[phone ringing] -If you know the extension number of the individual with whom you wish to speak, dial star-T now to restart at the activity menu, press star- -R, if finished, please hang up.

[cord clicks] ♪♪ -Number please.

-There was a time, not long ago, when your local telephone operator was likely to know your name just by the sound of your voice.

-Yes, Mabel?

No I don't- -She might take messages for you -let me try the post office -She probably had a good idea where the town doctor was.

♪♪ And she might just know a little bit more about your personal business than you'd like her to.

♪♪ -Number please.

-For nearly half a century, the telephone operator was at the heart of most rural communities, part social worker, part 911 operator, part gossip.

♪♪ -Are you finished?

Thank you.

♪♪ Historian Judith Moyer has spent the last five years reconstructing a piece of telephone history.

Instead of a hammer and nails, her tools include documents, photographs, and memories.

Judith is an oral historian.

She travels the state, interviewing people and recording their stories on audiotape.

-We call ourselves oral historians because we use oral sources We talk to people, get them to tell us what they remember.

We need to understand how we got here.

We need to understand how that machinery has affected us and how we have affected the machinery.

And what that means for us in the future.

-Judith began her study of telephone operators in 1990.

She was speaking to the Peterborough Historical Society when an older woman told her a story.

-She had a cane and she came up she was an elder, and she said, the next project you have to do has to be telephone operators, and a couple of years later, I realized she's right.

No one has written a history of the telephone system from the operator's point of view.

♪♪ It took Alexander Graham Bell's new invention just two years to travel from its birthplace in Boston, 60 miles north to the mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire.

The year was 1881, and the telephone was to be the great business tool of the 19th century.

But the phone's appeal spread quickly from the industrial centers like Manchester and Nashua, and by 1910, phone lines crisscrossed the state from Portsmouth to Hanover.

[electronic buzzing] -Hello?

-Early telephone systems, were organized into exchanges, -Eighteenth city market what's your name?

-From the hub of the switchboard a call could be connected to any other phone within that exchange.

For long distance calls the operator had to connect from one exchange to another until the call was complete.

-And we had a book.

We had to find our route, sort of like a map.

So we had to do our own route and go from one place to another to be connected.

And sometimes you'd get cut off.

You never knew where.

So we’d have little arguments with the operators.

Accuse them of cutting us off in Cincinnati or somewhere.

[car driving by] [footsteps in snow] It's helpful to talk to people and get a description.

It's a better step still to be able to put that together with a photograph.

And then the final wonderful step is to be able to look at the actual equipment and put all three together, and start understanding.

-When they turn the crank on their phone, which is the magneto.

The generator would generate a current that would make this drop come down.

This drop coming down, represents, say, a person calling in to a switchboard, and the operator with her headset on would use a cord and plug a cord in and push her, her key over to here's her answering key, and so she could talk and she'd say, number, please.

And they would ask for a number, for instance, like 208.

She would then plug in to 208, and she would then reverse this key and ring and turn the crank here for the generator to signal the party.

[phone ringing] ♪♪ -The first switchboards were operated by boys.

They would work for low wages and already had experience working with telegraph machines.

But by the late 1800s, male operators had earned a reputation for being unruly and impolite.

One visitor to a busy New York switchboard called the scene, perfect bedlam -The racket is almost deafening.

Boys rushing madly hither and thither as if they were lunatics, engaged in a mad game of fox and geese.

-Still in its infancy, the telephone industry could not afford to have its new customers offended by its operators.

And so, in 1878, New England Telephone in Boston hired its first female telephone operator.

If ever the rush of girls into the business world was a blessing, it was when they took control of the exchanges, 1891.

-For women, this meant new career opportunities in an otherwise limited job market.

-In the first place, the clear feminine quality of the voice best suits the delicate instrument.

Women are more sensitive, more amenable to discipline, far gentler and more forbearing than men.

The Watchman, 1906.

[engine rumbles] -If I am trying to find people who are not necessarily rich, famous and public, then I need to go to all the little corners that a lot of historians don't even think about.

And this means geographically, I talk to people that don't normally figure in historical accounts.

[car chimes] [car door slams] For over 90 years, the telephone company in Meriden, New Hampshire, has been run by the Chellis family.

For most of that time, the business has been a family affair, headquartered at the Chellis Farm just outside of town.

[phone ringing] -Hey, Judith!

Dave Chellis nice to meet you, come in.

In 1899, my grandfather, Harold Chellis, found out about these new fangled instruments called telephones and thought they would be very beneficial to him and possibly others.

And installed a line from this house across through the what were then open fields, probably to a cousin's house that was probably probably no more than a mile away.

Through the through what would have been pastures.

And they had two phones between them.

And then other people heard about it, saw it work, and decided they'd like to get in on this.

♪♪ -Like many rural exchanges, the switchboard was in the operator's home.

-We took it nice, but it wasn't easy because, well, the cellist slept here and we slept there.

And that was, ♪♪ Not so handy to come out and get up and come around the corner to answer it.

But we didn't think it was right for her to have to do it.

-In small towns like Meriden, the telephone operator became an essential part of the community.

Half communicator.

Half social worker.

-Today you have we have a full time police department.

We didn't then, today, the full time police department rides the roads and looks in on senior citizens and knows if the lights are off, early in the evening or maybe they're on till 2:00 in the morning.

There's something wrong, and they check it out.

The Chellises on the switchboard.

Knew that people called at certain times.

They checked in.

If they didn't see a call coming from someone's house that day, they might call up and say, Marty, are you all right?

What's going on?

Just check in.

-Sir, the line is out of order is there another phone at that address?

-I'm sure there are -The urban operators had to be very efficient, and the rules that governed their behavior ensured there would be a kind of lockstep, machine like quality to their work.

In the rural community, there were different expectations.

If an operator in the rural community behaved the way an operator in the urban environment had to, they’d think it wasn't very good service if, if you called and asked her, when is the Grange meeting?

If she didn't know that she wasn't very useful.

-Some lady called in one day, and she wanted to know how much sugar to put in an apple pie.

-One of them called information one night wanted know how to cook a cat.

-You're reaching up, trying to ring numbers that’s what you did all day with this and this, and you were!

You were like a monkey all over.

-We knew everything that was going on in that town.

-I had little children, and they often when their mother was busy doing the laundry or cooking or something, they'd go in the other room and play on the phone and, Mrs. Chellis or Henrietta Davis, whoever was on would talk with the kids, and after a while she'd say, I think you'd better go see what your mommy's doing, you better help your mommy.

-The difference between large city exchanges and small rural exchanges was dramatic.

For the first time in history, these two cultures were directly linked with the telephone switchboard at the crossroads.

[buttons clicking] -She is secretary to a city.

A city whose true limits are marked not by lines on a map, but by the compass of its voice.

And the city's voice is in her hands.

[indistinct chatter] [phone clicks] -As a child, when I would take the switchboard, and I very seldom took the switchboard, but even as a child before we were really active in the company, we always had a list of numbers that we didn't answer because they were customers we knew that professionally would not find it amusing to have a 12 or a 14 year old person answering the switchboard.

-What kind of people were those?

-Could I say people from the city?

That's, that would typically be the kind of people they were.

They weren't the people who were local to the community who, who, who understood that was part of being in Meriden.

-Predial switchboards had to be tended 24 hours a day, including meal times -At dinner one night I got up to answer a drop that came down.

I came into the switchboard, put the headset on, picked up the thing to talk into, put in the plug and said Meriden.

And the operator said, do you have a listing for Hazel Morrow?

And I said, no operator, nothing listed, and then pulled the plug and took off the headset and the vocal part of it and went back to the table, just barely sat down again.

And I was getting a little steam because this operator seemed a little slow catching on.

Some operators were very quick and could catch on to the Meredith, others knew from nothing.

Probably they were from farther away.

So I plug the- I put on the headset again, picked up the thing and answered Meriden.

And she said, operator, are you Meriden or Meredith?

And I said, operator, I'm Meriden, New Hampshire, and we have no morals here.

And the table went into hysterics, and I didn't know what I had said, but it was right after Peyton Place came out.

You know, the book Peyton Place?

Mhm.

-Throughout the early 1900s, privacy on the telephone was at best questionable.

Party lines where as many as ten different phones were connected to the same line, offered entertainment as well as phone service.

-You know, this was before when I was growing up, was before television and newspapers weren't quite as widely circulated as they are now.

And so listening in on the telephone was a very important, social activity, although supposedly illegal.

But a lot of people did it gossip, and listening and oh, there was a phone line in Plainfield, the 5-9-9 line that was notorious.

It had several old ladies who who would get on the line and tie it up for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, maybe.

I always remember Ernestine Clary, Mrs. Hanks and some of those ladies.

As soon as you picked up, they'd get out- They'd start shouting, say get off the phone!

Hang up!

We know you're listening.

Get off!

Hurry up.

And, you know, we kids would would, might hang up if we felt intimidated, we might not.

-Party lines were notorious for people listening in on other people's conversations.

That's how they found out what was going on in the community.

It wasn't expected that the the person at the phone company probably knew an awful lot of, of what was going on because people would call them and chat with them.

I mean, that's kind of like where you stop now to get your coffee.

Everybody there knew everybody's business.

-Well I remember when I was selectman I was on a phone call with somebody or other and with, it was sort of an argument going on.

I think it might have been about the road or something.

And, somebody at the switchboard was was checking in to see if our conversation was still going on.

And it was a sufficient intensity that they kind of wanted to follow along see what this is all about the person I was talking with became aware.

It was obvious that somebody was listening in and and said, whoever I think it was, Henrietta was on the phone I say Henrietta aren’t I right?

and Henrietta didn't know what to do with us she should say yes, you are or get off the line quickly.

But it it struck me funny and I think we both got laughing.

We'd agreed to resolve the subtlety issue right on the spot, so it worked out all right ♪♪ -By the 1920s, the telephone operator had become an icon of popular culture.

♪♪ In movies and in songs, she was portrayed as hardworking, sincere and resourceful.

♪♪ It was an image that served the phone companies well.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We've lost a whole world when we think about operators, telephone operators, we realized that is a world that's gone.

Even today, when companies are realizing that, their customers become very irritated, having to push buttons and listen to menus, it's important.

While we're still within reach of that world in living memory, to go back and try to reconstruct.

♪♪ Oftentimes, one source will give us an incomplete picture, so we have to go to written sources to fill in those gaps.

-Right here we can pull this box out, I think we’ll, may see some material that would be of interest in here, here's our folder on some telephone directories so why don't you take a look in there 81 that's really new.

[page turns] -Oh here we are, [in tandem] 1880.

- All right.

-There's a feeling of being able to go back to that time, a real feeling of connection.

-The ribbon, this is the telephone exchange.

-That's what we're talking about is making connections emotionally, intellectually, trying to put ourselves back there, or at least to understand enough so that we can interpret in a way that makes sense for us and also for the people that we're studying.

-That must be a photograph -Avoid using the telephone during a thunderstorm we’ve had op- [chuckling] -We've had operators say that they didn't like using the phone during thunderstorms.

[thunder rumbles] -All the latches would drop and you’d see great big balls of fire coming in there.

And they'd come in on those wires.

And boy, every latch you’d drop, by the time you try to get them back up again you wondered if someone was calling for fire or something.

[pouring rain] [thunder crashes] [pouring rain] -Usually when there was a thundershower, a big bang and a ball of fire might be apt to come out of this ringing machine.

So it was it was kind of the the thing that you would avoid during the heaviest part of the Thundershower [thunder crashes] -We could tell where they were, lots of times by the switch by the latches where they dropped and what part of town -For millions of young women have sat before the nation's switchboards as 200,000 sit before them today.

-By the 1930s, telephone operators had earned a reputation for heroism during emergencies.

-There wasn't such a thing in those days 911, you were 911.

You were just what they wanted.

You know, you had to take care of everything from an accident, you had to get the police phoned you had to send the ambulance.

You notified relatives.

-You knew when you were working.

If the board lit up, something had happened.

So then it was up to you to kind of, sort of not pull your key back too fast so that you could find out, you know what, what the emergency was.

-I always remember once there was a car accident in front of our house.

So I went in the house and I just gave a spin on the phone crank there and, Mary Chellis came on the line and I said, there's been an accident out here.

So she called the constable.

She called the ambulance.

She called the wrecker.

She called the families of the two parties involved in the accident, and in other words, took over complete management of, cleaning up that accident and, that was the way it was.

♪♪ [indistinct chatter] -From its beginnings in Boston, the telephone industry has been dominated by the Bell telephone companies.

Their rules and regulations set a standard for the entire industry.

-Everybody had to be the same.

-You couldn't wear your hair in curlers.

You couldn't wear slacks, you couldn't chew gum, you couldn't talk.

You had to keep your elbows off the like the desk.

There were an awful lot of no's.

-Wholesome habits and attitudes help to mold personalities.

Each of these factors has rich possibilities for developing personal magnetism and individual satisfaction, which in the long run means a genuinely happy and well-balanced life.

General Health Course For Women of the Bell System, 1939.

-The urban operators had to be very efficient.

They were part of the machinery, they were part of the system, and they had to function in that manner.

-In fact, when you signed up to work for the telephone company in my day, you had to sign a paper to say you wouldn't get married.

For two years.

They took single girls.

In those days, they wouldn't take anybody that was married.

-Long distance, calling Cocoa Beach, The Manorville Motel.

-Phrases, phrases were very important.

You all had to say the same thing to a customer.

-You know this number please, thank you, You were very polite and everything you know?

Well, sometimes in the evening when the chief operator wasn't, there we had a supervisor.

Instead of saying number please we’d say, bumble bees.

- Bumble bees.

- Bumble bee.

-And the customer would just give us their number.

[laughing] Once in a while they'd pick it up but not all, not very often.

[laughing] -As an historian, Judith Moyer will use many sources to help her explore the past.

Today, her work takes her to the New England Telephone Building in Boston.

-One kind of documentation that we may not think about ordinarily would be artwork, and this mural that we're going to look at is a gorgeous piece of artwork.

[voices echo] -New England Telephone commissioned this mural to be painted in the late 1940s.

160ft long and 12ft high, it's life size images depict the perfect operator.

-40 years later, we look at this and ask, what else can this mural tell us?

In the middle part of this century in the 1940s and 1950s, there were expectations of women, the roles they would play in middle class America, in the family, women had certain roles that were feminine, and they should not go beyond that.

The corporation depended on women for a workforce that would work for less than men.

The corporation, run by white males replicated in many ways the family structure and there is some theory that says it was to the males advantage to keep women in these gendered work roles that would not allow them to rise higher in the management hierarchy, May or may not be true, and we need to think about this, though when we look behind a piece of art such as this.

-Good morning Helen, nice to see you, this board is really something this morning!

- I’ll bet it is!

- By the late 1940s the telephones ever increasing popularity demanded a change in the way phone systems were run.

It had been said that if phone use continued to increase without technological advances, by the middle of the 20th century, virtually every woman in the country would have to become an operator to make the system work.

-Certainly, one moment.

-I remember one morning that, Nora, chief operator, called me in from the stock room a little after 8:00, and both boards, all of the drops were down and people were still ringing.

And so these things were jittering up and down.

All the cords circuits were in use.

And poor Nora was was in tears and says, Dick what are we going to do?

Everybody wants something.

We don't have cords to answer them.

And she says, what makes me so upset is that just now one of my good friends, in fact, a woman that I served a Grange supper with last night, just called me all kinds of horrid names because I didn't answer her right off and she had to ring 3 or 4 times before we answered.

But that was one of the reasons why dial, conversion to dial was absolutely essential.

-The equipment for each job is engineered to meet the telephone habits of the customers it is to serve.

-In 1953 over 80% of the phones within the Bell System had already converted to automatic dial.

For customers, this meant quicker but more impersonal service.

[buttons clicking] A person could now call another party simply by dialing that number directly.

Technology and society's demand for more efficient phone service, were combining to make the telephone operator a thing of the past.

♪♪ -Now turn the crank.

[phone rings] -In 1973, just one telephone exchange in New Hampshire remained pre dial.

-Hello?

Operator?

Okay.

-Telephone Company in Meriden was one of only two exchanges in New England that still relied on the operator to place a phone call.

♪♪ Sometime before midnight on August 26th of that year, an operator from Meriden placed New Hampshire's last pre dial telephone call.

♪♪ -Why change to the new system at all?

-I guess it's what they call progress.

♪♪ ♪♪