Telephone service in rural California...

As a society existing in 2023, we probably don't give much thought to telephone service today. It's a given that we all are connected: we have cell phones and the internet and that has the feel of how it's always been. Well, as the song goes. "... it ain't necessarily so".

As a child, my personal experience with communications was limited to writing letters to family and friends, seeing my parents pay bills by return post, ordering by mail from a catalog (Sears was the best), and the telephone. There was also radio communication, of course, but if you weren't in the military or weren't a ham radio operator with your own transmitter and receiver, radio was one-way communication.

In early1953 the nation was moving on from World War II and even starting to anticipate the end of the war in Korea. Most homes in the US were connected through rotary dial telephones to almost any other phone in the same exchange. Connections were automatic via the wires, cables and switching equipment of American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) local subsidiaries. There were other companies involved like General Telephone, but AT&T - 'Ma Bell' - was the biggy. Reno was served by an AT&T subsidiary named Bell of Nevada; in California there was another company named Pacific Bell; yet another serviced southern California. All three were wholly owned subsidiaries of AT&T (that ended in the early '90s when AT&T had to sell all subsidiaries as part of a court effort to break up the monopoly). In 1953 it wasn't immediately easy for my parents to transfer from Nevada to California. But that was what they did. And they managed to retain their seniority which was important a few years later when they retired.

Telephone service was basically automatic. Dial a number using the rotary dial hand set and talk to the person you had dialed (it would be another 20 years before TouchTone dialing came to residential use, replacing the old rotary handset). No operator necessary unless the person being called was not connected to the same exchange as you. 'Exchange' refers to all the phones connected to a central switching system in a given geographic area which used the same leading 3-digits of a 7-digit number. If the call was between exchanges you needed to dial 0 and ask the operator to connect you with so-and-so in Somewhere, Else. Area Codes - the 3-digit number which precedes the 7-digit local phone number - came along in about 1954 in the Central Valley of California. I remember the start of Area Codes because AT&T sent a speaker to our high school in Stockton to tell us what was coming and how we could use it to call everywhere in the country without an operator. Calling 'Anywhere' was a long distance call. And it was pricey. 

The same process applied if you wanted to talk to someone in another country except that the Long Distance Operator connected you with the International Operator who then got you to the right continent, then the right country, and then (hopefully!) got a local English-speaking operator in the destination country to connect the call to the local phone (it wasn't totally necessary to speak the language so long as everyone understood the numbers). That was how we rolled in 1953. Mostly. Yeah, at some more recent date we got "Country Codes" which precede the Area Code. So now we can direct-dial (who has a 'dial' anymore?!) most of the world. But in 1953 there were exceptions to this bit of un-validated history above...

If you lived in rural America it may well have been you had no telephone at all. If you were rural and near a medium size or larger town you might have a special subset of the Bell System's home phone line. In the area of central California I'm familiar with it was called the "farm line". I don't know how the service was created- built with volunteer labor? built by AT&T with limited service capability? Dunno. But I do know how it was operated.

At some point the Rosses entered into a contract with Pacific Bell to take on the task of running the local Lockeford telephone office for Pacific Bell. This included hosting all the equipment (primarily all the wires) needed for a telephone operator to connect one local phone to another in their home along with providing the operators necessary to man the switchboards 24 hours per day. In essence they were the local telephone company complete with switchboards and a phone booth on their porch. 

You didn't go to their home to open/move/close telephone service - that happened in Stockton. And they didn't deal with collecting money for the monthly bills. All the wires which connected to those 2 switchboards were routed thru the basement to the closet in the bedroom at the rear of their house. From the closet in that bedroom they found their way to telephone cables outside at the rear of the house. There were hundreds of homes connected to that switch board...

• the Pac Bell switchboard connected Lockeford to the rest of the world within the limitations above
  
• and the 'farm lines' were connected between the surrounding rural farms/ranches to a separate switchboard.
  

If someone on a farm line wanted to talk to someone else on another farm line (farm line means telephone lines that served the farming community exclusively), the caller would crank the ringer a few times in a unique pattern which would cause a bell to ring in everyone's home on that section of that farm line. The ring-sounds were either long or short: about 2 cranks of the magneto for a 'short' and about 4 cranks for a 'long'. If Ruby wanted to talk to Mabel and Mabel was on the same 'party line', Ruby would crank the ringer in the correct pattern of long & short rings. Phones would ring in every home in that particular portion of telephone line.

If Mabel wasn't on the same party line, she had to go through the operator which meant my grandmother Mae or a hired helper or maybe one of the family (kids were all enlisted bar none; yes I did my time at the switchboard), Mabel would do one long crank to get the operator. The operator would plug in a cord where the tab had dropped (no lights to indicate which line had made the call- that came with the next generation of Western Electric switch boards) and announce 'Operator'. The caller replied 'Connect me to Mabel please'; 'One moment please' and the operator would plug in the other end of the cord to Mabel's line (which was shared with perhaps 5 other homes) and turn the crank the the appropriate number of times in the correct pattern of short and long cranks. The ring pattern was something like 1 long + 2 short or maybe 2 long and 3 short. Everyone sharing the line being called knew each others ring pattern so there wasn't much privacy. And those others weren't above listening in. But if someone else listened in the volume in the earpiece of the handset dropped- 'someone is eavesdropping!'

The Bell System switch board installed just to the right of the farm line switchboard was very similar except the it was connected to the folks living in town and to the automated equipment in the Stockton office of Pac Bell. It was the more sophisticated equipment because you didn't turn a crank to generate a ring- that was done by the equipment in Stockton.  But if the caller wanted to call someone other than a phone serviced by the Stockton office (Stockton covered several towns and farms in the area), then the operator had to call the long distance operator. There was only one line for connecting to long distance so it had to be available. The caller told the local operator where they wanted to call, the local operator connected to the line for the long distance operator, then they would move the switch so the caller could speak to the operator and announced 'go ahead'. Job done. You had to listen in frequently to know when to disconnect. If another local wanted to make a long distance call they would have to wait till a line was available.

The 2 switchboards installed in the Ross home were not unlike the one below including the crank for generating the ring sound at the telephone you had connected with the patch cord. Just a little hand crank sticking out the front of the switchboard below. There were 2 switchboards installed side-by-side: farm lines to the left, PacBell to the right. In the vertical panel there are places to insert the plug at the end of the cord. That location had a little metal flap that dropped down when the caller rang so the operator had confirmation where to insert the plug. And of course the operator wore the ubiquitous 'headset- a boom mike and an earphone... the switchboard below has a circular hand-held microphone hanging on a cord to the upper left.

A switchboard identical to the pair installed in the Ross residence in Lockeford, California

We moved from Reno to Stockton just in time for me to start the 2nd semester of my Freshman year in high school. In June of that same year PacBell converted the manually operated equipment in Lockeford to fully automated calling including all the farm lines. All calls were routed thru the switching equipment in Stockton. Since both my parents were employed by PacBell there was family interest in seeing everything happen. So...

We drove out from Stockton to Lockeford - all of 14 miles - to be there for the big event. Standing in the back bedroom at the closet opening, the equipment installer (in this case the un-installer) had a piece of heavy insulated wire strung under all the bridge connections between Stockton equipment and the local Lockeford equipment. At the appointed moment he started pulling hard on the free end of that wire and, one-by-one, the jumpers between old and new came popping out like a tinny machine gun firing little pieces of metal. In a matter of a few seconds all the lines were transitioned to the automated equipment in Stockton from the manual switchboards in the front of the Ross home. Job done. It was a matter of another week or so getting all the old wire out of the house and another month or more before the phone booth on the porch was gone.

That change was felt by everyone in the town and the surrounding area. And it was also about the same time my grandfather Lewis Edward decided it was time to sell the grocery store. He found a buyer easily and Presto! - everything changed. Suddenly there were no switchboards demanding attention, and Ross Grocery had a new name under the care of someone else.

To mark the occasion and as a way of saying 'Thank you!', some kind soul in Lockeford collected donations from the many residents and, as a retirement gift, bought a TV set and paid for the installation complete with a massive roof-mounted antenna on a 20 foot mast. The Rosses were officially retired and coincidentally an historic era of US communications history ended.