Ann Genader

Columnist

Stories of the history of telephone service in the area go back to “magneto offices,” a name referring to the crank-operated magneto switchboard that operators used to make a telephone ring.

In the 1920s and '30s calls came into a switchboard that was often located in a private home. The person operating the switchboard was hired as an agent for the telephone company.

Brad Bender, a West Milford native who probably still holds the title of having been the youngest Board of Education president in New Jersey decades ago, has lived in Danby, Vermont for many years.

Involved with the historical society in Danby, Bender was surprised when a copy of a little book presented to the society described early telephone experiences back in his home state – with a chapter about his hometown of West Milford.

Bender wrote to me about Harold Kay, a man who retired from New Jersey to Danby in 1974. He died a few years ago. Bender said Kay was with “Ma Bell” in New Jersey for 47 years and wrote about his experiences in his book.

Bender believes his Aunt Harriet (Grandfather Sam Bunting’s sister) may have been fictionalized into Sally and doesn’t know if Sally is a real name or not. Harriet’s real-life daughters were Leah and Shirley. In the book the daughters were Sue and Mary.

“There were the two old maids over in Hewitt,” continued Bender. “I can’t remember their names either, but my grandfather would often tell the story of how they called him on Memorial Day 1939 when he moved into his house at Camp Hope. They didn’t think it was proper to be moving on a holiday and told him so.”

Bender wonders if anyone knows the names of these two ladies who handled the West Milford calls or where their house was. To my recollection I think he is correct in questioning if it could have been on the site of what became the “new” phone building on Lincoln Avenue on property behind the St. Catherine’s Church building which is now a second hand shop operated by a non-profit group.

I believe the switchboard ladies may have lived in the house next to the former church where the late Ed and Mary Shinol lived later.

The ladies operating the company telephones more often than not, in attending to business in their magneto home offices were generally having a social affair, Kay said. He described things as being quite homey – with family members going in and out, meals being eaten and laundry folded.

Kay told of a woman in the Newfoundland telephone office who enjoyed her cup of tea. He wrote that being that Helen was on call 24 hours a day she probably needed many cups of the beverage to get through the day.

He said it was not unusual for “central” (as those operators were always called) to have to respond to a ring in the wee morning hours. Because Helen made her tea one fresh cup at a time she went through tea bags at a fast rate.

Identifying himself as the son of a Scotsman, Kay said Helen’s habit struck him as not being very thrifty – but he knew that even people watching their pennies had to have their little pleasures. He assumed that a fresh teabag was Helen’s self-indulgence.

One day Kay was assigned to “routine” the battery for Newfoundland. The Edison cell, being heavy, industrial looking, full of lead and acid, and capable of giving off fumes, was kept in the basement. Described as resembling a tall, glass aquarium, the batteries kept the phone working even if there was a power failure.

To “routine” the Edison cell, Kay went down the outdoor steps into the basement. He waved to Helen through the window – where she sat alongside her always-present teacup. He switched on the bare light bulb in the basement, barely illuminating the packed dirt floor; exposed rod-and-tube power wires, and coal furnace that were typical basements fixtures in those days.

Continuing to tell his story, Kay said as he passed the furnace, going to the Edison cell, he noticed a table set nearby in the warmth. He said it was covered with high stacks of small, rectangular, reddish-brown objects.

“Helen was not quite the spendthrift I had presumed she was,” said Kay. She saved her teabags. Not just one bag, saved between one cup and the next. Helen saved all her teabags. What in the world she was ever going to do with them, I don’t know. Maybe she planned to retire by opening a tea shop.”

Kay told about the Edison cell that he was supposed to routine in Helen’s basement. He said like a car battery it uses “wet” cells of liquid acid and lead plates. Continuing his explanation Kay said that as in any wet cell, the acid solution in an Edison cell loses its potency. The routine was to take the cell out, dump its contents and refill it.

He said magneto offices did not run on electrical power alone. They also ran on people power – and people occasionally ran down as much as their batteries did. As in Helen’s case in Newfoundland, the agent was often the only person in the house.

“Despite all those cups of tea that Helen drank – or perhaps because of them – when Helen slept, she would fall so soundly asleep that the bell would not wake her,” recalled Kay. “Of course, the customers had no way to complain when that happened – as nobody in Newfoundland could call anywhere.”

Eventually one of the other offices would try to put a call through to Newfoundland and would get no answer.

“The cry would go up,” said Kay. ‘”We can’t get Newfoundland! We can’t get Newfoundland!”

He said the solution was for him or one of the other men to go up there with a truck and ladder. The ladder was necessary because Helen would, quite sensibly, lock the front door, and she wasn’t any more likely to hear someone at the door than hear the bell on the switchboard.”

“I would put the ladder up to her window, rap on the window and wake her,” Kay wrote. “This was a regular event, but you couldn’t do much else about it because she was the agent; it was her house and the switchboard was in the living room.”

Agents like Helen spent so much time on the job that they picked up some unusual technical skills. The way they rang someone’s phone was to spin the magneto crank that stuck out of the switchboard. The magneto generated current strong enough to ring the bell on the distant phone. Because of the electrical loses in the wire, the further away the phone was, the harder the crank was to turn. Likewise, if there was a trouble spot on the line, depending upon where and what the trouble was, the magneto would crank harder or easier than usual, he said.

One woman in particular had such a knack with the magneto and knew the area so well that if there was a trouble on the line, when a repairman came out, she’d say where she thought the trouble location was and she was generally right, said the lineman.

Kay said agents could also provide some special services. His family lived in Hawthorne at the time. He, along with his father and brothers were all avid skaters. Several of them used racing skates and for that type of skating a large body of water like Greenwood Lake with good ice was seen by them to be a real joy.

“You can stretch your legs and practically fly,” shared Kay. “Greenwood Lake was quite a distance away, but worth the trip if the ice was just right. In the winter, if we wanted to know if there was enough ice for skating on the lake, I would call the West Milford office, right near the lake, and ask, ‘How is the skating up there?’ The agent was in a position to see everyone’s comings and goings from the lake, and could tell me whether it was worth the trip.”

The local telephone service agents knew everyone in town, and usually knew about everything that was happening around the town.

“This was not really from listening in on people’s calls, as popular history might lead you to think,” said the retired lineman. “That idea probably came from the fact that when a call went between offices, some switchboards gave the operator no indication when the call was over. The operator had to check to see if the line was quiet, and if it was, say something like ‘West Milford are you through?’ Listening in created a noticeable click on the line, and any click, whether caused by the operator or not, probably raised unwarranted suspicion that the operator was snooping.”

Party lines – with six or more people on the line were widely in use. The subscribers were assigned a specific ringing cadence. People were only supposed to pick up the phone on their assigned number of rings. However, eavesdropping with others picking up a phone gently and listening in to other’s conversations was a pastime for curious people with nothing better to do.

Kay said it was simply that agents spoke to more people in town in any given day than anyone else and with no rules one could have a quick conversation about this or that while placing a call. As a result if someone made a call to an individual and there was no answer to the call the operator could generally tell people if the person they were calling was out shopping or somewhere else. In the day before “information” operators, a call for information had a much broader meaning Kay said.

When he was making the rounds of central offices he tried to do Newfoundland in the morning and get up to West Milford in the afternoon. He mentioned two very friendly agents in West Milford – who if he got there around noon – would insist on giving him lunch.

When he retired, Kay took many precious memories with him. He never forgot the job he greatly enjoyed and the good people he met along the way.