Operator! Operator!

Mandeville’s Althea Memory Wildgen, now 85, was an operator in the pre-World War II northshore phone system, starting work for the phone company in 1940. Her aunt, Ovida Loustalot, preceded her as the friendly, efficient, helpful voice on the other end of the line in the 1920s. Althea’s a pistol who’s worked a wide variety of jobs in her life; as Justice of the Peace, she performed the marriage ceremony for almost 1,000 couples. She left the phone company when Pearl Harbor gave the United States a wakeup call on December 7, 1941, and volunteered in service for the war effort.

Returning from the service in 1948, Althea was called back as an operator by the phone company, then located at the southwest intersection of Jefferson and Carrol Streets in old Mandeville. “The building is still there, and I’ve many recollections of those days,” she sighs. “There were four or five of us covering shifts 24-7, and we knew every subscriber who called.”

Phones in the area were all hand-crank, wall-hanging units that were connected to the old drop switchboards. When a customer rang—by turning the crank—the operator would answer by plugging a cord into the board. The connection was completed by plugging the associated cord into the slot for the called party. There were three long-distance lines to New Orleans, two to Covington and one to Slidell. “We’d write long-distance billing tickets by hand,” says Althea, “clocking the tickets on a timer, beginning to end.” She recalls which number corresponded to which family or business: “4 was the Bechacs’, 7 was the cleaners.” Amazingly, she rattles off the single- and two-digit numbers of customers as if she were still at her switchboard some 50 or 60 years ago.

In the late ’40s and ’50s, the telephone operator was a crucial link in the community. Got a health issue? You got connected to the doctor (there were a few) or the pharmacy (only one in those days—Williams’ Pharmacy) right away. Got a fire? You not only got to the fire department, but the operator had to explain to every subscriber who called for details about where the fire engines they heard were headed. “We didn’t have 911 in those days,” Althea says. “We were 911!”

Eventually, the advent of the rotary dial telephone put the operators such as Althea out of work.

Whose ring is whose?

Don Conner was Bell Telephone’s district manager for the northshore in 1968. Having worked for the company since 1958, he transferred from New Orleans to Covington, where he and his family still live. He recalls that in the late ’60s, 210 employees served the northshore area, including engineers, linemen and service personnel. “Our Covington group was headed up in those days by Paul Cordes, former mayor of Mandeville. He was in charge of Covington, Mandeville and Madisonville. East St. Tammany and the Hammond, Bogalusa, Franklinton, and Angie branches were separate offices. There were many rural areas with a lot of party lines.” (For those of you who don’t remember party lines, they had nothing to do with partying in today’s sense of the word—they were shared lines made necessary by the technological and economic realities of the day.)

Don explains the aggravations of the party lines: “A two-party line was really good. You only had one other customer sharing your line; you didn’t get their ring, so it wasn’t bad at all.” The rings were different for each party. “But if you were on the line and I picked up, I would hear your conversation. Folks would always apologize and hang up—well, almost always.

“There were four-party lines and even up to eight-party lines that were real problems, though. Discerning the rings—even longs and shorts on the eight-party lines—drove folks nuts. Often you didn’t get to talk on your own phone,” Don adds. “But that was then—like the four-way stop at Highway 22 and 190 before the traffic lights and major development. Mandeville just had a TG&Y, Winn-Dixie, a dry cleaner, and that was life in the big city.”

How does modern technology strike Don? In his charming Arkansas drawl, he intones, “I find that it’s an era that’s passing me by. I used to understand the telephone, I used to be able to make it work, but we just bought a new cell phone for my wife and the instructions were printed in China and I did not understand it.” He chuckles, “Now, my grandkids can do it, but I’ll be darned if I can.”

“I am a lineman
for the parish …”

Mandeville’s Milton Dinkel wasn’t always a telephone company manager. “I started my career with the telephone company in 1947 as a lineman, climbing poles and stringing wire. The wire we strung is no longer used, of course—it’s been replaced by microwave and fiber optics.” He was made district manager of the Covington District in 1969, when profit margins were very low and demand—especially in the rural areas—was extremely high.

“We simply could not provide telephone service to everyone who wanted and needed it. It’s hard to tell someone that we can’t give you service. Some people took it personally, and I was called a few unpleasant names. One incident is worth repeating,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I heard that one rural customer was extremely distraught about not being able to get a telephone. He barged into the phone company’s office, staffed only by a secretary, and proceeded to chop up her typewriter and every other piece of furniture in the office with his ax. He didn’t hurt anybody, thank goodness.”

Today’s telephone service? Milton laughs. “We’ve got it knocked nowadays. Rarely do you have the outages we had to endure, unless a cable gets cut by a contractor or something, and now we have computerization of all the services that make today’s technology happen.” Back in his day, Milton says, the thought of such services like cell phones were relegated to comic books, such as the two-way wrist radio worn by 1940s-era Dick Tracy.

“We thought that was a dream—it would never happen—but here we are,” he chuckles. “The cell phone business has destroyed the coin telephone business, which was very lucrative in its day. We were held by the Public Service Commission to a nickel a call for a long time in Louisiana, then we went to a dime, and now it’s almost eliminated. I have grandchildren who recently married, and they decided to just have a cell phone number and not a landline—and that’s going to be a growing trend, I believe. ”

The Last Stand of the Buffalo

What an extraordinary gent Mandevillian Murray Fincher is! At 91, he’s just released his second published novel and is working on a third. Sharp as a tack, he recalls his days as vice president of South Central Bell, Louisiana Operations, from 1963 to 1977.

“I’ll tell you a story about what we at the phone company jokingly referred to as ‘The Last Stand of the Buffalo’ in Louisiana. A member of the state legislature owed the phone company a lot of money.
He went to the Public Service Commission and begged to be relieved of his debt. Well, the commission ruled that a pay phone be installed in his home, and thereafter he had to put in a nickel every time he wanted to make one of his long-winded calls.” Phone calls were a nickel—a buffalo nickel—for years and years, and Louisiana was the last state to hold out for a nickel. (We were also the last state with nickel Cokes, but that’s another story.)

Murray chuckles as he tells about a lady phone customer in New Orleans who kept calling during the Cuban missile crisis, complaining that she saw Cubans atop the telephone poles by her home. “She was certain that Castro was near her house—and what was the phone company gonna’ do about it?
“I once fielded a complaint from a fellow who was furious about putting his nickel in a payphone and getting no response. Even though I was in charge of the state phone system, that wasn’t good enough for him. He demanded to speak to the head of AT&T. He was a chronic caller; we had our share of characters.”

Fincher recalls another problem from the phone system’s early days. “The cost of construction in the rural areas was so great that many times we had to ask the customers to share the burden of the cost. Folks didn’t rally to that concept, as you might expect. Waldheim, I recall, was a problem area for service.” Even the construction budget of $130,000,000 a year for the state couldn’t keep pace with the growth and accommodate the needs of the public.

About the future of telecommunications, Murray says, “I think we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I think some version of the Internet will supersede just about everything we have today. We’ve come a long way since the nickel telephone call—the Last Stand of the Buffalo—in Louisiana. It was emblematic of the control politics had over utilities in the early days: Increase long distance calls all you want, but keep that basic call down to a nickel.”

Murray is still sharp of mind, and his seemingly agile, ache-free body exudes spryness. The secret of his longevity? “I haven’t died,” he replies.

May I speak to Adelaide, please?

Adelaide Boettner has resided in Mandeville since 1937, though for reasons unbeknownst to me she still to this day considers herself a ‘come-here.’ Like many in the early days of the northshore, her father was told to relocate here for health reasons. Adelaide is a feisty member of the Mandeville City Council who always weighs in on issues, no matter how controversial, and she always calls it as she sees it. We asked her to tell it as she heard it in the early days of phone service on the northshore.

“In those days we stood up to the phone on the wall with a crank on the side, a removable earpiece, and a stationary mouthpiece. To call out, we’d have to give either the name of the person we were calling or their two-digit number. My number ’till about 1957 was 78. To call Covington, Madisonville, Abita Springs and Lacombe was long distance. In a big promotion, the phone company said that, for 50 cents more a month, using the new-fangled rotary dial phones, those immediate areas would be included in the basic phone bill. A lot of folks were up in arms about the prospect of paying 50 cents more a month for the new contraption in their homes, plus losing the live operators.

“I remember cranking up the operator in ’57 or ’58 and asking her to connect me to Dr. Archibald, who lived across the street. She told me that he just got a call from Dr. Rogers on the other end of town and she just saw his car pass here to go there. ‘I’ll call him there in a minute and have him call you back,’ she told me.” A minute later Adelaide got the call.

Adelaide remembers then-little Eddie Deano, Jr. of Mandeville having two grandmas in town, “One he called ‘Mo-Ma’ and the other was ‘Ma-Moie.’ As a little kid, he’d just crank the phone and ask the operator to speak to one or the other.

“I can tell you when they took those crank boxes out to replace them with the new rotary phones, a lot of people took them out themselves. I never saw it, but I’ve heard some folks would take out the crank phone boxes from their homes, drop the line down into the Tchefuncte and Bogue Falaya Rivers, crank the magneto, and the shock would stun fish and they would float to the top for easy pickin’s.

“Mandeville was the first town in St. Tammany Parish to get the rotary telephone. In the ’70s you could still dial just four digits to call someone in the Mandeville area.” Adelaide excused herself to take a cell phone call.

“S’cuse me.”

Certainly.