TBT - Grandma's Job as a Switchboard Operator

This is another story sent to me by my Aunt Cathy about my Grandma (Dad's mother), who died when I was 11 (while I was at Disney World with a friend, incidentally.)

Grandma in the 1940s

From her final year of high school, through the next few years until she got married, Mom (your Grandma Nancy) had a job with the telephone company.  She worked as a switchboard operator.  This was in the early 1940s - by this time, most households had one telephone in their house, but using a telephone in those days was nothing like using a telephone today.

All phones were connected by a network of wires, and all the wires converged to a central place in a township, and that would be the town's main switchboard room of the telephone company.   In the room, there would be a row of set-ups, all alike, and each one worked by an "operator", usually a young girl.  (Being a switchboard operator was one of the few jobs available to women, and was actually a more prestigious job to have than being a store clerk or a mill worker, although the hours were long, the pay low, the work a little monotonous, and thus the turnover was pretty high).

The set-up would be something like this:  the operator would sit in a chair in front of a "switchboard" - a board that looked something like a big pegboard, with twenty slots (or holes) across and twenty down.  The operator would have a headset on, and would have a whole bunch of wires to plug in to the holes.  Her switchboard would represent one section of the town, with all of the phones from that section represented by each of the slots.

It probably took awhile to learn exactly how to operate these switchboards.  When a person in a house or office wanted to call someone else in the city, they would pick up the receiver of their phone.  They might actually dial a number, or they could simply wait with the receiver to their ear, until they heard a voice on the other end say "number please" (or "what number are you calling?").  That voice would be one of the telephone operators, whoever had in front of them the switchboard grid that corresponded to that phone.  When the phone receiver had been picked up, the operator would have seen a light come on at the slot that represented that phone.  She would plug her master wire into that light and ask the question.  The person on the phone would give her the number, or household, they were trying to reach, and she would say, "one moment please, I will try to connect you", then take another wire and plug it in to the slot representing that number.

Mom worked at that job for several years.  The phone company often gave her lousy shifts, like late shifts or split shifts (where she would have to go in for three to four hours in the morning, be off for three to four hours, then go back in the late afternoon or evening of the same day to work for four more hours).  But she really enjoyed working that job.  Probably one reason was that it WAS a job for young women, so there would be a lot of other girls her age working there, and I would imagine there would be slow times when they could just gossip and talk with each other, when the phones weren't ringing.

Women working at a switchboard, Dec. 1943

If you worked the same grid day after day and month after month, you would certainly begin to recognize the voices of your patrons, and probably notice patterns to people's phone calls.  Some of the girls would unabashedly listen in on the phone conversations, too.  It was important, though, for the girls to remain professional - to sound totally neutral when they made any conversation, and to remain anonymous to the people on the other end of the line.

Grandpa said this is Grandma wearing his letter.

Mom told a story once, though - she was working at the switchboard during all the years that Dad was working in Washington, D.C., and later going to West Point.  Naturally, both she and Dad looked forward to the times when he came home for visits.  He would call her house as soon as he got back in to town, so they could make plans to see each other.

Grandma visiting Grandpa at West Point
Christmas 1943

One night, Mom was working at the phone company, and one of the lights on her grid lit up.  She plugged in and said, "Number please".  A voice that she recognized immediately as Dad's voice asked to be connected to her home phone number.  Protocol for the job, of course, was to give the standard answer, "One moment please, I will try to connect you."  However, Mom - probably looking around to make sure there was no supervisor nearby - hesitated a second, then said, "She's not home" - then disconnected.

After they were married.
When I asked Grandpa where they were in this picture he said,
"Somewhere down south.  Let's call it Hawaii.
Good enough."

When Cathy sent me this to me, she was afraid that the concept of a switchboard would be so foreign to my kids that they wouldn't understand the story.  Fortunately, they'd been to a children's exhibit (at a museum in Greensboro, NC earlier that year when we were visiting my sister) where they'd been introduced to the idea.

Eliza was 3 at the time.  I love that she's looking at the ear piece with
what seems to be a bewildered look on her face.