The Way it Was…
...On the the telephone party line
by Al Eicher

Whenever I see one of those old wooden wall mounted telephone boxes with the hand crank on the side, I immediately recall the sounds of the ringing bells. The chrome-plated bells were on the top of the box. The transmitter and receiving equipment were inside and what looked like a black bell hanging on a hook was the speaking device you held to your ear. The mouth piece you talked into was mounted on the front of the big box. Children sometimes had to stand on a wooden box to reach the mouth piece to be heard.

My grandparents had one of these early telephones, as did many of my boyhood friends on the farm. Grandpa's ring or number was two longs and two shorts. This was a party line and if you knew the rings for friends on the same line all you had to do was turn the crank and send out the right sequence of long and short rings or short and long rings to reach them. I cranked out many wrong numbers when I first tried calling friends from Grandpa's farm house. I am sure many people felt it was much easier calling the central operator at the switchboard and telling her who you wanted to call.

In 1908, John Campbell established the first telephone company in Pigeon. In the early days of telephone service, residents and local farmers helped in erecting poles and stringing of the wires to reach out to the farm community. This was true in several Huron County communities when the first telephone service came to the village.

Some of the early telephone books listed instructions on how to use the telephone and of utmost importance, "telephone etiquette", the rule of the day! To properly use the party line telephone you had to lift the hand held ear piece off the hook and carefully listen to make sure no one else was using the line. If another person or party was on the line you were suppose to quietly hang up the ear piece. A few minutes later you might try again and if it was still busy your patience might get a little thin. Now, if you had an emergency you could, according to telephone etiquette, ask them nicely to get off the line. If you hadn't abused this privilege too often, you now could have a free line.

When you lifted the ear piece off the hook, that action signaled the switchboard operator, and with her pleasant voice said, "Can I help you?" Back then a real human voice was on the line to connect you to a local friend or business establishment. You could also be connected to the "long distance operator" who would ask if this is a local charge call or a collect call. When I was in the Army, I always called home collect from the various Army bases. We didn't have credit cards then nor did we have a dialing telephone system. It was so convenient to talk to a human voice to get to the person you wanted to reach.

Let's look at the first telephone system in Huron County. About 1885, John C. Liken of Sebewaing had a telephone system installed to connect his office to the Liken Flour Mill, as well as to his Stave Mill, the railroad depot and the Liken General Store. John C. Liken was also in the travel agency business serving the Great Lakes and the high seas. The picture in this article shows Mr. Liken's large office and telephone on his desk. There is also a picture of an ocean liner mounted on the back wall of the office.

In 1896, the Sebewaing Village Council approved the installation of telephones poles and lines for operating "speaking apparatus". The contract went to the Saginaw County Telephone Company. The switchboard and the telephone operators were located on the second floor of the Farmers & Merchants Bank building. Dorothy and Leona Reinhold were telephone operators for many years. At Sebewaing, like Pigeon, many farmers who wanted service had to set their own poles and string the lines along the road by their fields. If you were farming a few miles from town you had to wait for those farmers who were closer to get on the system. Some of these party lines had nine or ten farm families on the same line.

As a young boy walking to the country school by our church in Berne, I remember in the winter the snow drifts were sometimes so high, you could touch the telephone wires and the cross arms with all those green insulators.

I wouldn't recommend touching any wires on utility poles today as this is not the same kind of electrical transmission of times past. One day, while in High School, we were studying electric, and the teacher got out one of these hand crank telephones. We connected two dry cell batteries to it, which is what generated the ring voltage. These batteries had to be replaced at least twice a year to make the telephone work, to complete the ring, and be able to talk to a person. In our school experiment, the teacher connected a bare wire to a connector in the box. One at a time, six or seven of us each grabbed the wire. The teacher then turned the crank and though none of us got a shock as we held the wire, the next person who grabbed the wire while the teacher was turning the crank got the big shock! Don't play with electricity if you don't know what you are doing! It was like grabbing onto the tip of a sparkplug when the car is running.

The first telephone system in Cass City came at the turn of the century around 1898. The contract was given to the Moore Company of Caro. The site selected for the location of the switchboard and the telephone operators was on the second floor of the Cass City bank building. The second floor was usually selected to avoid flood conditions and to keep the electric batteries dry. I think it is interesting to note some of the management policies of the telephone company in the 1916 Cass City telephone book. For example: If you talk more than five minutes you will be disconnected. Also, if you are caught gossiping, a disconnect is certain!

Back at Pigeon in 1908, the telephone and telegraph operators could really spread the word! Mr. Campbell, who owned the telephone company, liked baseball. His drug store and telephone office was next to the railroad depot. Mr. Campbell made arrangements with the depot agent, who was also the telegraph operator, to get the Detroit Tigers baseball scores, while the game was going on. The Detroit area telegraph operator was probably tapping out the Morse Code signals to several other depot operators while the Tigers played.

Mr. Campbell had a large blackboard by the side of the building where he took chalk and wrote down the game scores for people to view as they passed by the store. The telephone operators would also be told the scores, and soon the telephone lines were buzzing. The telephone operators were the first to find out if schools were closed due to the big snow fall. If there was a house or barn fire, the telephone operator in some towns could push a button to turn on the fire whistle. The longest running fire alarm whistle I ever heard was on that day in August 1945...the day World War II came to an end. The fire whistle and the church bells rang forever!

Today, we communicate with our cell phones, Ipods, Blackberry's, laptop computers and the very small wall mounted telephone in the kitchen. A home, today, most likely has a phone in the bedroom, another in the family room and one in the basement...and what about the garage! If you are in business, chances are, 60 percent of your calls will not be answered by a human. If you don't want to be bothered you can screen your calls with caller ID, and the person you are trying to call can do the same. We certainly have a lot of options, in ways, to communicate, which can be expensive and time consuming when writing a check to three or four service companies...but then you can always just charge it!

The old telephone service of the early 1900s was a message delivery system that worked, but I think there are some who might be happy with going back to the days of the ever present and reliable telephone operator...that human voice makes it work for me...and That's The Way It Was.

Al and Dave Eicher provide television production services to corporations, ad agencies, and nonprofit organizations. They also create Michigan town histories and offer lecture services on a variety of Michigan History Events. You may contact them at 248-333-2010; Email: info@program-source.com; Website: www.program-source.com; Address: PSI, P.O. Box 444, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48303.