I
had a friend working as an operator for the telephone company, so it
was not surprising that I, too, ended up working for the company.
In 1925 Hattie Goody hired me for part-time work. This was
even before my graduation from Iowa City High School.
The
training consisted of plugging in with an experienced operator, and
watching her work. Then you would take over while she monitored
your work. I think this went on for about two weeks, or until you
were ready to be on your own at the board.
As I remember, Laura
Peet was the evening chief; Ferdell Sims was an assistant chief; Clara
Young was the night chief; Hattie Goody, of course, was the chief
operator at the time, and for many years more.
For about six
months I worked evening as a part-time, however, due to illness, I had
the summer off. In the autumn I returned part-time for a short
period, and then became full-time. Operators were a regimented
lot. There was to be no talking, no looking around the room, no
chewing gum, and so on.
There were lots of evenings in my
working career. After I'd been a local operator long enough to
work my way up to seven to four ours, I learned toll. This put me
back to evening hours once again! I'm sure I did have lots of day
tricks, but at the time the evening hours made more of an impression on
me. Once in a while I had worked nights, but I really did not
like night hours.
The supervisors by this time had tall,
thin-legged chairs - which we occasionally got to sit in. Hattie
did pace up and down behind the row of operators, and the supervisors;
she was keeping her eye on all of us.
We used to have a male
customer who persistently complained about the service. He
complained if the operators did not answer his signal fast enough; he
complained if the operators did not ring his called party often enough;
he complained about everything, mot of the time quite unreasonably.
The operators hated to sit at the position where his light
appeared, because they knew that he would always find things to
complain about; he seemed to enjoy trying to make life miserable for
the operators and supervisors. He often called the manager of the
day, Carl Cone, with his voluminous complaints. Then the manager would
call upstairs to inquire what the problem was. Of course the
customer was the problem, but Cone could hardly tell the customer that!
I still recall one day when that customer called me with a
complaint; I was listening to him rattle away when I was called to the
other end of the board. I unplugged my headset from the
complainer, took the other call, handled the problem and then returned
to the complainer. He was still going on at great length and had
not even noticed my absence!
In the late 1920s a group of
operators would go to Danceland in Cedar Rapids to dance and to hear
the big orchestras. You could make the trip on the interurban,
and I remember one time when Anna Miller and I, and probably some of
the other telephone girls, were on the interurban heading for a dance
in Cedar Rapids. Our interurban collided head-on with another
interurban; when we finally made it to Cedar Rapids, I was too shaken
to go on to the dance. I stayed around the depot and caught the
next interurban back to Iowa City. Of course some of the girls
went right on to the dance. The next day my father opened the
paper to read that I had been injured in an interurban crash; he came
up to my room to see if I was all right. Other people as they saw
the item in the paper called my home to see if I'd been badly hurt.
My father was embarrassed, for my parents did not approve of
dancing.
The day of the Englert Theatre fire was my day off, so
I missed out on that memorable day. I cannot say that I was sorry
to have missed it. Those working that day did stay at the
switchboard. This was early in 1926, I believe.
Among
those who worked at the old building when I did, I remember Esther
Bouquot, Esther Franklin, Frances Gaulocher, LaVae Huffman, Gertrude
Miller, Lillian Vrana, Shirley Wharton and Gwen Wiese, as well as many
others too numerous to list. There was quite a turnover due to
the "no married women" rule of the era. In 1932 we moved from the
old building at 227 East Washington to the new building at 302 South
Linn; now we supervisors and operators only had to climb up to the
second floor instead of the third floor.
When I married Albert
Jonas in 1936, that was my resignation from the company; however
Hattie would still call me in to work when she needed help. But
if she gave me day hours, the other operators complained because
married women were not supposed to be working at all. So then
Hattie would give me late hours, which I was not too happy about.
I worked only intermittently from 1936 to 1941. During
World War II the "no married women" rule was dropped and from 1941 to
1943 I worked regularly.
My husband was with A T & T and
when he was transferred to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1943, I also
transferred. But I worked only a short time there before thyroid
and other health problems caused me to resign rather than go on sick
leave. This was the end of my working career with the Bell System
in 1943. When my husband later transferred to Pocatello, Idaho, I
almost returned to work, but in the end, decided not to.
I do
remember during the war that we often made up our own routings of toll
calls when we ran across long delays on the authorized routes.
This sometimes made distant operators rather angry.
One
other item may be of interest. Salt Lake City had a large army
base and many of the service wives were working as operators for the
telephone company there. While supervising, I would often notice
that an operator - lonesome for her home in say, Boston - would have a
connection up on her board to that city, and would be visiting with the
home folks between taking calls! Of course operators were needed
so badly then that you couldn't really fire anyone. You just
requested that the connection to the home folks be taken down.
In
conclusion, I will say that I have always enjoyed working at the
telephone company. I made lots of friends there and I had a
varied and interesting career of local, toll and supervisory duties.