reality? Apart from Alice's own hanging toward the end of the show, women are "the" targets of violence in this presentation. Remember, as Cooper himself has sung, only women bleed. In this scenario they are little more than harlots deserving of their fate. Is this another way of condoning such behavior or a way of revealing its sickness?

Or have we come to the point where we just accept it?

The massacre onstage - a beheading, a hanging, stabbings, dismemberments - combined with giant, scorching floodlights turned on the audience and the rumbling decibels overhead added up to pure sensory overload, pure nastiness. The sooner you get numbed to the effects, the better. I mean, there's nothing fine, elegant or classy about it. We're talking ugly.

His brain securely fastened in his biceps, Kane Roberts, the muscle-bound guitarist who's embarking on a solo career as well, put the macho back into rock in its most caricaturized form, standing there blazing up the frets lickity-split and brandishing his instrument like a machine gun. Power - power through might, kind of like Rambo rocking out over the killing field.

Roberts did peel off one semi-interesting solo on "School's Out".

It didn't connect with anything, of course, but, as in most heavy metal, it added up to a sonic blast of technical wizardry, where the ethics of speed and noise prevail. Drummer Ken Mary unleashed a savage drum solo during the same song, heavy on the bass, which oozed out uncontrollably.

The band exited for a short break following "School's Out" and returned for an encore of "Freedom". By now the crowd, only half of capacity, was standing, raising fists and yelling. I'm not quite sure what they were yelling about, what the message was. I think the secret is locked in the adolescent male hormone.

Following this monstrosity I hastened over to the Ale House, presenting its final night of music after nearly four years of support for local bands. The place was packed. Houston heavy metal champs XOX was the headliner, and I walked into their first song, " Stand Up And Shout".

Or was it "Stand Up, Raise Your Fist and Yell and then Shout"?

Whatever. Remember, it's your freedom, and heavy metal is fighting for your right to address the issues of the day with nonsense.

* It may have been a parrot, but it sure sang like a canary. Here's what happened, as reported by John Makeig, when someone made off with a bird that was just a little too talkative.

The prosecutors needed a witness, and the victim sang like a bird.

In fact, the victim was a bird - a 13-year-old, yellow-headed parrot with the boyish name of Eric, even though suspicions are that he just may be a she.

After nine years of treating employees and patrons of the Shoe Hut at Westheimer and Fondren to wolf whistles and such utterances as "Telephone Line 1," "Rock 'n' Roll," and "Polly Want a Cracker," Eric was whisked from his perch in October during a burglary.

The store owner, Laura Lancaster Bates, said that although Eric had been a regular store fixture, no one realized how popular the parrot was until the theft. Then, she said, longtime patrons remarked how depressing it was not to see the bird they had come to know so well.

It was in November when police were checking into a pawn shop burglary that a 19-year-old probationer, Bobby Latroy McCuin, came to the officers' attention.

McCuin's probation officer recalled how, on one trip to his apartment, it was mostly empty. But the next visit to the residence, the probation officer said, it was filled with electronics gear.

Investigators subsequently showed McCuin's photograph to the pawn shop owner and then went to McCuin's apartment themselves. Among the many articles found there was a parrot in a large gold cage.

The parrot made his presence known by shouting "Hello, Laura!" and "Hello, Eric!" while they were there.

Asked about the green and yellow bird, McCuin told them he had gotten it from someone identified only as "Little Man."

Additional checks for stolen parrots turned up Bates' name, and she was summoned to a police substation to see if it was hers.

She was directed to an upstairs room at the substation and, even before she saw Eric, the parrot went berserk in the cage. Flapping its wings madly and swinging wildly around inside the cage, it set up a loud chorus of "Hello, Laura!"

"Eric just started screaming, 'Laura!' It took me aback," Bates said. "I knew I was his favorite, but I didn't know it was that much.

I didn't have to identify him; he identified me."

Not only did Bates reclaim her missing parrot, she was also surprised to find that the thieves had done a good job of clipping the wings and manicuring the talons.

"Whoever did it," she marveled, "really knew what they were doing."

Prosecutor Diane Bull said, "The moral of the story is that if you steal, a talking parrot you better retrain him."

McCuin pleaded guilty Friday to theft by receiving for acquiring the stolen $2,700 parrot, and state District Judge Michael McSpadden sentenced him to four years in prison.

Eric, meanwhile, is back at the Shoe Hut in a new, larger cage, and Bates admitted to one small fabrication in the saga of her store's pet parrot.

"We call him Eric, you know, but we really think he's a girl," she confessed. "He's been trying to nest and things like that."