Maine’s hand-crank phones remembered> Author tells tale of unique family business

EVERYTHING HAPPENED AROUND THE SWITCHBOARD by Michael R. Hathaway, Reflection Publications, 191 pages, paperback $13.95.

At 2:12 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1983, the carbons were pulled from the mainframe in a corner of the Bryant Pond Telephone Co.’s office, and the last hand-crank telephone system in North America was no more. The Oxford County Telephone and Telegraph Co. had taken over and changed Bryant Pond to the dial system, focusing national attention on the small western Maine town.

A strange silence descended over owner Elden Hathaway’s home, which had served as company headquarters since 1951.

“For the first time in more than 30 years, the switchboards stood lifeless. It was as if a member of the family had just passed away. And so it had,” writes the author, who, as son of the owner, by necessity learned early the tricks of the lineman’s trade as practiced in rural Maine.

Mike Hathaway, who went on to graduate from the Boston Conservatory of Music and spent 30 years as a high school band director, writes in a folksy manner of his unpretentious parents who devoted the best years of their lives to keeping their small community plugged in during a unique part of the state’s history.

Elden Hathaway was a railroad man. He had started working part time for the Canadian National Railroad in 1936, right out of high school, and had hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps, a railroad man for life.

But the full-time job he coveted never materialized, and in 1951 Hathaway and his wife, Barbara, jumped at the opportunity to buy the local hand-crank operated phone system from Howard Judkins for $2,500. The deal was financed by the owner, who accepted payments of $19.15 a month for 15 years.

“So what do we do next?” Hathaway asked Judkins after the papers had been signed. It was a perfectly logical question, given the greenhorn status of the new owner. But he proved to be a quick study in everything from climbing poles and stringing wire to troubleshooting and maintaining good public relations, and for the next 30 years there rarely was a dull moment in the Hathaway family’s existence.

A room was built on to the modest family home to accommodate the switchboard equipment that would require tending 24 hours a day, and the three Hathaway children would eventually be pressed into service to help make the little company a going enterprise. Family life revolved around the switchboard.

The Bryant Pond Telephone Co. was a lifeline to the world beyond the homes of the elderly citizens in the community who were comforted to know that help and companionship were only a crank of the phone away. Operators knew who needed to be checked on, and they monitored those people daily. As well, they were stalwarts in handling calls involving the everyday emergencies of small-town life — the fires, the medical and emotional crises, the predicament of a child who had swallowed a penny and the occasional cry for relief from a victim of a sad domestic violence situation.

As the office crew developed expertise in dealing with such developments, the outside crew became adept at battling the elements at all hours of the day and night to locate and repair downed lines, keeping the community lifeline open. Once, a wandering bull moose tore down a section of line, hooking it on his massive rack and dragging the entire lash-up into the puckerbrush.

The author tells these stories with the relaxed down-home approach of someone talking over the backyard fence, giving the reader a renewed appreciation for life in simpler, more neighborly times. Progress is nice, but in this book nostalgia gives it a good run for its money.