People with prodigious long-term memories may recognize the title of this piece as being a telephone number.  That is indeed the case.  It was a four party line associated with the town of Clayton, Missouri.

In 1934 or 1935, my father was again employed after a layoff of six years, which was a function of the Hoover Depression.  His new job was as a maintenance worker for a private subdivision, which involved cutting the grass and shoveling snow as well as trimming trees.  When he succeeded his boss after a year or so, he found that the job paid $25 a week with no sick leave or vacation.  If you came to work every day from Monday through Saturday, you would collect your $25 at the end of the week.  If you were sick a day or two, that amount would be docked from your wages.  But bear in mind that these were the Depression years, and my father considered himself lucky to have a job, and we were now able to afford a telephone.
At that time, during the Depression, there was no such thing as a dial tone on your telephone.  It was a case of being a manual operation from beginning to end.  Once our phone was installed, we celebrated that we were now a part of the upper crust as many people had no phone service whatsoever.  Every small community had its own telephone center where telephone operators provided service 24 hours per day.
The Carr phone service was a party affair.  There were three other parties who were listed as having a Clayton 714 number.  We were given the suffix J and we knew to answer the phone when it rang once.  Other parties on our line were signaled to answer their phones when the phone rang twice or three times or four times.  My best recollection is that J was one suffix, while R was another one.  I have forgotten the last two suffixes.  But give me a break.  This was more than seventy years ago.
When the earpiece was lifted from the telephone, a light would flash in the central office and the operator would say, “Number please?”  Operators and customers became friendly and often exchanged a bit of gossip now and then.  If Mrs. X was expecting a baby, for example, I suspect that news was quickly spread to other operators as well as to party line subscribers.  There were certain advantages in having a party line because if there was an emergency, the operator would break into the line and say that there was an emergency that needed to be taken care of now.  On the other hand, there were obvious disadvantages in that if your party line subscribers were given to long-winded chats, it might be a while before the service became available again.
If my memory serves me correctly, there was a charge of five cents for each call.  Nickels in those days did not come easily, and the phone was used therefore when there was a need for it.  But for the Carr family, having a phone of any kind was a luxury and was greatly appreciated by all concerned.
Because of the charge associated with each call, our grocer, John Gualdoni, used his light pickup truck to solicit orders every morning.  In those days, five gallons of gasoline could be bought with a single dollar bill.
Living immediately next door to us was a blond bombshell of a woman who was married to the coldest fish ever seen outside of a fish counter.  The husband was a sheet metal worker who installed furnaces and hired me from time to time when I was about 12 years old to accompany him and hand him pieces of metal.  In a whole afternoon, the blond bombshell’s husband might say only four or five words to me.  But at the end of the day, he would reward me with a fifty-cent piece.  For me, that was a pretty good wage and I had no complaints at all.
My elder brothers and sister had occasions to attend parties with the blond bombshell who was married to the cold fish.  From what I could gather, the blond bombshell lived up to her billing in every respect.  Unfortunately, I regret to tell you, I never saw the blond bombshell in action because I was too young.
The fact that telephone calls cost a nickel a piece and that gasoline was so cheap, made it convenient for John Gualdoni to take his orders from customers in person in our neighborhood in the morning and deliver the groceries in the afternoon.  The young fellow who took the orders was named Bob and the gossips in the neighborhood quickly noticed that Bob spent an inordinate amount of time taking the order from the blond bombshell.  Mind you, this is gossip, and if he made out with her, given her cold fish husband, I would say to Bob, “More power to you.”
At that time, the telephone service was provided by the Bell System which was another name for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.  If the telephone service malfunctioned, the Bell System would assume responsibility and be there almost instantly.  The Bell System, founded by Alexander Graham Bell, was in the business of providing telephone service.  If it malfunctioned, they were there to fix it.
In 1941, AT&T was looking for a draftsman to work in its St. Louis office.  Robert C. Mann was the records engineer in that office, and fortunately he was acquainted with Don Zoerb, who taught drafting at the ClaytonHigh School.  One way or another, Mr. Zoerb recommended me and I was hired by Mr. Mann.  From day one in that employment, I found out that the Bell System was obsessed by service.  That was fine by me because it gave me an opportunity to work a bit of overtime now and then.
When my Bell System career ended, I had worked for AT&T for 43 years.  The company had sent me from St. Louis to Kansas City, then to Chicago, then to New York, then to Washington DC, back to New York, and then to New Jersey.  I owned homes in Kansas City; New Providence, New Jersey; Bethesda, Maryland; and then in my current residence of Short Hills.  In that long history of using Bell System service, if a malfunction were reported to the operator, a repairman would appear, probably within the hour.  As I say, the Bell System was given to an obsession with service.
I retired in 1984 and that same year the Telecommunications Act was placed into effect.  Basically, it provided for the dissolution of the Bell System service and its parts were scattered to the winds.  And if I may say so, the spirit of being obsessed with service went with it.
I have lived in this house for nearly forty years.  In the last several years, interruptions to our telephone service have occurred with alarming frequency.  First, for example, there was a road crew digging up the highway and it interrupted service.  Then there was a case when a tree trunk hit our junction box and that interrupted service.  Now, however, over the long weekend preceding Memorial Day, we found that our service disappeared on Sunday, and upon inquiry we were told at first that it would be restored on Wednesday.  From the time of the report, this would be a four-day span.  Twenty-four hours later, we were making a bit of progress in that we would only be out of service for three days.  I suspect that we should be thankful for this great improvement.
Following the Telecommunications Act of 1984, a large conglomerate, based mainly from the former New York Telephone Company, took over our phone service.  It is called the Verizon Corporation.  The people who run the repair service for the Verizon Corporation that affects our exchange appear to be “unobsessed” with service.  Curiously, at the same time that our service is interrupted, they are promoting a service called FIOS.  If we were ever to subscribe to the FIOS service, we could put our television as well as our telephone and computer service in the hands of the Verizon Corporation.  Given the rapid deterioration in the service provided by Verizon, we are extremely reluctant to do that.  More than that, we are not going to do it.
And so, as I dictate these lines on the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, May 25, we are bereft of telephone service.  Fortunately, there are cell phones today.  In a way, it is a lot like returning to the 1920s, before our party line was available.
And so our only consolation is that the neighbors who have this exchange are out of service as well.  That is not too much of a consolation but that is all that there is.  Perhaps my spirits will improve tomorrow or the next day when the repairman again shows up to restore our telephone service.
But in the meantime, I tend to think of the days when we could pick up the telephone and the voice at the other end would say, “Number please.”  That is a comforting thought but I suspect that it is all of the comfort I am going to get from the Verizon Corporation until service is restored tomorrow or maybe Wednesday.  Conglomerates like Verizon don’t waste their love on individual subscribers.  So I suspect that, given the circumstances, individual subscribers such as ourselves will simply have to do the best we can.
 
E. E. CARR
May 25, 2009
Essay 386
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Kevin’s commentary: You know, I always thought that the reason AT&T and other service providers had crappy service was because they had (local) monopolies and thus no incentive to do particularly well. But it sounds like the monopoly reason can’t really explain it, if they were good at what they did when they had a nation-wide monopoly. Maybe there really is something to the whole corporate culture argument, after all. Or maybe they just have more responsibilities now and consumers have higher expectations — hard to tell.