![[Photo: meters!]](meters.jpg)
Photo: Old volt- and ammeters
A close brush with employment... Lindy/IHOP: the difference is coolness... Museum... Secret lore of the telcos...
1999.03.25-1999.03.26
I headed West along Central Ave, downtown, towards the Albuquerque Visitor's Center, visions of informative pamphlets dancing in my head. A scruffy-looking guy asked me if I knew where to find a liquor store in the area. Maybe I felt like a tourist, but I still walked with enough self-assurance to fool this inebriate into thinking I knew where I was going. I confessed my ignorance, kept going.
I noticed the newspaper headlines. LANL was getting set to ship the first ever load of radioactive waste to WIPP. History was being made; I was missing it by mere days and miles.
The Visitor's Center had moved since my travel guide had been published; fortunately, some helpful security guards were able to point me in the right direction. Soon I found the new Center, loaded myself down with information about local attractions.
I went back to Central Avenue, started looking around for a place for a late breakfast. I might have been looking kind of scruffy as I walked along; I don't know. A van drove slowly alongside of me. A guy yelled at me out the window: "Hey! I don't suppose you're looking for work?" I said "Nah." I thought, not for a few months at least. (I would later wish I'd gone with the guy; a few days later I would exhaust Albuquerque's tourist activities, and I might have been glad to have spent a day doing unskilled labor.)
I entered Lindy's Cafe (est. 1929) and could tell I wasn't really cool enough to eat there, but decided to try anyhow. Most of the customers inside were smoking. A couple of punks sat at one table; At another table was a man who seemed covered with tattoos. I sat between these tables, out of my league. I ordered breakfast: french toast, oatmeal, O.J. "The oatmeal's instant," the waitress warned me. Somehow, she managed to imbue those three words with an air of friendliness. "Nevertheless, I would have some," I replied. The tatooed guy looked at me. What, nobody in this place ever said "nevertheless" before? Breakfast was fine, the music was good. The ceilings were so high and the fans so efficient that I was never bothered by cigarette smoke, in spite of its proximity.
The Telephone Pioneer Museum's sign said it had opened at 10:00. I rattled the locked door. I sat down, read about WIPP in the local paper. I read about war in Yugoslavia. I read about tourists dismembered by insane murderers. I checked my watch. 10:30. I rattled the door some more.
An expletive escaped my lips at high velocity.
I wandered over to Old Town, where there were a few old buildings and 15 bazillion little shops selling tourist crap. I made my way through the milling crowds and found my way to the Albuquerque Museum of Art, History and Science. I killed some time here--in my notes, I summed up my breeze through the place with the syllables "tra la la". I stood a while in front of a photo of 1950s Central Avenue which showed a glowing neon sign of the Power Public Service Company of New Mexico, featuring the grinning visage of Reddy Kilowatt. Tra la la.
By 12:30, I'd made it back to the Telephone Pioneer Museum, which was now open. I entered, made a donation, signed the register, started looking around.
I wasn't looking very long before I got swept up by a docent. She was showing around a guy who'd dropped in for the second half of his lunch hour, and was hoping for a 30-minute whirlwind tour. I struggled to keep up.
I was surprised by how much lore there was. I suppose that I take phone service too much for granted, think of telcos as giant faceless corporations. But there were stories peeking out of the displays.
Some of the earliest four-wheel drive vehicles were post-hole diggers for the Southwest's desert. Early drivers had to be at least 6'2" to be able to reach the pedals on these early vehicles.
Linemen climbing a pole would put extra insulators in their overall's back pockets to keep their belt from slipping down.
Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph employee Joe M. Ports was making some phone repairs at the UNM ROTC building one day in 1970 when he noticed a time bomb. The bomb's triggering mechanism was based on (I am not making this up) a mechanical analog alarm clock. As near as I could figure from the description, when the minute hand swept past some point, it would have triggered something. Ports made his partner go a ways away, then bent the alarm clock's minute hand away from the clock face to keep it from triggering. The bomb was then removed from the area. There were about 20 people inside the building when the bomb was found.
In 1908, a flood was on its way towards Folsom, NM (a town which was unfortunately situated in a canyon). Someone upstream used their phone to contact Sarah "Sally" Rooke, the local switchboard operator. This was back before there was broadcast news. People weren't going to find out about this flood by TV, not by radio. They might not have found out about it until it was about their ears, but Sally called up all local telephone customers and gave them warning. One family didn't believe her--that family didn't survive the flood. Everyone else in the community was warned and escaped--except for Sally herself, carried away by the flood in the middle of delivering warning.
Do phone company employees have more stories like this? I don't know. I tried doing a web search on Sally Rooke and got diddley. When I search for books on the history of telephones, I find lots of books about the invention of the telephone, but little about the history of people who got the phone company up and operating.
The other visitor's lunch break was over; he left. I stuck around.
I looked at handsets and talked to the docent about tricks of memory. There's an example of how memory works that I learned about in AI class. It presumes that the subject remembers what dial phones looked like. (Are you old enough to remember that?) If you ask the subject to visualize the dial, they can. Ask them what's in the fingerholes, and they'll tell you which numbers go with which letters.
But, the example says, there are no letters, no numbers in the fingerholes. There are dots. The letters and numbers are outside the fingerholes. What does it say about memory that our brains put the numbers inside the holes?
This example is supposed to refute the claim that people memorize pictures of the world. If people think of those numbers as being inside the fingerholes, this suggests that memory is more conceptual than pictorial.
I looked at lots of different handsets. Many of them had numbers and letters inside the fingerholes. In fact, it looked as if most of the phones produced before 1970 used this scheme. There were maybe ten or fifteen years when most phones had dials with dots in the fingerholes. So much for AI.
To prevent me from boring her with more such tidbits, the docent gave me more stories.
She said that in the beginning, most telephone operators had been men, but they tended to use vile language. The telephone company decided to bring in women instead. Women wore constrictive clothing back then--corsets and bustles and such. When men had worked the switchboards, controls had extended from floor to top. Women, bound by fashion, couldn't reach as far. Thus came about the switchboard configuration we recognize from old movies--a desk area, a few feet of console space above the desk, operators sitting in front.
Photo: Old volt- and ammeters
Technicians would change the wiring on the back of the switchboards while operators sat in front. This allowed for new phone features, perhaps for new customers and such. Some technicians would make holes in the bottom panels of switchboards so that they could peek through at the legs of the operators on the other side.
In the early days, phone lines would often get staticky. Normally a switchboard operator would connect her customer's lines to other lines, but if a customer complained that their line wasn't working very well, the operator would hook the line up to a meter on her switchboard. As telephone service expanded, more and more people were having trouble with their lines, and a special group of technicians was formed to test lines. No women were allowed in this group, the reason being that women didn't have the necessary technical knowledge. Of course, some might say that the women who'd been using the meters up until that point did have the necessary technical knowledge, by empirical evidence. But one mustn't let the facts cloud one's judgement.
There were more stories. They were good, some of them better than what I've written down. But I wrote incomplete notes; I have an incomplete memory. I hope this stuff is written down somewhere.
The people who run the museum are the Telephone Pioneers of America. I tried looking at their web site. They talked a lot about the nice things that they were doing for their communities. But they didn't say anything about pioneers of telephony.
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