"Hello Elsie, Get Me Twenty-One Ring Two"

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

Today’s technology makes it possible for people to be connected in more ways than ever before. There are just the two of us at home, yet we have a home phone, a cell phone, my work cell phone, Randi’s work Blackberry and her office phone; that’s five phone numbers for just two people. Plus we have a home e-mail address as well as Randi’s work e-mail. People can also contact me though Facebook or through a blog I have. And of course as a last resort there’s what many people consider the old fashioned way; sit down with a pen and paper, put the letter in an envelope and stick it in the mail; snail mail some call it. I haven’t made it onto Twitter yet, although I do have a couple of friends who make a bit of extra money writing updates for other people who feel the need to have a Twitter account but are either too busy or too technologically inept to do it for themselves.

We have become so accustomed to near-constant contact that we now take it for granted without really appreciating it. This was brought home to us several years ago when our daughter Sarah spent a couple of months volunteering for an infrastructure rebuilding project in rural Costa Rica. In order to talk to us, she had to fend off the occasional wild dog pack while hiking for an hour on trails and dirt roads to get to the nearest town and then stand in line to use the only public phone in the only store in the village. Once she got to the phone it was usually hit-and-miss on whether we would be home to accept her call. After several missed calls, we began to make sure at least one of us was home all the time. When she did get us, she was a bit restricted in what she could say because everyone in the store was able to overhear her conversation; also, her time was limited because the next person in line was standing behind her waiting to make their call. A couple of years later, she went to work in the Philippines for the summer. This time she had all the modern conveniences, she was in an office in a city and was supplied with a cell phone and Internet access. The phone didn’t work all that well for international calls so she ended up using it mostly for texting. For calls we installed Skype on our computer and this worked great. It felt very futuristic to be able to call someone part-way around the world and see them as you talked with them.

It was not all that long ago when just being able to hear another person’s voice over a wire seemed like an incredible thing. The first phone that I can remember was a big wooden box that hung on the wall. For some reason this modern convenience had been installed in our unheated porch, so you had to practically go outside to use the phone, not too comfortable in the winter. It was made of some kind of varnished hardwood, possibly oak, and had a little shelf on the front. An adjustable arm stuck out just above this shelf and held the mouthpiece, a black cup that you spoke into, on the side of the box was another cup connected to a wire, you held this up to your ear in order to hear the person on the other end. Also on the side of the box was a crank; to call someone on your line you just turned this crank in a way that produced a series of long and short rings, each phone on the line had a set of distinctive rings, one long and three short or two short and one long or some variation of this pattern.

A couple of people on the Island had private lines, but this was more expensive, so most of us were on a party line; this was a line shared by several people so when someone called it would ring in every house on that line, and everyone would know by the series of rings who was getting a call. If you wanted to make a call, you would have to pick up the earpiece and listen first to make sure no one else was using the line. Sometimes you might have to ask some long-winded neighbour to get off the line so you could use it. Every party line seemed to have at least one person who couldn’t resist the urge to listen in on other people’s calls. Anyone talking on a party line would be wise to assume that there might be a silent third party listening in and occasionally would have their suspicions confirmed when the listener would forget they weren’t supposed to be there and spontaneously joined in the conversation. There were times when the party line came in handy, if you were next door and someone rang your number, you could answer from your neighbour’s house, or if you were expecting a call but were not going to be at home you could ask someone else on the same line to pick up and take a message if they heard your number being called. Once in a while some important event would take place that affected the whole community, and when the phone rang everybody on the line might pick up no matter who it was for.

If you wanted to call someone who wasn’t on your own party line you had to go through the operator. For many years the switchboard for the islands was located in Freeport at the home of Elsie Young. Elsie’s job was not an easy one, she was basically on duty twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, although once in a while a caller would be momentarily startled to be greeted by the gruff voice of her husband Charlie on the line, giving Elsie a break. Several of the Island’s teen-age girls also worked part-time over the years as relief operators so the Youngs could have some time away from the maze of plugs and wires.

The phone number you gave the operator consisted of the line the person was on and then their number on that line, written down it looked like 22-4, which translated to twenty-two ring four when spoken. In addition to connecting the caller with the correct customer, Elsie was often called upon to take or pass along messages, look up phone numbers and act as our own emergency operator. In those pre-911 days, if some disaster happened on the Islands, all you had to do was call Elsie and let her know about it, she would handle it from there by alerting the appropriate people. If anyone wanted reliable information as to what was going on on either island, Elsie could most likely fill them in. Due to her position, she must have inadvertently come across a lot of juicy gossip, but as far as I know, she was very good at keeping it to herself. In some ways Elsie was almost a wizard at her job, often knowing who it was you wanted to call even before you told her. I remember my father, who had a habit of blanking out on people’s names, once telling her he wanted to talk to “that farmer that lives halfway up the Island”, within seconds she had him connected to the exact person he had been thinking of.

The big wooden box in our porch was eventually replaced with a smaller wooden box with a black one-piece handset which was sensibly relocated inside to the kitchen. Sometime around the end of the sixties the Maritime Tel & Tel guys showed up and removed all the wooden phone boxes and replaced them with modern black plastic contraptions. Jerry Hoare of Digby was one of the phone company employees who switched all the phones on Digby Neck, he says they drove truckloads of the old wooden boxes to the dump. With this massive change-over the end of an era was reached, the Islands had become one of the last places in Nova Scotia to be converted to dial-up and the Freeport exchange was no longer needed.

Things have changed a lot since The Westport and Digby Telephone Company started up in 1904, folding a year later after reaching a peak of fifteen customers. Today we can carry around in our pocket a phone that can do more things and handle more traffic than Elsie at her switchboard could ever dream of. Still, there was something comforting about making a phone call in the middle of the night and hearing a human voice on the line. It was reassuring to know that Elsie was there and that she was your connection to the rest of the world.