Mrs. Printz was picky about prospective buyers, Mr. Snyder said, and had requested his assurance on two things: “Keep the legacy intact, and take care of my girls.” Mr. Snyder had studied business at Columbia and saw the opportunity to revitalize a historic brand, but the transition ended up being far more agonizing than he’d expected.

The switchboards confounded him, the girls had not been girls for a long while, and the office walls were stained brown from decades of cigarette smoke. “They didn’t know how to use computers,” Mr. Snyder said. “No modern technology. There was no website. There were still typewriters.”

Thus began the Belles’ tardy transition to modernity. An early website Mr. Snyder designed stressing the company’s past was scrapped; receptionists were taught how to use computers; and the company dropped “Celebrity” from its name. He retired the switchboards: Three were thrown out, two were sold and the last was kept out of respect, he said.

Mr. Snyder can still slip into fascination with the time warp surrounding him. He retrieved a plastic jar filled with small sticks of worn plastic. “This is a plug,” he said, holding up a red one. “We used to use them to jam someone’s service if they hadn’t paid the bill.” He pushed it into an imaginary switchboard with a grin on his face.

He recently stood in front of the dismantled switchboard in his office’s back room. A box containing its gutted parts sat on a shelf.

“If you were to put a soul into this thing and it could talk, we would have some very interesting conversations. It could tell us some stories,” Mr. Snyder said. “But the times change and things change. That’s the cycle of life: We move on.”

Some bulbs on the switchboard, which once lit up when calls came in, were colored red. In later years, he explained, receptionists started marking the last few active personal lines with a red marker. “Eventually it came down to one,” he said. I asked who the holdout was.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

I pressed him. He upheld the code of the Belles.

“I’m not saying,” he said with finality. “They’ve been with us a long time.”