Weiser was one of the last places in Idaho to get dial telephones; maybe one of the last in the United States. Certainly, it was the last town of more than 4,000 people to be hooked up to the worldwide telephonic web.
It was a Monday in late September of 1959. I was a freshman at Weiser High School and we were called to an assembly. “All students will accumulate in the auditorium at 10 a.m. this morning,” assistant principal Walt Kerfoot announced over the intercom. “Second period classes will be canceled.”
I was thrilled. I had not read the two chapters of Silas Marner assigned for Miss Coons’s English class that day and was not looking forward to dodging her questions. We all knew what the assembly was about. The boys from AT&T had been installing new dial telephones in our homes for the past month. Tuesday we would be able to dial our own calls without going through the operator, just like they did on television.
Our number was 479-R and we shared the line with two other households. This often made it difficult to make a call, especially when Arabella Long was playing records over the phone to her boyfriend. It also made for good entertainment listening in on other party’s calls. This took some skill as you had to pick up the phone very carefully while quickly pressing down the release button with the finger of your free hand. If you let the button up slowly enough there would be no click sound informing the talkers of your intrusion.
Problem was, everyone knew people could be listening in so it was rare to hear anything particularly juicy or informative. If you were discovered, you might be reported to the phone company, which would notify your parents bringing serious consequences. Your parents could lose their telephone service, especially if you inserted snide comments into the conversation as my friends and I liked to do.
As soon as dial telephoning was up and running children began dialing. Northam-Jones Funeral Home had cleverly, they thought, claimed the number 549-1234. For weeks afterward, their phone rang morning and afternoon as Weiser kids played with their new toy.
Things soon settled down and before long most people forgot that there was anything new about dialing your number. Before long you didn’t have to go through the operator for directory assistance. I’ve always kind of missed picking up the phone, waiting for the operator to come on with “Number plea-uz”. You’d say “information please,” and she would say either “One moment plea-uz” or “This iuz”. You would tell her the name and she would tell you the number and say “A’ll connect yew” and you would have your party.
I once went into the old telephone office on Main Street in Weiser when paying bills with my father. It all looked very ordinary to me at the time. But, as I reflect back on it, I realize we were in the presence of a bygone era. Lined up at the call board were three or four women in headsets moving plugs on the end of long cords in and out of holes. They all looked exactly like Ernestine Bass, comic Lilly Tomlin’s now iconic operator parody.
Things were changing fast in Weiser, but everything was still human. None of us foresaw the day when there would be no operators, no directory assistance and virtually no human contact telephonically. .
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